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Right from the beginning, games were a component of the commercial online services that predated the World Wide Web; both The Source and CompuServe included them among their offerings from the moment those services first went online. In the early years, such online games were mostly refugees from 1970s institutional computing. Classics like Star Trek, Adventure, and Hammurabi had the advantage of being in the public domain and already running without modification on the time-shared computer systems which hosted the services, and could thus be made available to subscribers with a minimum of investment. Eventually even some text-only microcomputer games made the transition. By 1984, CompuServe, now well-established at the vanguard of the burgeoning online-services industry, had a catalog that included the original Adventure along with an expanded version, nine Scott Adams games, and the original PDP-10 Zork (renamed for some reason to The House of Banshi). And those were just the text adventures. There were also the dungeon crawls Dungeons of Kesmai and Castle Telengard and the war games Civil War, Fantasy, and Command Decision, while for the less hardcore there were the CompuServe Casino, board games like Reversi, and curiosities like a biorhythm charter and an astrology calculator.
- Games on the Net Before the Web, Part 1: Strategy and Simulation
- Games on the Net Before the Web, Part 2: MUD
- Games on the Net Before the Web, Part 3: The Persistent Multiplayer CRPG
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Hyperturtle on Monday December 25 2017, @03:56PM (3 children)
There were a lot of good Novell network games. maybe some people remember tinkering with ipxsetup.exe? It's even an achievement in Doom 2016...
Not long ago, I had two windows 98 laptops running ipx wirelessly over an access point that, in its configuration, had zero support for IPX. It mindlessly passed the traffic anyway, just as a good hub or switch should do... layer 2 devices shouldn't be interfering with layer 3 traffic, so it's likely a lot of these older games work fine on a local wifi network, provided you are able to install the protocols.
I have no idea if win10 supports ipx or has workarounds for that if it is not enabled via some checkboxes.
Anyway there were a lot of good local multi-player games back before Internets Killed the LAN Party. Sacrifice, the first few Command and Conquer games, Magic Carpet 2 (great with VR glasses of the era), and of course Doom 1 and 2, and their respective Doom-a-likes.
DNF 3D was a great multiplayer game for LAN play, too. There were a number of then as gaming caught on, then TCP/IP connectivity and then finally "on-line only". Remember, being on the LAN is "on-line". People, and now games, presume "on-line" means Internet connectivity. Not true... on-line refers to your being on the network and connected to what you want to connect to, which may mean never leaving your local network segment... but I digress.
And who can forget Quake? It came with a server application so that you could host it locally and have people dial in or just connect on the LAN. I had set one up at work with a few underutilized fax lines and we'd connect in locally or straight into it (or even over a VPN) to play "LAN only" games remotely. It was a inter-intranet game in that regard... it really helped demonstrate to me and others just how useful the Internet can be and that it wouldn't be just a fad (that let us play games). You could get around numerous restrictions of "having to be there".
Of course, now DRM and licensing seems to have taken the wind out of those sails. You may not need to physically be there to play anymore, but the problem is that if you all are, you still have to connect remotely to something for most modern multiplayer games to function. I should not have to log into steam or some other client shell to play a LAN game--in some cases, it is not possible to even authenticate such as when in a hotel and refusing to pay for their wifi connectivity to get to the internet to authenticate so I can frag the guy sitting at the same table as me. Some games support "offline mode", but really that should not be a special feature--many companies have deliberately written the ability out.
You can see this on many "HD updates" of classic games -- like Serious Sam for example --what used to work locally now requires a phone home. Some games even actually send all of the traffic externally and back again and causes problems with port openings on cheap routers and firewalls... problems created due to greed that never existed in the original versions since LAN play didn't require internet connectivity.
There are workarounds, but not enough people seem to care to make a purchasing decision relating to how hard it is to keep control. (Windows 10 was free, after all)
(Score: 4, Funny) by daver!west!fmc on Monday December 25 2017, @06:01PM (1 child)
Heh. I remember Doom. Here's how.
Imagine a large state university with campuses all over the state. Only now it's the 1990s and here we are in an administrative computer center. Even though we have TCP/IP, there's still some folks holding on to VMS and DECnet (which is gonna be OSI real soon now, and that'll be it for your TCP/IP, yeah right) and worst of all LAT, and LAT is worst because there's a network spanning the state (because the VMS fan club is still big on VT220s into DECserver 100s/200s) and LAT means it's bridged. Yeah, the bridges are smart but they're not smart enough, kind of like the VMS fan club.
So here's the latest thing, Doom, and there's a couple of us looking at it, so we've got it up on two PCs. "Hey is that you?" I ask, pressing the fire key because I don't know any better way to indicate what I'm pointing at. "Yeah yeah yeah stop shooting!" And the phone rings, Arseburg campus out at the arse end of the state has just dropped off the net because of all the IPX broadcast traffic between our two PCs.
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Thursday December 28 2017, @04:49PM
I remember doom very well because the first version was a little buggy...
It used IPX broadcasts to talk to other players. Not too bad if you have a single game with 3 other people. Very very very bad if you have groups of people who are supposed to be working sneaking games of doom on an IPX network with a game that uses broadcasts on.. a 4 megabit token-ring star topology.
oh man
then the network/server guys get blamed that someone can't print or connect to whatever file server...but it's because... 32 people are playing doom in 8 different areas in just this department alone!
Needless to say, it was my desire to continue gaming despite the tradegy of the new "computer use policy" we all had to agree to... that helped me become the person I am today! I also learned a lot as to how this stuff worked... and how to identify similar broadcast storms and the like. Games suffer the same problems applications do, too, and with games it is worse... people are rarely honest about it. It can be harder to troubleshoot a widepread issue when no one admits to being part of the problem but are readily blaming others.
Sometimes games really do provide an education even if shooting demons with friends doesn't seem like the most intuitive career path to take...
To id's credit, id also later fixed the broadcast issue in the next patch of Doom (maybe 1.1; I think 1.2 introduced the serial/modem option... I was using IPX over serial and then tunneling it at 9600bps at the time, so the official support was a welcome change since it worked the first time...unlike my command-line kludge...)
(and hey I laughed at the VMS/bridges being smart but not smart enough comment... it's still relevant today. there are diehard adherents out there, but I was more of a VT100 guy myself since it put me into a proper 'work mode'. ANSI made me think of calling boards and online games...)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by isostatic on Monday December 25 2017, @11:14PM
Netwars I believe came with novel netware, that was fun. Duke nukem 3D was the best though - many days spent with a null modem serial cable between a couple of 486s.
Until the late 90s most faces didn't support IP, but there were some services that made it work. I think command and conquer red alert did internet play, but nothing beat LAN parties with games like total annihilation, a right of passage of a teenager that I suspect in the 80s was filled with dungeons and dragons