312: The Original Tree Puncher

Okay, I have a problem. Go on. That's vague and broad, but hey, we're here to tackle problems. So in the olden times. Consoles were things that lived in the cabinet under my TV. And then I would, you know, when I wasn't using the console, I would close the door. When I use the console, I'd open the door. Right. So nice and out of the way. You don't have to look at them, which I like. But now.

In the modern context, I have all these docks attached to my TV. I have one for the Steam Deck and I have one for the Switch and I have one for the Switch 2 because we are a mixed mode Switch 1 and Switch 2 family. Wait, hang on. Most important question, where is your Animal Crossing island? We all have our own. We got multiple switches because everybody wanted to make their own Animal Crossing island. Right. Okay.

This is what we this is. Look, this is what we did with our Biden bonus in 2021 or whatever that was. That's one way to tackle it. Sure. Yeah. So. OK, so here's the problem, though. Well, OK, one of them is easy because Gina doesn't ever use the switch on the TV. So her dock is just the places that she places. She plugs in her switch to charge. Right. So she's a handheld only.

Yeah, real quick to define the problem. You need you need vertical lifting space. Is that correct? I need vertical lifting space, but ideally I want something I don't have to look at. But also I do like playing games on the TV, so I want to be able to use it attached to the TV occasionally. Sure.

My instinct is to say, I just put the docks behind the TV, but then you have to like contort your spine in a curve around the TV to get to the dock. Yeah. And also the TV is too close to the wall. This doesn't work. So what do people do? Like I have a Steam Deck dock and a Switch 2 dock. The Switch 1 dock is going to go away because the kiddo and I are both Switch 2'd up now. Wait, you have two Switch 2's? Yeah. You have two Switch 2's to my 0?

I mean, look, I'm a professional game games person. Okay. What's that like? It's up and down. It doesn't pay great. My girlfriend literally just got back from Costco like two hours ago. Yeah. Send me a photo of, like, stacks and stacks of Switch 2s at Costco. She wants a Switch 2, clearly. I should have had her just pick one up. Look, here's the thing. That Animal Crossing update's coming. It's true. Yeah.

There's now jockeying going on in the house because right now my daughter's island is on her Switch Lite still. And my wife's island is on her Switch OLED. And my island is on my original Switch. So there's two.

available slots for new islands right now okay and even though they've given like like the resetty powers to get rid of the flower problem that plagues every island that hasn't been touched in in three years exists now as of january it's still a problem like i like everybody wants a clean started so two of us are going to get to have their brand new island and then i'm never going to play animal crossing again so that sounds like a good plan

Yeah. I'll tell you what I do. Yeah, what do you do? Now that there are some prerequisites to this. Okay. Or there's one prerequisite, which is to have very large floor standing speakers. Yeah. Switch dock sits on top of a fuller speaker. Real nice. Yeah, but the problem is I don't want to see it. And I definitely don't want multiples. At that point, what else are you going to put on top of your speaker?

I have Wally and the BDRE on my speakers. Okay. They're both made of Lego. You may be constructing an impossible set of requirements here. Look, I'm a simple man. Accessible and like, you know, again, we need like. We need like aerial landing space over the dock, but invisible, like accessible, but not seen, like obscured by things. I'm not sure that maybe they pick one or the other. I just had an idea.

I think if I drill a hole in the floor and run a long HDMI cable down through the crawl space, I could bring it back up at my chair. Okay. And then. The switch jog just plugs in next to my chair so I can seamlessly transition. I love this from from playing on the TV to playing in my hands. Now, there are length limitations on the HDMI cable, especially depending on what.

which switch we're talking about and what signal is coming out of it. It's funny you mentioned this because I did a video about this at PC World. If you can get a passive... a one-way hdmi cable oh sure you get a fiber hdmi cable yeah that's 50 50 up to 50 meters i have one as a matter of fact yep i can do a lot less than that because it won't be 50 meters the biggest problem is i'll have to drill a real big hole to get

the HDMI cable through the endpoint through, because it's not like Ethernet where you can just run the cable up and then put the ends on for HDMI, I don't think. I have good news for you. Yeah, what's up? You own your house. That's true. You own that floor. That's true. You can put as many holes in that floor as you want. I don't want to have a way for the snails to get from the snail. Have I not told you about the snail Golgotha under my crawl space? No. So, look.

It sometimes gets a little wet in there when it rains. We have a big like three inches of rain in one day and then dormant snail eggs hatch. And then they're under there and there's nothing to eat because, you know, snails. And then. they just let loose the mortal coil after they make a bunch of big shells after they've eaten all the whatever grows on the mud down there and then

It's just like when you crawl around, it's just the remnants of snails that have let loose the mortal coil that are just crunching their bones under your knees and hands as your belly crawling through the muck. That doesn't sound so bad. It's not great.

