You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villany...
Some games can be played with multiple players simulataneously via a so called `split-screen' mode. As you can guess from the name, the screen is divided in 2 or sometimes 4 parts, and each player has its own piece of the screen to look at the world from his position, his view. There are also games that have one screen and still allow multiple players to play, for example Tennis for Two, one of the first electronic games, where two players play on one screen against each other. In this article however, we want to focus on networked multiplayer games.
Most games feature some form of multiplayer, especially today, now most people have access to the internet most games have an online multiplayer component. Defeating an opponent you know in real life is more fun than defeating a computer controlled opponent.
Among the first networked multiplayer games were the MUDs. The first MUD1,2 was created in 1979 for the DEC/PDP-10 by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle at the Essex university in the U.K., and the game was also named MUD. The game name became the genre name. In 1980, this PDP-10 was connected to the predecessor of the internet, ARPAnet. "MUD (and its successor MUD II) is still around as the oldest, continuous running multiplayer game. You can play it at www.mud2.com"2.
MUDs were essentially multiplayer versions of text-based adventures or RPGs. In these virtual worlds, players explored dungeons, fighting monsters and collecting treasures. This earns them experience points, which they can use to improve their character. In MUD, players would ultimately be ranked "Wizard"1 which gave them the power to create new items or locations.
Quickly, in the early 80s, big companies began to realise that they could sell their slack mainframe computing time to users who wanted to play games. Playing during the night was relatively cheap2 at $5/hour, while playing during the working hours could cost as much as $22.50/hour. More and more games appeared on university and corporate systems, some of them multiplayer, which were the most popular ones.
As said in the previous paragraph, players were willing to pay to play online in big communities, which led to the rise of BBSes, where one calls a server hosting some or more phone lines, and can swap hints, software, and reviews about games, or play bulletin board versions of online games3. Players paid only costs of a local phone call, plus a membership fee if any. Privately run BBS systems took over gamers playing on the big companies' mainframe in their spare time, with some BBSes growing to companies. Most boards ran variations of previously existing adventure or tabletop role playing games.
Another major influence in the multiplayer world was Habitat, a graphical MUD created by Lucasfilm Games in 19854. There were graphical "Avatars" that represented your character, and the term "Avatar" is still in use today on web forums with the same meaning. Despite the fact that was not a big commercial success, it was studied by game designers and by academicians, proven by the fact a paper titled "The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat" was written, which is available online. Among important lessons learned were to use as little bandwidth as possible, to decrease latency, to represent items in the world as objects that have several actions to manipulate them, and to have a good data representation for communication, so the world can be expanded with new objects and object types, to keep the world and story alive.
More innovations in multiplayer games came in the early 90s, with the appearance of new game networks, like the MPGN in 1989, and the TSN in 1991 (source: www.themis-group.com). The game Drakkar5, playable on MPGN, which was a fantasy role-playing game, but with the new feature that players could get "the right to create guilds and have guild clubhouses, hideouts, and so on". Unfortenately, the MPGN does not exist anymore, due to a "wealthy financial angel" financing the network, but the company was starting to make money too little, too late. Also Drakkar was so successful, most people only played that game and not one of the others in the network. The archived MPGN website can be found using the internet archive.
On the other hand, TSN, which offered a "theme park" view of the world, where each game had its own land. Most players went directly to the game Shadows of Yserbius. This game allowed multiple players to join up in teams and do quests together, in which it was the first. The history of TSN is further explained6 as:
TSN ultimately became the ImagiNation Network (INN), was sold to AT&T, and closed up shop when AT&T decided not to continue with an ambituous cyberworld project under way at the time.
After this, from the mid 90s onward, the World Wide Web in combination with Netscape's browser began to emerge, where people could connect to others using only a modem and a mouse, via a standardized protocol, instead of company specific solutions. Also, games came out that offered a multi-player option by connecting two modems directly or via local LAN connections, used by for example DOOM by id Software, causing the main online entities like AOL and Compuserve to lose their dominance in multiplayer game networks6.
From then on, more games came out, MMORPGs, where players bought the game to get onto the network instead of the other way around. Notable are Ultima Online, launched in 1997, the first commercially successful MMORPG7, by adding a "deep skill system and detailed world", based on previously published and well known Ultima games; and also Asheron's Call, launched in 1999, that focused more on "monster killing and group social dynamics"7, making it easier for new players to join into an existing group; in other games they could not easily win from existing players that had much more experience than them.