History of online games
Encyclopedia
Online game
s are currently considered a separate industry of video games. The evolution of these games parallels the evolution of computers and computer networking, with new technologies improving the essential functionality needed for playing video games on a remote server.
, such as NIMROD
(1951), OXO
(1952), and Spacewar! (1961), were for one or two players sitting at a single computer which was being used only to play the game. Later in the 1960s, computers began to support time-sharing
, which allowed multiple users to share use of a computer simultaneously. Systems of computer terminal
s were created allowing users to operate the computer from a different room than where the computer was housed. Soon after, Modem
links further expanded this range so that users did not have to be in the same building as the computer; terminals could connect to their host computers via dial-up or leased telephone lines
. With the increased remote access, "host based" games were created, in which users on remote systems connected to a central computer to play single-player, and soon after, multiplayer games.
Later, in the 1970s, packet-based computer networking
technology began to mature. Between 1973 and 1975, Xerox PARC
developed Local Area Network
s based on Ethernet
allowing the creation of Local Area Network
s based on Ethernet
. Additionally, the Wide Area Network
ARPANET
further developed from its 1969 roots, lead to the creation of the Internet
on January 1, 1983. These LANs and WANS allowed for network games, where the game created and received network packets; Systems located across LANs or the Internet could run games with each other in peer-to-peer
or client–server models.
allowed students at several locations to use online lessons in one of the earliest systems for computer aided instruction. In 1972, PLATO IV terminals with new graphics capabilities were introduced, and students started using this system to create multiplayer games. By 1978, PLATO had multiplayer interactive graphical dungeon crawl
s, air combat (Airfight), tank combat, space battles (Empire and Spasim
), with features such as inter-player messaging, persistent game characters, and team play for at least 32 simultaneous players.
was to allow users of "dumb" text-based terminals attached to one host computer (or, later, to terminal server
s) to interactively use programs on other host computers. This meant that games on those systems were accessible to users in many different locations by use of programs such as telnet
.
Most of the early host-based games were single-player, and frequently originated and were primarily played at universities. A sizable proportion were written on DEC-20 mainframes, as those had a strong presence in the university market. Games such as The Oregon Trail
(1971), Colossal Cave Adventure
(1972), and Star Trek
(1972) were very popular, with several or many students each playing their own copy of the game at once, time-sharing the system with each other and users running other programs.
Eventually, though, multiplayer host-based games on networked computers began to be developed. One of the most important of these was MUD
(1978), a program which spawned a genre and had significant input into the development of concepts of shared world design, having formative impact on the evolution of MMORPG
's. In 1984, MAD
debuted on BITNET
; this was the first MUD fully accessible from a worldwide computer network. During its two year existence, 10% of the sites on BITNET connected to it.
In 1988, another BITNET
MUD
named MUDA
appeared. It lasted for five years, before going off line due to the retirement of the computers it ran on.
was first written at NASA
's Ames Research Center in California by high school summer interns using Imlac PDS-1
computers. The authors added two-player capability by connection two IMLAC computers with serial cable
s. Since two computers were involved, as opposed to "dumb terminals", they could use formatted protocol packets to send information to each other, so this could be considered the first peer-to-peer computer video game. It could also be called the first First person shooter
in the Fall of 1973, he brought Maze War with him. A server program was written to run on a DEC-20 mainframe allowing up to eight IMLACs to play against each other. This could be considered the first client–server computer video game.
MITTTY's DEC 20's were connected to the ARPANET, which meant that people using Imlacs at other ARPANET sites could play against each other and people at MIT by connecting to the MIT server using the ARPANET's TIP and NCP
protocols. Maze War may have been the only game ever written to use the ARPANET protocols directly.
wrote a version of Maze War to use Ethernet and the XNS network protocol.
Kent later interned at Digital Equipment Corporation
's Western Research Lab (DEC WRL) in Palo Alto, California
during his Ph.D. studies. Several former Xerox PARC employees worked at WRL, and one of them, Gene McDaniel, gave Kent a hardcopy of the Mesa source code listing from the Xerox version of Maze, and the bitmap file that is used for the display.
The X Window System
had been newly released as a result of collaborative efforts between DEC and MIT. Kent wrote a networked version of Mazewar which he released in December 1986. This version used UDP port 1111, and could be played by Unix
workstations running X across the Internet. This was probably the second game (SGI Dogfight being the first) which directly used the Internet's TCP/IP protocol suite, and the first which could be played across the Internet (which SGI Dogfight could not do at the time). Xtrek came out a few months earlier, but did not directly use the Internet protocols, instead relying on X to provide networking.
demonstration program for Silicon Graphics
workstation computers. In 1984, networking capabilities were added by connecting two machines using serial cables just as had been done with the IMLACs for Mazewar at NASA eleven years earlier. Next, XNS support was added, allowing multiple stations to play over an Ethernet, just as with the Xerox version of Mazewar. In 1986, UDP support was added (port 5130), making SGI Dogfight the first game to ever use the Internet protocol suite
.
