The Most Important Multiplayer Games Ever
Gamasutra's 'Quantum Leap' awards roll on, with game developers voting in the titles they see as the most important multiplayer titles ever made. These are non-massive multiplayer games that significantly advanced the pastime of playing videogames with other people. Some of the listed games are gimmes (Goldeneye, Tribes), but I thought an Anonymous submitter's comment about humble Pokémon was interesting: "Tajiri-san's introduction of the collect and trade concept opened the eyes of every developer, all of whom previously believed multiplayer was either head-to-head or cooperative. What Pokémon created with this breakthrough concept was a true sense of community centered about a game - a kinship among people which transcended the immediate game environment. With the inclusion of real-world Pokémon merchandise, and a constant flow of new, wicked-cute characters, it was easy for anyone to embrace the Pokémon lifestyle...not that I would ever admit to it." Any multiplayer classics you'd add to the list?
Unreal Tournament would be the game that converted me to online gaming.
Bomberman & Goldeneye on the N64 were some of my fondest memories of Sixth Form, and Micro Machines was awesome as well.
Also, Super Mario Kart on the N64 was brilliant too, and I never realised quite how well Nintendo used to be at MP titles until now.
First multiplayer PC game was C&C at my first secondary school. First online game with Internet People was Delta horse 2 and its CS:S and Beef that have maintained my interest more recently, although all due to a big dose of 5punk.
I think the first Multiplayer game I played was Quake... a friend's dad had a number of PCs of varying ages, so we would connect the two working ones together and Deathmatch it out.
Good times.
The first I played properly was Team Fortress Classic, shortly followed by Unreal Tournament. Only the demo mind, once the full game had come out I had already played it to death. Especially as you had to pay for your time online back then.
I remember hooking up two PCs to play doom via the serial port back in the day. I also remember playing 8 man C&C: Red Alert games at my Dad's office (great times!). A big one in my younger years was playing Duke Nukem 3D and dialing into a friend's PC so we could go 1 on 1. Always fun. I played a lot of the quake and early UTs, and diablo and others.
And there has been no experience like I had when I first played Battlefield 1942. It was an amazing game that really just floored me.
It took MP gaming from the days of hooking up multiple copies of Doom with mates and crashing the network to really playing against randoms on the internet.
Nickface wrote:I remember hooking up two PCs to play doom via the serial port back in the day. I also remember playing 8 man C&C: Red Alert games at my Dad's office (great times!). A big one in my younger years was playing Duke Nukem 3D and dialing into a friend's PC so we could go 1 on 1. Always fun. I played a lot of the quake and early UTs, and diablo and others.
And there has been no experience like I had when I first played Battlefield 1942. It was an amazing game that really just floored me.
Duke Nukem was my best experience for ages. We uset to get all our machines together in someone's house and hook up a coax IPX/SPX jobby. Terminators were a valuable commodity and getting 8 players together without someone having some technical problem was a rare treat.
Maybe that grounding is why I never really enjoyed online gaming until I started using TS with 5punkers - in a LAN you can see the reaction of your mates, online it's very impersonal (and full of wankers).
Reading the article made me remember the first, and perhaps therefore most important, multiplayer game I ever played - multiplayer meaning more than two players.
Anyone in Cov Baths on a Friday afternmoon in the 80s would have heard the immortal phrase echoing around the (very echoey) foyer:
The Most Important Multiplayer Games Ever
