-Dustin Gulley
1972 was a very boring year. I Googled it and it was utterly depressing. The free spirit of the 60‟s was coming to an end, calculators
were $150, and I wasn‟t born yet. It was simply a very bad year. Luckily, in 1973, NASA decided to take a break from the unimportant
work of space exploration, and created the first peer-to-peer game, Maze War. Unfortunately, Maze War suffered from the Rule of the
First, and much to the dismay of NASA scientists they were forced to go back to the tedious work of exploring the unknown universe.
Getting back to the Rule of the First, I‟m not sure if such a rule actually exists because I just made it up, but it goes like this, the first of
everything stinks. However, the Rule of the First has one plus, anything abiding by it inevitably gets to be used as an opener in arti-
cles to lead the reader comfortably to the subject of the history of whatever is abiding by the Rule of the First. This leads us comforta-
bly to the history of network gaming.
Network gaming began with Maze War, and while I already mentioned that it stunk, what I didn‟t mention was that it had one big suc-
cess. It was the first game to be played through a peer-to-peer network. Many people stupidly think that peer-to-peer networking was
created by Shawn Fanning for Napster in 1999, well, maybe not many people, but I certainly did. Does this make me an idiot? The
answer is yes, but I try very hard not to be an idiot, and
occasionally I‟ve had some success.
PLATO, a computer network created for the University
of Illinois, was home to many of the first network
games. One game that deserves mention is Avatar.
Avatar was probably the most popular network game
of the late 1970‟s, and was one of the first games to
allow players to chat. This is very significant because
social interaction is really the whole point of network
gaming, and game chatting had a large impact on
leetspeak! OMG 1 pwn3d h n00b, w00t w00t!!!!111
Avatar was an RPG, very similar to dungeons and
dragons, in which players formed parties and fought
monsters. Avatar is still available for play through a
PLATO emulator at http://www.cyber1.org/. Go there if
your bored, it won‟t help, but it may teach you a lesson
about trying to cure boredom by playing incredibly
outdated games with people who won‟t let go of the
past (wink wink).
The 1980‟s would prove to be a very interesting dec-
ade, largely due to the fact that it was the decade in
which I was born, but also because the price of calcu-
lators had dropped dramatically. Going into the 1980‟s
many geeks came to accept an obvious problem which
they had been avoiding; their vocabularies were ridicu-
lously short of acronyms which begin with the letter
„m‟ (or as I like to call them, macronyms). To solve this
problem they decided to create several network gam-
ing engines which would all be macronyms, these
include MOO (MUD Object Oriented), MUSH (Multi
User Shared Hallucination), MUCK (Multi User C Ker- Avatar Screen Shot
nel), MUSE (Multi User Simulated Environment),
MAGE (Multi Actor Gaming Environment), and of course MUD (Multi User Dungeon), MUD was actually created in the late 70‟s but
was perfected in the early 80‟s, and it was really the inspiration for all the other macronyms. To a limited extent MUD is still in use
today, and there‟s a tutorial for creating your own MUD server at http://www.gamedev.net/reference/programming/features/mudpie1/.
Network gaming really began to take off in the 1990‟s, it was also during this decade that the price of calculators had dropped to the
point in which businesses were actually giving them away, much to the bitter dismay of anyone who paid $150 for one in the early
1970‟s. Doom would lead the way of network gaming in 1993. As it turned out, the only thing network gaming needed to be popular
was a game in which people were sent to hell in order to blast away at evil deadly demons (duh!). Doom single handedly made net-
work gaming popular; suddenly network café‟s were created in which geeks would play Doom over a LAN. In fact, I was one of those
geeks. People were also more than willing to play Doom online. Not playing Doom in the 1990‟s would have been like not wearing
parachute pants in the 1980‟s, it simply wasn‟t heard of.
Near the end of the 1990‟s Massive Multi-Player Online
Role Playing Games (MMORPG‟s – another macronym!)
would just start to become popular. MMORPGS‟s intro-
duced the concept of a persistent world (PW). A persistent
world is a world inside a game which continues even if
players are logged off. PW‟s are very popular today, so
much that some people consider them to be the real world,
and the world outside of the game to be a minor inconven-
ience. Ultima Online, Diablo, and EverQuest were re-
leased in the 90‟s, and suddenly network traffic went to a
new high. The 2000‟s would prove to be a large extension
of the 90‟s as far as network gaming is concerned. With
games such as Final Fantasy XI and World of Warcraft,
network gaming has blown up. Network gaming across
consoles has also become popular, largely due to the ef-
forts of the Microsoft XBOX. Handheld games are capable
of network gaming, both across a personal area network,
and online. Even cell phones are getting in on the action.
It‟s truly a great time to be a geek!
Doom
43 | Video Game Trader Magazine | July 2008 | www.VideoGameTrader.com
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