The packets used, though, were broadcast packets, which meant that the game was limited to a single network segment; it could not cross a router, and thus could not be played across the Internet.
Around 1989, IP Multicast
capability was added, and the game became playable between any compatible hosts on the Internet, assuming that they had multicast access (which was quite uncommon). The multicast address is 224.0.1.2, making this only the third multicast application (and the first game) to receive an address assignment, with only the VMTP protocol (224.0.1.0) and the Network Time Protocol
(224.0.1.1) having arrived earlier.
computers on the Internet. A number of workstation graphics systems existed, including Bell Labs
' BLIT, SGI's IRIS GL
, Carnegie Mellon
's Andrew Project
, DEC's UWS (Ultrix Workstation Software) and VWS (Vax Workstation Software), and Sun's NeWS
, but X managed over time to secure cross-platform dominance, becoming available for systems from nearly all workstation manufacturers, and coming from MIT, had particular strength in the academic arena. Since Internet games were being written mostly by college students, this was critical.
Secondly, X had the capability of using computers as thin client
s, allowing a personal workstation to use a program which was actually being run on a much more powerful server computer exactly as if the user were sitting at the server computer. While remote control programs such as VNC
allow similar capabilities, X incorporates it at the operating system
level, allowing for much more tightly integrated functionality than these later solutions provide; multiple applications running on different servers can display individual windows. For example, a word processor running on one server could have two or three windows open while a mail reader running on the workstation itself, and a game running on yet another server could each display their own windows, and all applications would be using native graphics calls.
This meant that starting in the summer of 1986, a class of games began to be developed which relied on a fast host computer running the game and "throwing" X display windows, using personal workstation computers to remotely display the game and receive user input.
Since X can use multiple networking systems, games based on remote X displays are not Internet-only games; they can be played over DECnet
and other non-TCP/IP network stacks.
universe. This game could be played across the Internet, probably the first graphical game that could do so, a few months ahead of the X version of Maze War.
Importantly, however, the game itself was not aware that it was using a network. In a sense it was a host-based game, because the program only ran on a single computer, and knew about the X Window System, and the window system took care of the networking; essentially one computer displaying on several screens. The X version of Maze War, on the other hand, was peer-to-peer and used the network directly, with a copy of the program running on each computer in the game, instead of only a single copy running on a server.
(1991).
s such as Tymshare
(founded 1966) dedicated to selling time on a single computer to multiple customers sprang up. The customers were typically businesses that did not have the need or money to purchase and manage their own computer systems.
In 1979, two time-sharing companies, The Source and CompuServe
, began selling access to their systems to individual consumers and small business; this was the beginning of the era of online service provider
s. While an initial focus of service offerings was the ability for users to run their own programs, over time applications including online chat
, electronic mail and BBS
' and games became the dominant uses of the systems.
For many people, these, rather than the academic and commercial systems available only at universities and technical corporations, were their first exposure to online gaming.
In 1984, CompuServe debuted Islands of Kesmai
, the first commercial multiplayer online role playing game. Islands of Kesmai used scrolling text (ASCII
graphics) on screen to draw maps of player location, depict movement, and so on; the interface is considered Roguelike
. At some point, graphical overlay interfaces could be downloaded, putting a slightly more glitzy face on the game. Playing cost was the standard CompuServe connection fee of the time, $6 per hour with a 300 baud
modem, $12 for a 1200 baud modem; the game processed one command every 10 seconds, which equates to 1 2/3 cents per command.
Habitat
was the first attempt at a large-scale commercial virtual community
that was graphically based. Habitat was not a 3D environment and did not incorporate immersion techniques. This would generally exclude it from the VR mold, and it was neither designed nor perceived as a VR environment. However, it is considered a forerunner of the modern MMORPGs, and was quite unlike other online communities (i.e. MUDs and MOOs with text-based interfaces) of the time. Habitat had a GUI and large userbase of consumer-oriented users, and those elements in particular have made it a much-cited project. When Habitat was shut down in 1988, it was succeeded by a scaled-down but more sophisticated game called Club Caribe
.
In 1987, Kesmai
(the company which developed Islands of Kesmai) released Air Warrior
on GEnie
. It was a graphical flight simulator/air combat game, initially using wire frame graphics, and could run on Apple Macintosh, Atari ST
, or Commodore Amiga
computers. Over time, Air Warrior was added to other online services, including Delphi, CRIS, CompuServe
, America Online, Earthlink
, GameStorm
and CompuLink.
Over time, Kesmai produced many improved versions of the game. In 1997, a backport from Windows to the Macintosh was made available as an open beta on the Internet. In 1999, Kesmai was purchased by Electronic Arts
which started running the game servers themselves. The last Air Warrior servers were shut down on December 7, 2001.
