When was online gaming invented

The integration of the microprocessor also led to the release of Space Invaders for the Atari VCS in , signifying a new era of gaming — and sales: Atari sales shot up to 2 million units in As home and arcade gaming boomed, so too did the development of the gaming community. The late s and early s saw the release of hobbyist magazines such as Creative Computing , Computer and Video Games and Computer Gaming World These magazines created a sense of community , and offered a channel by which gamers could engage.

The video game boom caused by Space Invaders saw a huge number of new companies and consoles pop up, resulting in a period of market saturation. Too many gaming consoles, and too few interesting, engaging new games to play on them, eventually led to the North American video games crash, which saw huge losses, and truckloads of unpopular, poor-quality titles buried in the desert just to get rid of them.

The gaming industry was in need of a change. At more or less the same time that consoles started getting bad press, home computers like the Commodore Vic, the Commodore 64 and the Apple II started to grow in popularity. These home computers had much more powerful processors than the previous generation of consoles; this opened the door to a new level of gaming , with more complex, less linear games. Even Bill Gates designed a game, called Donkey a simple game that involved dodging donkeys on a highway while driving a sports car.

Interestingly, the game was brought back from the dead as an iOS app back in In addition to providing the means for more people to create their own game using code, early computers also paved the way for multiplayer gaming , a key milestone for the evolution of the gaming community.

Early computers such as the Macintosh, and some consoles such as the Atari ST, allowed users to connect their devices with other players as early as the late s.

While many users reported that more than four players at a time slowed the game dramatically and made it unstable, this was the first step toward the idea of a deathmatch, which exploded in popularity with the release of Doom in and is one of the most popular types of games today. The real revolution in gaming came when LAN networks, and later the Internet, opened up multiplayer gaming. LAN gaming grew more popular with the release of Marathon on the Macintosh in and especially after first-person multiplayer shooter Quake hit stores in By this point, the release of Windows 95 and affordable Ethernet cards brought networking to the Windows PC, further expanding the popularity of multiplayer LAN games.

Multiplayer gaming took the gaming community to a new level because it allowed fans to compete and interact from different computers, which improved the social aspect of gaming. This key step set the stage for the large-scale interactive gaming that modern gamers currently enjoy. On April 30, , CERN put the World Wide Web software in the public domain, but it would be years before the Internet was powerful enough to accommodate gaming as we know it today.

Long before gaming giants Sega and Nintendo moved into the sphere of online gaming , many engineers attempted to utilize the power of telephone lines to transfer information between consoles. The new device, the CVC GameLine, enabled users to download software and games using their fixed telephone connection and a cartridge that could be plugged in to their Atari console. Unfortunately, the device failed to gain support from the leading games manufacturers of the time, and was dealt a death-blow by the crash of The technology allowed users to download games, news and cheats hints directly to their console using satellites.

Broadcasts continued until , but the technology never made it out of Japan to the global market. Accessing the Internet was expensive at the turn of the millennium. The Dreamcast came with an embedded 56 Kbps modem and a copy of the latest PlanetWeb browser, making Internet-based gaming a core part of its setup rather than just a quirky add-on used by a minority of users.

The Dreamcast was a truly revolutionary system, and was the first net-centric device to gain popularity. Accessing the Internet was expensive at the turn of the millennium, and Sega ended up footing huge bills as users used its PlanetWeb browser around the world. Not only was this game a pioneer of online multiplayer, but it also sparked what would become a robust hacking movement within video games.

Meridian 59 came online in as one of the first "highly graphical multiplayer games" that also existed in a persistent world online. Though limited to 35 simultaneous players, many video game historians consider it to be the first game to adopt a monthly fee.

Believe it or not, the game still operates today with a focus mainly on PvP gameplay. The game puts players in a sword and sorcery setting as they adventure throughout the world. This includes a dynamic guild voting system, guild halls, in-game bulletin boards, customizable armor sigils, world expansions, an in-game mail system, and more.

Not all online multiplayer experiences need to be role-playing games or arena shooters. Quake might be one of the most well-known shooting games of all time. The original game offered incredible and real-time 3D graphics and was an early adopter of OpenGL 3D acceleration.

