When did the Internet game scene first start? Well not in the early 1990s when mainstream America started to get Internet connectivity in their homes at an amazingly slow dial up speed. Actually, Internet games started almost forty years ago in the late 1960s according to most games’ fanatics. And, not unlike most great creations, the game field really began to take off in educational institutions across America. Some of the first colleges to introduce games to the world were MIT and the University of Illinois.
A system known as Plato ran games that
people could play that were developed for its capacity. These games of course
became widely popular amongst students, ate tons of computer resources as
usual, got a slap by the administration, and spawned a truly wild game craze.
Other games were developed for the Plato system. Some of these games were
multiplayer and some were not. Great games like Avatar and Aircraft, and early
flight simulators were introduced to the world on Plato. Some trekkie type games were also developed
on this early multi player capable platform.
Some other great game developments happened
at an educational institution across the pond, in England, at Essex University,
throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s. The most popular gaming phenomenon
that came out of Essex was a Multi User Dungeon (Mud). People at the University
loved this game, and its popularity began to spread across the world as users
gained access to the source code and started sharing the application with every
gamer they knew. Free gaming owes a lot to this wonderful early program.
In the early 1980s, corporations started
to the see the possibilities of getting every teenager in the world addicted to
their products. A corporation by the name of Kesmai developed games for
Compuserve and together they began serving up great product like Islands of
Kesmai and Megawars 1. A user basically had to pay by the hour to play some of
these early games, and Compuserve was having a blast getting paid some pretty
good rates exceeding ten dollars an hour for game play.
In the 1980s, after the success of Kesmai and
Compuserve, the gaming industry was beginning to really take off. Companies
like General Electric and Quantum Computer were starting to offer monthly
subscription fees to access their gaming nirvana. Kesmai at this point really
began to elevate the gaming scene when they began introducing the gaming
community to Air Warrior. The company also brought gamers Stellar Warrior and
Stellar Emperor. Quantaum introduced Rabbit Jack’s casino at this time.
The late eighties saw the introduction of the
AppleLink by Quantum for Apple II computer users, and parents everywhere
started screaming at their kids to get away from the games. And the parents
were of course right, except if you went to go work in the gaming industry, and
then you probably made more than your parents.
Comments