In 1988, Federation debuted on Compunet
. It was a text-based online game, focused around the intergalactic economy of our galaxy in the distant future. Players work their way up a series of ranks, each of which has a slightly more rewarding and interesting but difficult job attached, which culminates in the ownership of one's own "duchy," a small solar system. After some time on GEnie, in 1995 Federation moved to AOL. AOL made online games free, dropping surcharges to play, in 1996, and the resulting load caused them to drop online game offerings entirely. IBGames, creators of Federation, started offering access to the game through their own website, making it perhaps the first game to transition off of an online service provider. IBGames kept the game operational until 2005, after most of the player base transitioned to the sequel, 2003's Federation II
.
In 1991, Sega
introduced online multiplayer gaming to video game console
s, with their Sega Meganet
service for the Mega Drive (Genesis). Sega continued to provide online gaming services for their later consoles, including the Sega NetLink
service for the Sega Saturn
and the SegaNet
service for the DreamCast.
The 1990s saw an explosion of MMORPGs; for details, see History of massively multiplayer online games
.
Online game
An online game is a game played over some form of computer network. This almost always means the Internet or equivalent technology, but games have always used whatever technology was current: modems before the Internet, and hard wired terminals before modems...
s are currently considered a separate industry of video games. The evolution of these games parallels the evolution of computers and computer networking, with new technologies improving the essential functionality needed for playing video games on a remote server.
Background of technologies
The first video and computer gamesFirst video game
There are numerous debates over who created the first video game, with the answer depending largely on how video games are defined. The evolution of video games represents a tangled web of several different industries, including scientific, computer, arcade, and consumer electronics.The "video" in...
, such as NIMROD
Nimrod (computing)
The Nimrod was a special purpose computer that played the game of Nim, designed and built by Ferranti and displayed at the Exhibition of Science during the 1951 Festival of Britain. Later, when the Festival ended, the computer was shown in Berlin...
(1951), OXO
OXO
OXO was a computer game written for the EDSAC computer in 1952, an implementation of the game known as Noughts and Crosses in the UK, or tic-tac-toe in the United States. It was written by Alexander S. Douglas as an illustration for his Ph.D. thesis on human-computer interaction for the University...
(1952), and Spacewar! (1961), were for one or two players sitting at a single computer which was being used only to play the game. Later in the 1960s, computers began to support time-sharing
Time-sharing
Time-sharing is the sharing of a computing resource among many users by means of multiprogramming and multi-tasking. Its introduction in the 1960s, and emergence as the prominent model of computing in the 1970s, represents a major technological shift in the history of computing.By allowing a large...
, which allowed multiple users to share use of a computer simultaneously. Systems of computer terminal
Computer terminal
A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that is used for entering data into, and displaying data from, a computer or a computing system...
s were created allowing users to operate the computer from a different room than where the computer was housed. Soon after, Modem
Modem
A modem is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. The goal is to produce a signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded to reproduce the original digital data...
links further expanded this range so that users did not have to be in the same building as the computer; terminals could connect to their host computers via dial-up or leased telephone lines
Leased line
A leased line is a service contract between a provider and a customer, whereby the provider agrees to deliver a symmetric telecommunications line connecting two or more locations in exchange for a monthly rent . It is sometimes known as a 'Private Circuit' or 'Data Line' in the UK or as CDN in Italy...
. With the increased remote access, "host based" games were created, in which users on remote systems connected to a central computer to play single-player, and soon after, multiplayer games.
Later, in the 1970s, packet-based computer networking
Packet switching
Packet switching is a digital networking communications method that groups all transmitted data – regardless of content, type, or structure – into suitably sized blocks, called packets. Packet switching features delivery of variable-bit-rate data streams over a shared network...
technology began to mature. Between 1973 and 1975, Xerox PARC
Xerox PARC
PARC , formerly Xerox PARC, is a research and co-development company in Palo Alto, California, with a distinguished reputation for its contributions to information technology and hardware systems....
developed Local Area Network
Local area network
A local area network is a computer network that interconnects computers in a limited area such as a home, school, computer laboratory, or office building...
s based on Ethernet
Ethernet
Ethernet is a family of computer networking technologies for local area networks commercially introduced in 1980. Standardized in IEEE 802.3, Ethernet has largely replaced competing wired LAN technologies....
allowing the creation of Local Area Network
Local area network
A local area network is a computer network that interconnects computers in a limited area such as a home, school, computer laboratory, or office building...
s based on Ethernet
Ethernet
Ethernet is a family of computer networking technologies for local area networks commercially introduced in 1980. Standardized in IEEE 802.3, Ethernet has largely replaced competing wired LAN technologies....
. Additionally, the Wide Area Network
Wide area network
A wide area network is a telecommunication network that covers a broad area . Business and government entities utilize WANs to relay data among employees, clients, buyers, and suppliers from various geographical locations...
ARPANET
ARPANET
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network , was the world's first operational packet switching network and the core network of a set that came to compose the global Internet...
further developed from its 1969 roots, lead to the creation of the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
on January 1, 1983. These LANs and WANS allowed for network games, where the game created and received network packets; Systems located across LANs or the Internet could run games with each other in peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads among peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application...
or client–server models.
