Online Gaming History

[mark_battista]

Hi I'm looking for some history of online gaming, I'm just wondering how long has online gaming been around and what genres have been covered. If you have any information or know where I can get my hands on some, other than gamasutra etc then I look forward to hearing from you.
Thanx
regards
mark battista

[OneSadCookie]

Minotaur!

[mark_battista]

what!?!

[macboy]

Minotaur was the first online multiplayer game for the Mac; made by Bungie (http://www.bungie.com) (makers of Marathon)

[igame3d]

I can't find reference yet, maybe these will help.
But before there was a bungie there were MUDS.

Here's the history of games.

I'll google it. and be back
Ignore the plug in warning if you don't have REALPlayer.
First actual video game (http://www.osti.gov/accomplishments/videogame.html)

Better history, although it doesn't seem to mention exactly a network,
The Evolution of Games (http://www.emuunlim.com/doteaters/play1sta1.htm)

Whoa! Actual Emulated SpaceWars!
http://lcs.www.media.mit.edu/groups/el/projects/spacewar/ let it load, its java

Perhaps I shouldn't include Video in my link.
hmm
About dot come covers more of the same info but there are links (http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blcomputer_videogames.htm)

[igame3d]

AHA! I FOUND DATA!
by Searching

BBS GAME HISTORY (http://www.portcommodore.com/commodore/bbs/bbshist.html)

Get to the page and do a find for game if you want to get to the first reference of it. Might have to scroll back and see what year it is.

History of the MUD (http://www.apocalypse.org/pub/u/lpb/muddex/bartle.txt)

[Reverand1297]

The very first multiplayer or "online" game was actually SpaceWar, developed by Rick Bloome in 1969 for the PLATO system at the University of Illinois Champagne-Urbana. I'm literally writing a paper over this stuff for my computer science final right now...

[BinarySpike]

You are correct at SpaceWar being the first multiplayer game but Pong was a much bigger hit than SpaceWar. (Get an A+ for me OK :D)

[Quillbit]

PLATO pretty much stands at the ancient center of all computer gaming -- it was proof that any hacker, given sufficient networking and graphics capability, will immediately begin wasting clock cycles trying to virtually kill other people. "Empire," which was created sometime in the mid-1970s, give or take, was probably the first persistent virtual gaming world.

From there, DECWAR, MUD (circa 1980 or thereabouts), Tradewars, Netrek, so on and so on. LucasArt's Habitat (early '80s) is particularly important though not well-known. (I recall reading a journal article on Habitat during the VR craze of the mid-90s, but I don't have any details on the title/authors/journal.) After that, you've got the BBS games, and the various MUDs, MUCKs, MUSHes and other M*s that populate(d) the Net. Then Quake, Meridian 59, on to Ultima Online, and here we are today.

So, to recap: online gaming, as such, has existed as long as computer games have. The reason is that until the 1980s, computers were large time-sharing systems with robust IPC communications facilities. Thus, it was natural (perhaps more natural than single-player games) to create games that would let you play against other people on the same system.

During the rise of personal computers, networked games generally vanished from the scene until the rise of ubiquitous LAN (at universities) and Internet connections (DOOM obviously is one example, as was Warcraft and, as we all recall, Minotaur).