WOF: What was the first game you played online?

Jos

Posts: 3,073   +97

[Weekend Open Forum] People who have been gaming for just a few years might take online functionality for granted. After all, with the latest generation of consoles you just need to pop in the game disc to start playing with someone across the globe -- provided you have an Internet connection and in the case of Xbox 360 owners, signed up for an Xbox Live subscription. But to get where we are today many years have passed since the early days of dial-up and BBS turn-based games -- or PLATO time-sharing systems if you go way back, according to Wikipedia.

You could say I was a bit late to the party if you consider remote gaming has been around, in one way or another, for almost four decades. But it was not until the mid-1990s that online games really blossomed. Around that time a friend borrowed me a copy of Command & Conquer, which included two CDs, one for the Global Defense Initiative (GDI) and another for the Brotherhood of Nod, in order to make multiplayer gaming possible with a single purchase of the game. We had unreliable dial-up connections, but that didn't stop up us from playing until the wee hours of the morning.


I was blown away by the real-time strategy element, so it was a while before I started paying more attention to the first-person shooter genre that is also wildly popular amongst online gamers. Ironically, bearing in mind how the gaming landscape turned out, my first steps into the computer gaming world were made on a Mac.

We've asked you before about the first video game you ever played and the ones you are looking forward to. Today we want to know which title got you started into online gaming and which one has you hooked right now. Discuss.

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Technically it was some version of Risk that I played on a dial up BBS.

The first game I played via modem against another player was Command and Conquer.

The first online game I played was Call of Duty 4.
 
Either the original C&C or Half Life. Both were awesome games at the time. Ah, I can remember the days when your health didn't come back on it's own, you had to run around the map searching for med packs.
 
Runescape. I don't play much more because they modified the trade system and make it hard to make money. That, and for some reason i got bored with clicking a rock for 6 hours at a time.
 
Haha awesome, Counter-strike and Team Fortress Classic, timing the ping just ahead of the enemy for a headshot.

and Quake lan at my mates house on the old coaxil bus network setup.

Kel
 
Doom on DOS, through the dial-up Dwango service in Texas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWANGO

After that came Quake95 on iiNet, again on dial-up with no latency prediction. Quakeworld came soon after.

- [TRB]_ReKTeK
 
Warcraft 2, that game got me hooked back in the 90s, I played with my friends modem to modem. There was also some sort of network setup locally where you could dial in with your modem and 4 people could play at once (The Cage), there was no battle net back then, The Cage was just setup by some dude and his friends, you could chat on it, play war2, duke nukem 3d, there were some text based games you could play, actually only 4 people could even connect to the cage at once! It was 5$ a month for a premium account, most of it was free. This was before very many people had the internet and my parents would have thought it absurd to pay for the net back then :).
 
the first online game i ever played is the one that i am still playing now. which is combat arms that i am addicted to playing.
 
OMG thats the game ! thats the game ! (command & conquer) that made me anti-social and a tech enthusiast.

But the first game i play'd online was Rainbow Six. With my slow dial-up, that i still have :(
 
Unreal Tournament in 1999. I remember I used to play online using dial-up. My download speed was about 6-8 kbit/s. That was sad. Lol
 
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