networked games 1972 to 1988

[Curt @ Atari Museum]

I played Conquest quite a bit on the Vax in college, that played through 
the VT100 terminals with refreshing the graphics on the screen for 
animation (ships turning, shots fired, etc...)   We'd get like 10 or 
more people on after hours in the computer labs in Manhattan and Old 
Westbury and we'd essentially bring the Vax to its knee's ;-)




Curt



Andrew K. Bressen wrote:
> Hi all--
>
> I'm doing some work on promoting Netrek, and it's gotton 
> me interested in the following qualities:
>   graphical (incl. ascii graphics)
>   action (real-time-ish)
>   multiplayer, by which I mean 3 or more
>   wide area
>   on the internet
>   teams
>   leagues and guilds
>
>
> If anyone can help with the following questions or add material, 
> that'd be great...
>
>
> I've got the following timeline points:
> 1972 - Alto Trek
>        probably first networked game
>        multiplayer
> 1973 (Fall)  - Empire II on the PLATO system
>        not networked, but a wide-area multiplayer action game from
>        graphic terminals
>        did not clock like a modern game; players called for their own
>        screen updates manually
> 1974 - MazeWar, probably second networked game
>   ?    XNS/PUP, right? 
>        first First Person Shooter
>        first use of Avatars (enemy players appeared as walking
>        eyeballs. I don't count ships as Avatars)
>        first level mapping
>        first or second rendered 3D perspective graphics (Spasim may
>        have been first on this)
>   ?    In 1993, SGI did a Mazewar demo at Interop, with
>        workstations placed around the show,
>        So at some point, MazeWar became playable on a routed TCP/IP
>        network. When? 
> 1981 - Empire tournament play starts
> 1983 Jan - flag day; NCP turned off, net goes TCP/IP
> 1983 - SGI Dogfight (aka fight)
>   ?    I think the first game with its own Internet client-server
>        protocol?
>   ?    Did Mazewar get there first? It was client-server and not peer-
>        to-peer, right?
>   ?    I also think it was LAN-only, using broadcast UDP? I've also heard
>        it was originally XNS, but there's a well-known UDP port for it,
>        so when did it switch? 
>        I believe that while it was possible to choose to play in
>   ?    cooperation, the game itself did not have teams per se?
> 1985 - X Window System 10 ships
> 1986 - Xtrek, descendant of PLATO Empire
>   ?    first X-Windows thrown-display game?
> 1988 - Xtrek II: Netrek
>   ?    second client-server game?
>   ?    first client-server team game?
>   ?    first client-server game with routeable protocol?
> 1991 - Netrek league play starts
>
> So, what am I missing?
>
> 1974 to 1983 seems like too long a gap for there to have been 
> no ARPAnet graphic action games... there were many PLATO games
> during that timeframe, and an IBM space battle game of some sort.
>
> Also probably military simulators. 
>
> Thanks all!
>
>
>