PLATO
In the early 1970s, the PLATO time-sharing system, created by the University of Illinois and Control Data CorporationControl Data Corporation
Control Data Corporation was a supercomputer firm. For most of the 1960s, it built the fastest computers in the world by far, only losing that crown in the 1970s after Seymour Cray left the company to found Cray Research, Inc....
allowed students at several locations to use online lessons in one of the earliest systems for computer aided instruction. In 1972, PLATO IV terminals with new graphics capabilities were introduced, and students started using this system to create multiplayer games. By 1978, PLATO had multiplayer interactive graphical dungeon crawl
Dungeon crawl
A dungeon crawl is a type of scenario in fantasy role-playing games in which heroes navigate a labyrinthine environment, battling various monsters, and looting any treasure they may find...
s, air combat (Airfight), tank combat, space battles (Empire and Spasim
Spasim
Spasim was a 32-player 3D networked computer game by Jim Bowery involving 4 planetary systems with up to 8 players per planetary system, released in March 1974...
), with features such as inter-player messaging, persistent game characters, and team play for at least 32 simultaneous players.
Networked host-based systems
A key goal of early network systems such as ARPANET and JANETJANET
JANET is a private British government-funded computer network dedicated to education and research. All further- and higher-education organisations in the UK are connected to JANET, as are all the Research Councils; the majority of these sites are connected via 20 metropolitan area networks JANET...
was to allow users of "dumb" text-based terminals attached to one host computer (or, later, to terminal server
Terminal server
A terminal server enables organizations to connect devices with an RS-232, RS-422 or RS-485 serial interface to a local area network . Products marketed as terminal servers can be very simple devices that do not offer any security functionality, such as data encryption and user authentication...
s) to interactively use programs on other host computers. This meant that games on those systems were accessible to users in many different locations by use of programs such as telnet
TELNET
Telnet is a network protocol used on the Internet or local area networks to provide a bidirectional interactive text-oriented communications facility using a virtual terminal connection...
.
Most of the early host-based games were single-player, and frequently originated and were primarily played at universities. A sizable proportion were written on DEC-20 mainframes, as those had a strong presence in the university market. Games such as The Oregon Trail
The Oregon Trail (computer game)
The Oregon Trail is a computer game originally developed by Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger in 1971 and produced by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium in 1974. The original game was designed to teach school children about the realities of 19th century pioneer life...
(1971), Colossal Cave Adventure
Colossal Cave Adventure
Colossal Cave Adventure gave its name to the computer adventure game genre . It was originally designed by Will Crowther, a programmer and caving enthusiast who based the layout on part of the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky...
(1972), and Star Trek
Star Trek (script game)
Star Trek was a text-based mainframe computer game written by Don Daglow on a PDP-10 timesharing computer at Pomona College in 1972, and upgraded periodically through 1974, including contributions by Jonathan Osser...
(1972) were very popular, with several or many students each playing their own copy of the game at once, time-sharing the system with each other and users running other programs.
Eventually, though, multiplayer host-based games on networked computers began to be developed. One of the most important of these was MUD
MUD1
Multi-User Dungeon, or MUD is the first MUD and the oldest virtual world in existence. It was created in 1978 by Roy Trubshaw at Essex University on a DEC PDP-10 in the UK, using the MACRO-10 assembly language...
(1978), a program which spawned a genre and had significant input into the development of concepts of shared world design, having formative impact on the evolution of MMORPG
MMORPG
Massively multiplayer online role-playing game is a genre of role-playing video games in which a very large number of players interact with one another within a virtual game world....
's. In 1984, MAD
MAD (MUD)
In 1984, on BITNET, a cooperative worldwide university network founded in 1981, two French students from the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris, Bruno Chabrier and Vincent Lextrait developed and operated a global MUD named MAD . It ran on the BITNET node of their school...
debuted on BITNET
BITNET
BITNET was a cooperative USA university network founded in 1981 by Ira Fuchs at the City University of New York and Greydon Freeman at Yale University...
; this was the first MUD fully accessible from a worldwide computer network. During its two year existence, 10% of the sites on BITNET connected to it.
In 1988, another BITNET
BITNET
BITNET was a cooperative USA university network founded in 1981 by Ira Fuchs at the City University of New York and Greydon Freeman at Yale University...
MUD
MUD
A MUD , pronounced , is a multiplayer real-time virtual world, with the term usually referring to text-based instances of these. MUDs combine elements of role-playing games, hack and slash, player versus player, interactive fiction, and online chat...
named MUDA
Muda
is a traditional Japanese term for an activity that is wasteful and doesn't add value or is unproductive, etymologically none + trivia or un-useful in practice or others. It is also a key concept in the Toyota Production System and is one of the three types of waste that it identifies. Waste...
appeared. It lasted for five years, before going off line due to the retirement of the computers it ran on.
