My first online experience was playing shareware DOOM with a friend, using one of these:
I dialled his phone number and as if by magic, were in the lobby. Great stuff.
Actually, I lie, my first online experience was probably playing Chess online in the old Yahoo lobbies I expect.
My next experience was GTA 1, same setup, it worked. I actually spent MANY hours in GTA online late night/early morning. My phone in my room had no ringer off switch so would often wake up parents at 2am who were not too impressed. Likewise, played some Virtual Pool in the same way. Games were normally prompted by a Windows Messenger chat
Skip forward a few years and after being nagged by a friend, I end up buying this:
Upto this point, I had been playing online games for a while, Total Annihilation via the Microsoft Zone match making service and Half Life deathmatch via the World Opponents Network were some of my favourites.
Now, playing Battlefield 2, I was blown away. We would all pile into Xfire and someone would choose a server from there.
I would say for me, BF2 was the high watermark moment.
Not saying it is the best example of an online game, it was not but as an experience, it did everything I wanted from a game and scratched all the itches to this day for the PC, I do not think it has been bettered from a relative standpoint.
Maybe it was the fact it was a PC exclusive, it played to a lot of the strengths of the PC at the time, no compromises.
If using BF2 as a baseline, as online gaming evolved from that 13 years later?
I dialled his phone number and as if by magic, were in the lobby. Great stuff.
Actually, I lie, my first online experience was probably playing Chess online in the old Yahoo lobbies I expect.
My next experience was GTA 1, same setup, it worked. I actually spent MANY hours in GTA online late night/early morning. My phone in my room had no ringer off switch so would often wake up parents at 2am who were not too impressed. Likewise, played some Virtual Pool in the same way. Games were normally prompted by a Windows Messenger chat
Skip forward a few years and after being nagged by a friend, I end up buying this:
Upto this point, I had been playing online games for a while, Total Annihilation via the Microsoft Zone match making service and Half Life deathmatch via the World Opponents Network were some of my favourites.
Now, playing Battlefield 2, I was blown away. We would all pile into Xfire and someone would choose a server from there.
I would say for me, BF2 was the high watermark moment.
Not saying it is the best example of an online game, it was not but as an experience, it did everything I wanted from a game and scratched all the itches to this day for the PC, I do not think it has been bettered from a relative standpoint.
Maybe it was the fact it was a PC exclusive, it played to a lot of the strengths of the PC at the time, no compromises.
If using BF2 as a baseline, as online gaming evolved from that 13 years later?
and obviously it lagged compared to other players overseas who might have faster speed.
. My favourite map was Gazala and I spent hours playing it much to the annoyance of the wife who could not use the phone 
however, the arrival of ADSL with Plusnet fixed that followed a year later by Telewest cable B/B at what was then a huge 1 Mb/s speed 