But the iconic arena shooter did not get an online multiplayer mode until the QuakeWorld update. This allowed gamers to use dial-up modems for online matchmaking and released in Since then, it has spawned many sequels and mods including the original Team Fortress which started as a Quake add-on.

Thanks to remasters of games in the series, many gamers continue to play Age of Empires even today. But the game originally launched in allowing for up to 8 simultaneous players. Microsoft itself supported the online multiplayer with Microsoft Gaming Zone. But this game stands out amongst the masses as one of the first to use Scenario Builders. Users could create their own custom scenarios and then submit them for others to download.

Players also found that they could modify data files to release unused units like a spaceship or manipulate gameplay mechanics. It featured an embattled world known as Nimbus and god-like beings known as "The Furies. Individual players control islands and a priest with the ultimate goal being to capture someone else's priest. The game maintains a large fandom with many calling the game ahead of its time.

Legend has it that some servers remain active to this day. That honor goes to Ultima Online which still has servers and players active today; those interested in playing can do so for free. Though officially released in , its roots date back to with many greats in early video game history attached like Rich Vogel and Raph Koster.

Over the next few years, the primitive Odyssey console would commercially fizzle and die out. In , Atari released a home version of Pong , which was as successful as its arcade counterpart. Magnavox, along with Sanders Associates, would eventually sue Atari for copyright infringement.

In , Atari released the Atari also known as the Video Computer System , a home console that featured joysticks and interchangeable game cartridges that played multi-colored games, effectively kicking off the second generation of the video game consoles.

The video game industry had a few notable milestones in the late s and early s, including:. Lasting a couple of years, the crash led to the bankruptcy of several home computer and video game console companies. The NES had improved 8-bit graphics, colors, sound and gameplay over previous consoles.

Nintendo, a Japanese company that began as a playing card manufacturer in , released a number of important video game franchises still around today, such as Super Mario Bros. Additionally, Nintendo imposed various regulations on third-party games developed for its system, helping to combat rushed, low-quality software. In , Nintendo made waves again by popularizing handheld gaming with the release of its 8-bit Game Boy video game device and the often-bundled game Tetris.

With its technological superiority to the NES, clever marketing, and the release of the Sonic the Hedgehog game, the Genesis made significant headway against its older rival.

The early- to mids saw the release of a wealth of popular games on both consoles, including new franchises such as Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat , a fighting game that depicted blood and gore on the Genesis version of the game. In response to the violent game as well as congressional hearings about violent video games , Sega created the Videogame Rating Council in to provide descriptive labeling for every game sold on a Sega home console.

The council later gives rise to the industry-wide Entertainment Software Rating Board, which is still used today to rate video games based on content. Numerous movies based on video games have been released since. With a much larger library of games, lower price point, and successful marketing, the Genesis had leapfrogged ahead of the SNES in North America by this time. But Sega was unable to find similar success in Japan. With a leap in computer technology, the fifth generation of video games ushered in the three-dimensional era of gaming.

In , Sega released in North America its Saturn system, the first bit console that played games on CDs rather than cartridges, five months ahead of schedule.

The following year, Nintendo released its cartridge-based bit system, the Nintendo Simply put: Sony dominated the video game market and would continue to do so into the next generation. In fact, the Playstation 2, released in and able to play original Playstation games, would become the best-selling game console of all time.

Sega pulled the plug on the system in , becoming a third-party software company henceforth. Though the Playstation 3—the only system at the time to play Blu-rays—was successful in its own right, Sony, for the first time, faced stiff competition from its rivals. The Xbox , which had similar graphics capabilities to the Playstation 3, was lauded for its online gaming ecosystem and won far more Game Critics Awards than the other platforms in ; it also featured the Microsoft Kinect, a state-of-the-art motion capture system that offered a different way to play video games though the Kinect never caught on with core gamers or game developers.

And despite being technologically inferior to the other two systems, the Wii trounced its competition in sales. Its motion-sensitive remotes made gaming more active than ever before, helping it appeal to a much larger slice of the general public, including people in retirement homes.