IMLACs at NASA
In the summer of 1973, Maze WarMaze War
Maze War is a video game.Maze War originated or disseminated a number of concepts used in thousands of games to follow, and is considered one of the earliest examples of, or progenitor of, a first-person shooter...
was first written at NASA
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...
's Ames Research Center in California by high school summer interns using Imlac PDS-1
Imlac PDS-1
The Imlac PDS-1 is a graphical minicomputer made by Imlac Corporation of Needham, Massachusetts. The PDS-1 debuted in 1970 and is considered to be the predecessor of all later graphical minicomputers and modern computer workstations. The PDS-1 had a built-in display list processor and 4096 16-bit...
computers. The authors added two-player capability by connection two IMLAC computers with serial cable
Serial cable
A serial cable is a cable that can be used to transfer information between two devices using serial communication. The form of connectors depends on the particular PHY used...
s. Since two computers were involved, as opposed to "dumb terminals", they could use formatted protocol packets to send information to each other, so this could be considered the first peer-to-peer computer video game. It could also be called the first First person shooter
MITTTY
When author Greg Thompson went to college at MITMassachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
in the Fall of 1973, he brought Maze War with him. A server program was written to run on a DEC-20 mainframe allowing up to eight IMLACs to play against each other. This could be considered the first client–server computer video game.
MITTTY's DEC 20's were connected to the ARPANET, which meant that people using Imlacs at other ARPANET sites could play against each other and people at MIT by connecting to the MIT server using the ARPANET's TIP and NCP
Network Control Protocol
A Network Control Protocol is a protocol that runs atop the Point-to-Point Protocol and that is used to negotiate options for a network layer protocol running atop PPP...
protocols. Maze War may have been the only game ever written to use the ARPANET protocols directly.
Xerox
In 1977, staff at Xerox PARCXerox PARC
PARC , formerly Xerox PARC, is a research and co-development company in Palo Alto, California, with a distinguished reputation for its contributions to information technology and hardware systems....
wrote a version of Maze War to use Ethernet and the XNS network protocol.
DEC
In 1982, Christopher Kent (later Christopher Kantarjiev) saw Maze War at RAND.Kent later interned at Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...
's Western Research Lab (DEC WRL) in Palo Alto, California
Palo Alto, California
Palo Alto is a California charter city located in the northwest corner of Santa Clara County, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, United States. The city shares its borders with East Palo Alto, Mountain View, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Stanford, Portola Valley, and Menlo Park. It is...
during his Ph.D. studies. Several former Xerox PARC employees worked at WRL, and one of them, Gene McDaniel, gave Kent a hardcopy of the Mesa source code listing from the Xerox version of Maze, and the bitmap file that is used for the display.
The X Window System
X Window System
The X window system is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a basis for graphical user interfaces and rich input device capability for networked computers...
had been newly released as a result of collaborative efforts between DEC and MIT. Kent wrote a networked version of Mazewar which he released in December 1986. This version used UDP port 1111, and could be played by Unix
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
workstations running X across the Internet. This was probably the second game (SGI Dogfight being the first) which directly used the Internet's TCP/IP protocol suite, and the first which could be played across the Internet (which SGI Dogfight could not do at the time). Xtrek came out a few months earlier, but did not directly use the Internet protocols, instead relying on X to provide networking.
SGI Dogfight
In 1983, Gary Tarolli wrote a flight simulatorFlight simulator
A flight simulator is a device that artificially re-creates aircraft flight and various aspects of the flight environment. This includes the equations that govern how aircraft fly, how they react to applications of their controls and other aircraft systems, and how they react to the external...
demonstration program for Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics, Inc. was a manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark...
workstation computers. In 1984, networking capabilities were added by connecting two machines using serial cables just as had been done with the IMLACs for Mazewar at NASA eleven years earlier. Next, XNS support was added, allowing multiple stations to play over an Ethernet, just as with the Xerox version of Mazewar. In 1986, UDP support was added (port 5130), making SGI Dogfight the first game to ever use the Internet protocol suite
Internet protocol suite
The Internet protocol suite is the set of communications protocols used for the Internet and other similar networks. It is commonly known as TCP/IP from its most important protocols: Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol , which were the first networking protocols defined in this...
.
The packets used, though, were broadcast packets, which meant that the game was limited to a single network segment; it could not cross a router, and thus could not be played across the Internet.
Around 1989, IP Multicast
IP Multicast
IP multicast is a method of sending Internet Protocol datagrams to a group of interested receivers in a single transmission. It is often employed for streaming media applications on the Internet and private networks. The method is the IP-specific version of the general concept of multicast...
capability was added, and the game became playable between any compatible hosts on the Internet, assuming that they had multicast access (which was quite uncommon). The multicast address is 224.0.1.2, making this only the third multicast application (and the first game) to receive an address assignment, with only the VMTP protocol (224.0.1.0) and the Network Time Protocol
Network Time Protocol
The Network Time Protocol is a protocol and software implementation for synchronizing the clocks of computer systems over packet-switched, variable-latency data networks. Originally designed by David L...
