Early Online Gaming

The origins of online gaming can be traced back to text-based games that ran on private servers (usually at a university) and dialup bulletin board systems in the 1970s. One of the first examples was a multi-user dungeon game (MUD) developed by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw in 1978 at Essex University on a DEC PDP-10. Players could typically connect to the game using a TELNET client, and by typing in commands, they would enter a dungeon, fight monsters, gain experience and acquire loot. Other similar games such as Oubliette and Moria were also developed in the late 70s; Oubliette was so difficult that it could not be successfully played by a single person on their own, and players had to run in groups in order for to survive (i.e. a multi-player game).

The popularity of these games spread to the US during the 1980s, when home personal computers with modems enabled role players to log into multi-line bulletin board systems (BBSs) and online service providers such as Compuserve, The Source and GEnie. There were also platform-specific graphical services available, including AppleLink for the Apple II and Macintosh, Quantum Link for the Commodore 64 and PC Link for the IBM PC, all of which were run by the company which eventually became America Online. These services offered access to a number of games, ranging from text adventures to gambling games such as blackjack. Some of these systems allowed the different users to interact with one another to play multi-player games.

In 1983, a text-mode networked computer game called Snipes was created by SuperSet Software. It is thought to have been the first network game ever written for a commercial personal computer and is officially credited as being the original inspiration for Novell NetWare. Along with Spasim (a 3d multiplayer space simulation for time shared mainframes) and Maze War (a networked multiplayer maze game for several research machines), Snipes is recognised as the forerunner to multi-player games such as Doom and Quake.

The first commercial MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) was a text-based game called Islands of Kesmai, designed by Kelton Flinn and John Taylor in 1984. Consumers were able to play the game via the CompuServe online service for $12.00 per hour.

Also released was Club Caribe, a graphical character-based interactive environment game introduced by LucasArts for Q-Link customers on their Commodore 64 computers. Users controlled an online avatar and could interact with one another, chat and exchange items.