Ever wondered what your parents and the adults played for fun back in their day? Or before the existence of Nintendo Wii’s, Playstations, and World of Warcraft, what were the games that people played with the computer? Online gaming back then wasn’t as high-tech as what you play now but they delivered the same amount of fun that today’s online games give you. Take a journey down old time geekery and see what was deemed as hi-tech back then:
1.#TradeWars 2002
A space game developed in 1984. In TW2002, the player is a galaxy trader where the main objective is to gain control of a limited set and amount of resources, as you travel in different sectors of the galaxy. Using your gained wealth in trading, you can upgrade your spaceship, get better weapons and fight for control of planets and starbases.
2.#MUDs
Also known as Multi-User Dungeon, this is a text-based multiplayer real-time virtual world that started in 1978. It combined elements such as role-playing games, hack and slash, player versus player, interactive fiction, and online chat with a fantasy setting populated by fictional races and monsters. The objective of the game is to slay monsters, explore a fantasy world, complete quests, go on adventures, create a story by role-playing, and advance the character.
3.#MUSHes
MUSH, generally called a Multi-User Shared Hallucination, is somewhat of a text-based Second Life where you can create anything you want, be anyone you want, and do anything that you want in a multi-user game. With the popularity of MUDs in the 1980s, many variations emerged such as TinyMUD in 1989. MUSH was then created by Larry Foard who used TinyMUD’s code and added a different programming language.
4.#Hunt
The old school Before Doom, created in 1985 by Conrad C. Huang and Gregory S. Couch, is represented using ASCII characters on an 80×24 terminal screen. Hunt is a multiplayer game where each player wanders around a maze, killing off other players using guns, bombs, and slime. Players can also form a team. The maze, when destroyed, regenerates over time, during which “deflectors” appear, changing the direction of the projectile. Sometimes a “wandering bomb” appears, exploding when contact is made.
5.#Empire 3.84
Considered as the grandfather of all Internet games, Empire 3.84 is a risk-like conquer-the-world game with its original version appearing in 1971 on a PDP-11/45 mainframe computer at Harvard University. It gained popularity for being cited as one of Sid Meier’s inspiration for Civilization PC game series.
6.#BBS Door Games
Since the technology in the old days was pretty much text-based, online games back then usually were also text-based games played over the modem on an amateur-run bulleting board system (BBS). Supporting only one phone line, there wasn’t WiFi back then, so players usually had to take turns when playing, but still they can compete against each other.
7.#FIBS
The First Internet Backgammon Server pretty much tells us what it is, it’s the first backgammon server on the Internet. Started in 1992, it has become one of the most popular online games to play backgammon against other players around the globe.