(224.0.1.1) having arrived earlier.
X Window System games
As mentioned above, in 1986, MIT and DEC released the X Window System. X provided two important capabilities in terms of game development. Firstly, it provided a widely deployed graphics system for workstationWorkstation
A workstation is a high-end microcomputer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by one person at a time, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems...
computers on the Internet. A number of workstation graphics systems existed, including Bell Labs
Bell Labs
Bell Laboratories is the research and development subsidiary of the French-owned Alcatel-Lucent and previously of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company , half-owned through its Western Electric manufacturing subsidiary.Bell Laboratories operates its...
' BLIT, SGI's IRIS GL
OpenGL
OpenGL is a standard specification defining a cross-language, cross-platform API for writing applications that produce 2D and 3D computer graphics. The interface consists of over 250 different function calls which can be used to draw complex three-dimensional scenes from simple primitives. OpenGL...
, Carnegie Mellon
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States....
's Andrew Project
Andrew Project
The Andrew Project was a distributed computing environment developed at Carnegie Mellon University beginning in 1982. It was an ambitious project for its time and resulted in an unprecedentedly vast and accessible university computing infrastructure....
, DEC's UWS (Ultrix Workstation Software) and VWS (Vax Workstation Software), and Sun's NeWS
NeWS
NeWS was a windowing system developed by Sun Microsystems in the mid 1980s. Originally known as "SunDew", its primary authors were James Gosling and David S. H. Rosenthal...
, but X managed over time to secure cross-platform dominance, becoming available for systems from nearly all workstation manufacturers, and coming from MIT, had particular strength in the academic arena. Since Internet games were being written mostly by college students, this was critical.
Secondly, X had the capability of using computers as thin client
Thin client
A thin client is a computer or a computer program which depends heavily on some other computer to fulfill its traditional computational roles. This stands in contrast to the traditional fat client, a computer designed to take on these roles by itself...
s, allowing a personal workstation to use a program which was actually being run on a much more powerful server computer exactly as if the user were sitting at the server computer. While remote control programs such as VNC
Virtual Network Computing
In computing, Virtual Network Computing is a graphical desktop sharing system that uses the RFB protocol to remotely control another computer...
allow similar capabilities, X incorporates it at the operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
level, allowing for much more tightly integrated functionality than these later solutions provide; multiple applications running on different servers can display individual windows. For example, a word processor running on one server could have two or three windows open while a mail reader running on the workstation itself, and a game running on yet another server could each display their own windows, and all applications would be using native graphics calls.
This meant that starting in the summer of 1986, a class of games began to be developed which relied on a fast host computer running the game and "throwing" X display windows, using personal workstation computers to remotely display the game and receive user input.
Since X can use multiple networking systems, games based on remote X displays are not Internet-only games; they can be played over DECnet
DECnet
DECnet is a suite of network protocols created by Digital Equipment Corporation, originally released in 1975 in order to connect two PDP-11 minicomputers. It evolved into one of the first peer-to-peer network architectures, thus transforming DEC into a networking powerhouse in the 1980s...
and other non-TCP/IP network stacks.
Xtrek
The first of these remote display games was Xtrek. Based on a PLATO system game, Empire, Xtrek is a 2D multiplayer space battle game loosely set in the Star TrekStar Trek
Star Trek is an American science fiction entertainment franchise created by Gene Roddenberry. The core of Star Trek is its six television series: The Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise...
universe. This game could be played across the Internet, probably the first graphical game that could do so, a few months ahead of the X version of Maze War.
Importantly, however, the game itself was not aware that it was using a network. In a sense it was a host-based game, because the program only ran on a single computer, and knew about the X Window System, and the window system took care of the networking; essentially one computer displaying on several screens. The X version of Maze War, on the other hand, was peer-to-peer and used the network directly, with a copy of the program running on each computer in the game, instead of only a single copy running on a server.
Other remote X display games
Other remote X display based games include xtank and XPilotXPilot
XPilot is a multiplayer computer game. It is open source and runs on many platforms. Although its 2D graphics have improved over time, they still resemble the style of Thrust. Gameplay includes Capture the Flag, base defense, racing and deathmatches...
(1991).
Netrek
Originally called Xtrek II, Netrek is a rewrite of Xtrek as a fully network-aware client–server game. Released in 1988, it was probably the first game to use both the TCP and UDP protocols, the first Internet-aware team game, the first Internet game to use metaservers to locate open game servers, and the first to have persistent user information. It also uses public key cryptography to attempt to reduce cheating by use of modified clients with automatic aiming aids and other illicit features.Commercial timesharing services
As time-sharing technology matured, it became practical for companies with excess capacity on their expensive computer systems to sell that capacity. Service bureauService bureau
A service bureau is a company which provides business services for a fee. The term has been extensively used to describe technology based services to financial services companies, particularly banks. Customers of service bureaus typically do not have the scale or expertise to incorporate these...
s such as Tymshare
Tymshare
Tymshare, Inc. was headquartered in Cupertino, California from 1964 to 1984.It was a well-known timesharing service and third-party hardware maintenance company throughout its history and competed with companies such as Four Phase, Compuserve, and Digital Equipment Corporation...
