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The latest Call of Duty game sold over seven million units in less than a month. Games like World of Warcraft have over ten million subscribers worldwide. To put that in perspective, the total population of Australia is just 21 million.
Some might think this a recent phenomenon. However, PC games have been trail-blazing the world of online gaming since the 1980s.
Although many PC games initially avoided the Internet, due to the lack of widespread connectivity among its user bases, many early adopters were able to play online using primitive modems or through closed networks.
The most common type of online PC games in the early days of gaming were Multi-User Dungeons (MUDS), role-playing games (RPGs) that allowed users to slay dragons together in a limited text environment. The first completely worldwide online game, MAD (Multi-Access Dungeon), was released in 1984 and heralded a new age of online gaming.
Although modems would remain very slow for the next two decades, the growth of online bulletin boards would improve the gamers abilities to network.
These bulletin boards would often set up online games that their users could interact with. The most famous, Legend of the Red Dragon, was created in 1989. It allowed gamers to play a single-player story while interacting with other players participating in the quests at the same time. It featured in-game mail, message boards and, in some versions, the ability to cause semi-permanent changes to the environment which other players would encounter during their own adventures.
The 1990s saw an increase in online gaming.
The incredibly popular first-person shooter (FPS) game Doom saw players leaving slow placed RPGs behind and instead running and shooting together in real time. Doom could initially only be played over a network, although later editions would include worldwide online support. Due to the network requirement, Doom became a hit in colleges and created what might be the first community of online shooter fans.
Although it started small, they would eventually become one of the largest, most dedicated fan bases in the world.
The 1990s also saw an increase in pay-for-play gaming. AOL games (MUDS, graphical RPGs, and a few other games) required an hourly fee for players. Other upstart gaming services began to take notice at the growing number of online gamers.
However, a now-defunct gaming service known as Gamestorm changed the way people paid for online gaming. For $10 a month, gamers could join players all over the world in first-person shooter games such as Magestorm, MUDS such as Darkness Falls, and persistent graphical RPGs such as Legends of Kesami.
This payment structure would become the standard for online games.
For much of its 30-year history, playing games online has been a part of PC gaming. As networking becomes easier, this has continued to grow, till today online gaming is a major phenomenon. There is now an expectation that almost all new game releases will include some type of multi-player gaming.
Large communities have formed around these games, resulting in the creation of new friendships, providing new emotional outlets for people, and even triggering a few romantic connections: the world is more connected than ever and a lot of that connectivity is taking place in the world of PC games.
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