Now we see thousands of people playing online games such as tetris, ping pong, mario bros, super mario etc for free but despite its history dating back to the 1970s, for most gambling line began with the explosion of the Internet in 1993 and the advent of Doom and Warcraft sometime in 1994 or 1995. This has further boost with publishers starting to add Internet connectivity to computer games in 1994-95.
The media, in fact, have been ignorant of the history of online gaming. As they are concerned, online gaming just coincidentally happened when their advertisers started producing Internet-capable gaming. Not so.
The early development -
In early 1950 a college student created a game similar to Tic-Tac-Toe for a class project that will be played on computers of the day dinosaurs complete with cathode ray tube display. The 1960′s had MIT students programming a game called “Space war” that could play with two people in a primitive network. End of 1960 brought the first “real” video games like table tennis and shooter games.
The 70 – play begins
Serious online gaming began with the first interactive online game called Advent. In fact, online gaming was conceptualized with the Advent. Network games had users playing against each other in an online fantasy world. The game was first called Mazewar network, a game that the players involved in network travel through a maze and trying to kill each other. Online games are a great source of entertainment for everyone.
Then the interpersonal interaction came in multi-player environment. The game was first called Dungen. Dungen had players competing to complete a series of missions. Dungen provided with new values and the players every time the user logged on.
In late 1970, started the fashion for the home video games get more and more computer savvy. As a natural corollary, people started writing their own games for home computers. These programming hobbyists traded and sold these home-grown games in local markets.
Other changes in the 1970 game consoles were used game cartridges. That meant that people could collect games cartridges for the base unit instead of bulky game console systems.
The 80 – a pause before the storm
1980 saw growing craze for video and computer game fashion, but online gaming was not on the horizon yet. New games with better graphics and sound have been introduced and gained popularity. Pole Position and Pac-Man were two who achieved great popularity. It was in 1980 when Nintendo released the game system first.
The 90 – revolution begins
The 1990′s saw the phenomenal growth in popularity and technology mostly due to the rise in 3-D and multimedia.
Myst, the game of intellectual adventure games, created in the CD-ROM. Fancier 3-D graphics hardware made FPS (first person shooter) games such as Quake possible.
At the end of 1990 saw the exponential growth of Internet, MUDs (multi-user dungeons) which made the popular online games. GUIs had new and improved people around the world playing against each other, not only in FPS games, but games in real-time strategy (strategy games in real time) and third games person, such as Grand Theft Auto.
This was also the period which began offering online gaming websites such as tetris, ping pong, Mario Bros, Super Mario and other games free online flash and without flash based games free to play after registering with them. This really pushed online gaming into the popular psyche.
Century 21 – the world is a playground
Early 21st century was dominated by the DVD-CD-ROM. It has changed the way online games are played. The latest game systems like Play Station Sony and Microsoft X-box have networking capabilities to let people play with each other in real time around the world. Exponential growth in the services of broadband Internet has made playing these online games possible in the true sense of the word.
The only drawback of the evolving technology for online games is that what you buy today might become obsolete for the next year. Fortunately for gamers, the resale industry for these online games is huge. This resale industry is one more element to the ever changing history of online gaming.