(founded 1966) dedicated to selling time on a single computer to multiple customers sprang up. The customers were typically businesses that did not have the need or money to purchase and manage their own computer systems.
In 1979, two time-sharing companies, The Source and CompuServe
CompuServe
CompuServe was the first major commercial online service in the United States. It dominated the field during the 1980s and remained a major player through the mid-1990s, when it was sidelined by the rise of services such as AOL with monthly subscriptions rather than hourly rates...
, began selling access to their systems to individual consumers and small business; this was the beginning of the era of online service provider
Online service provider
An online service provider can for example be an internet service provider, email provider, news provider , entertainment provider , search, e-shopping site , e-finance or e-banking site, e-health site, e-government site, Wikipedia, Usenet...
s. While an initial focus of service offerings was the ability for users to run their own programs, over time applications including online chat
Online chat
Online chat may refer to any kind of communication over the Internet, that offers an instantaneous transmission of text-based messages from sender to receiver, hence the delay for visual access to the sent message shall not hamper the flow of communications in any of the directions...
, electronic mail and BBS
Bulletin board system
A Bulletin Board System, or BBS, is a computer system running software that allows users to connect and log in to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, a user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging...
' and games became the dominant uses of the systems.
For many people, these, rather than the academic and commercial systems available only at universities and technical corporations, were their first exposure to online gaming.
In 1984, CompuServe debuted Islands of Kesmai
Islands of Kesmai
Island of Kesmai was an early commercial online game in the MUD genre, innovative in its use of roguelike pseudo-graphics. It is considered a major forerunner of modern MMORPGs.-Launch date:...
, the first commercial multiplayer online role playing game. Islands of Kesmai used scrolling text (ASCII
ASCII
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...
graphics) on screen to draw maps of player location, depict movement, and so on; the interface is considered Roguelike
Roguelike
The roguelike is a sub-genre of role-playing video games, characterized by randomization for replayability, permanent death, and turn-based movement. Most roguelikes feature ASCII graphics, with newer ones increasingly offering tile-based graphics. Games are typically dungeon crawls, with many...
. At some point, graphical overlay interfaces could be downloaded, putting a slightly more glitzy face on the game. Playing cost was the standard CompuServe connection fee of the time, $6 per hour with a 300 baud
Baud
In telecommunications and electronics, baud is synonymous to symbols per second or pulses per second. It is the unit of symbol rate, also known as baud rate or modulation rate; the number of distinct symbol changes made to the transmission medium per second in a digitally modulated signal or a...
modem, $12 for a 1200 baud modem; the game processed one command every 10 seconds, which equates to 1 2/3 cents per command.
Habitat
Habitat (video game)
Lucasfilm's Habitat was an early and technologically influential online role-playing game developed by Lucasfilm Games and made available as a beta test in 1986 by Quantum Link, an online service for the Commodore 64 computer and the corporate progenitor to America Online...
was the first attempt at a large-scale commercial virtual community
Virtual community
A virtual community is a social network of individuals who interact through specific media, potentially crossing geographical and political boundaries in order to pursue mutual interests or goals...
that was graphically based. Habitat was not a 3D environment and did not incorporate immersion techniques. This would generally exclude it from the VR mold, and it was neither designed nor perceived as a VR environment. However, it is considered a forerunner of the modern MMORPGs, and was quite unlike other online communities (i.e. MUDs and MOOs with text-based interfaces) of the time. Habitat had a GUI and large userbase of consumer-oriented users, and those elements in particular have made it a much-cited project. When Habitat was shut down in 1988, it was succeeded by a scaled-down but more sophisticated game called Club Caribe
Club Caribe
Club Caribe was one of the first graphical online worlds. It was available in the 1980s on the exclusively Commodore 64 online service Quantum Link. Originally available in limited release as Habitat, Club Caribe was eventually released to the public as an extension of Q-Link's "People Connection"...
.
In 1987, Kesmai
Kesmai
Kesmai was a pioneering game developer and online game publisher, founded in 1981 by Kelton Flinn and John Taylor. The company was best known for the combat flight sim Air Warrior on the GEnie online service, one of the first graphical MMOGs, launched in 1987...
(the company which developed Islands of Kesmai) released Air Warrior
Air Warrior
Air Warrior was an early multiplayer on-line air-combat simulator. A player is able to fly a simulated World War II aircraft, fighting with and against other players, each flying his own simulated aircraft. It was introduced in 1986 by Kelton Flinn and his company Kesmai. At this time the internet...
on GEnie
GEnie
GEnie was an online service created by a General Electric business - GEIS that ran from 1985 through the end of 1999. In 1994, GEnie claimed around 350,000 users. Peak simultaneous usage was around 10,000 users...
. It was a graphical flight simulator/air combat game, initially using wire frame graphics, and could run on Apple Macintosh, Atari ST
Atari ST
The Atari ST is a home/personal computer that was released by Atari Corporation in 1985 and commercially available from that summer into the early 1990s. The "ST" officially stands for "Sixteen/Thirty-two", which referred to the Motorola 68000's 16-bit external bus and 32-bit internals...
, or Commodore Amiga
Amiga
The Amiga is a family of personal computers that was sold by Commodore in the 1980s and 1990s. The first model was launched in 1985 as a high-end home computer and became popular for its graphical, audio and multi-tasking abilities...
computers. Over time, Air Warrior was added to other online services, including Delphi, CRIS, CompuServe
CompuServe
CompuServe was the first major commercial online service in the United States. It dominated the field during the 1980s and remained a major player through the mid-1990s, when it was sidelined by the rise of services such as AOL with monthly subscriptions rather than hourly rates...
, America Online, Earthlink
EarthLink
EarthLink , is an Internet service provider headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. It claims 1.94 million subscribers.- Business :EarthLink provides a variety of Internet connection types, including dial-up, DSL, satellite, and cable. Both dial-up and high speed Internet access are available...
, GameStorm
GameStorm
GameStorm was an online gaming service founded by Kesmai corporation in the 1990s. It offered several online video games at a flat monthly fee of $10 per month, a relatively radical payment system in the age of pay-by-hour online gaming...
and CompuLink.
Over time, Kesmai produced many improved versions of the game. In 1997, a backport from Windows to the Macintosh was made available as an open beta on the Internet. In 1999, Kesmai was purchased by Electronic Arts
Electronic Arts
Electronic Arts, Inc. is a major American developer, marketer, publisher and distributor of video games. Founded and incorporated on May 28, 1982 by Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer games industry and was notable for promoting the designers and programmers...
which started running the game servers themselves. The last Air Warrior servers were shut down on December 7, 2001.
In 1988, Federation debuted on Compunet
Compunet
Compunet was a United Kingdom based interactive service provider, catering primarily for the Commodore 64 but later for the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST...
. It was a text-based online game, focused around the intergalactic economy of our galaxy in the distant future. Players work their way up a series of ranks, each of which has a slightly more rewarding and interesting but difficult job attached, which culminates in the ownership of one's own "duchy," a small solar system. After some time on GEnie, in 1995 Federation moved to AOL. AOL made online games free, dropping surcharges to play, in 1996, and the resulting load caused them to drop online game offerings entirely. IBGames, creators of Federation, started offering access to the game through their own website, making it perhaps the first game to transition off of an online service provider. IBGames kept the game operational until 2005, after most of the player base transitioned to the sequel, 2003's Federation II
Federation II
Federation II is an online text-based game also known as Federation 2 or Fed2, designed and programmed by Alan Lenton and developed by IBGames that centers on the intergalactic trade and economy in the distant future. The game was originally launched in 2003, but started attracting larger crowds...
.
In 1991, Sega
Sega
, usually styled as SEGA, is a multinational video game software developer and an arcade software and hardware development company headquartered in Ōta, Tokyo, Japan, with various offices around the world...
introduced online multiplayer gaming to video game console
Video game console
A video game console is an interactive entertainment computer or customized computer system that produces a video display signal which can be used with a display device to display a video game...
s, with their Sega Meganet
Sega Meganet
The Sega Toshokan, Sega Game Library or Sega Meganet was a network service in Japan for people using the Sega Mega Drive. Debuting in 1990, this was the first time online multiplayer console gaming was possible. However, the service was not very successful and was eventually discontinued...
service for the Mega Drive (Genesis). Sega continued to provide online gaming services for their later consoles, including the Sega NetLink
Sega NetLink
Sega NetLink was an attachment for the Sega Saturn game console to provide Saturn users with internet access, a web browser, and access to email through their console. NetLink consisted of a 28.8 kbit/s modem that fits into the Sega Saturn cartridge port, although there was a cheaper version that...
service for the Sega Saturn
Sega Saturn
The is a 32-bit fifth-generation video game console that was first released by Sega on November 22, 1994 in Japan, May 11, 1995 in North America, and July 8, 1995 in Europe...
and the SegaNet
SegaNet
SegaNet was an internet service provided by Sega for the Sega Saturn and Dreamcast video game consoles.-Saturn:In its inception, SegaNet was Sega's online service for the Sega Saturn in Japan...
service for the DreamCast.
The 1990s saw an explosion of MMORPGs; for details, see History of massively multiplayer online games
History of massively multiplayer online games
The history of massively multiplayer online games spans over thirty years and hundreds of massively multiplayer online games titles. The origin and influence on MMOG games stems from MUDs, Dungeons and Dragons and earlier social games....
.