You get snails when it rains. We get ants. Yeah. I think I would take the snails, honestly. We get ants, too. You got to put a barrier, a deadly poison barrier around your domicile. Wait, what kind of poison are we talking? Anti-ant poison. Such as? I don't know. They touch it and then they... Well, I guess I'll get right on that.

Welcome to Brad and Will made a tech pod. I'm Will. I'm Brad. Hello. My levels look a little scary, but I don't see any peaking, so I'm going to say it's fine. This is the joy of doing your own audio engineering. It's true. This podcast is a two-man operation. What I should do, what I should do is teach my daughter to be an audio engineer. Yes. Make her earn her keep. Yeah. Make her earn that Animal Crossing Island. She could be like the Rizzler of podcasting.

Or every hour she spends adjusting knobs on your mixer while you podcast. That's another hour. Two V-Bucks. Yes, there you go. That's a healthy conversion rate. Two V-Bucks an hour? That's totally reasonable. She looked at me and she's like, Dad, two V-Bucks isn't going to buy anything.

What is your, I mean, do you have ant materials that you rely on? Ant materials? Yeah, I like cinnamon for, cinnamon's very good at disrupting their, what? Cinnamon's tigers, man. No, no, no, it disrupts their scent trails. It doesn't kill them. Oh, whatever, whatever, like chemical signifiers, animal or ants, drop pheromones or whatever. Yeah. The way they form their conga lines, I guess. So I go to the Ace Hardware in my neighborhood.

And I ask the old guy there, what's the deadliest shit that they have for ants? Oh, it's Borax. No, Borax. They're wise to the Borax here. They don't eat the Borax anymore. They'll just look, they'll walk right by it and look at it. Oh, well, touching the Borax is what you want, though. Borax does bad things to ants. Yeah, they eat it and it disrupts their tum-tums. Well, it also, like, let's say you vacuum up a little bit of Borax into a hand vac. Yeah.

And then vacuum up all the ants that are flooding. Wow. Wow. That is grim. They don't last long. And I feel terrible doing it, honestly. But when there when there are hundreds of ants in your house. What other choice do you have? The worst thing that ever. One of the worst things I've ever seen as a homeowner is when we had our house cleaned a few years ago, the guys were using like a soap on the on the.

You know, like a mild soap on the outside of the house, basically. And the soap ran down around the edges of my patio, the concrete patio in the backyard. And when. apparently there were a billion ants living under there and it was it was like it was like a scene in an indiana jones movie when it's like snakes except it was all ants like you couldn't see the concrete there were so many ants that came up Oh my God. A nightmare. It was like driving them out of their. Yeah. Their.

tunnel network they did not like the soap it's funny because it doesn't happen when it rains it was something about the soap that the cleaners use but anyway we get a really toxic poison and use that to keep the ants from coming in yeah that'll do it solves the problem yeah but you know what there's one problem what

There's always more ants. There are infinite supply of ants. Anyway, I'm so sick of thinking about ants. Let's talk about anything else. Yeah. Hey, what about a theory of fun? How's that sound? I like fun. I was reading the internet this morning, as one does, and I came across Raf Koster's blog. Raf Koster, for folks who don't know, is a game designer who...

Worked on such games as Ultima Online and a little bit of EverQuest, but mostly when he was at Varant, it was Star Wars Galaxies was the thing he was known for. That's like three very seminal online games right there. Yeah, and to be clear, Raph wrote a book called A Theory of Fun, like, I don't know, 15 or 20 years ago now, that's like a children's, I think he illustrated it himself, but it's like illustrated like a children's book, but it basically explains what it's.

It's it's it's his shot at defining what a game is. Yeah. Yeah. I've never met him before, but he might be the first game designer that I can remember who seemed to be approaching the topic of game design from sort of an academic angle. He was the first one I was seeing like, oh, he's doing talks on and he's written books on and et cetera, et cetera. Like kind of really breaking down analytically the science, if you want to call it that, of designing fun and engaging games.

Before like the NYU game design seminar was in effect or any of that stuff, Raph was was keeping it real in Star Wars Galaxies by making a game that was basically just life simulator. But in Star Wars. It was it was very much a predecessor to like everything from like power wash simulator and home repair simulator and all those kinds of weird.

hey here's a piece of life that some people don't get to access so we're going to make a video game about it stuff it just like the the things you were replicating were oh i'm going to be a twi'lek dancer or i'm going to be a a smuggler or I'm going to be a medic or whatever. The jobs were boring. The game didn't do great, is my understanding. Had it not been a Star Wars game, it would have been shut down in like 15 minutes, I think. But...

I read this article. The article is called Game Design is Simple, actually. And it's interesting. He talks about the biological basis for. Fun and why people enjoy games and stuff like that, which was interesting. There is a depiction of a dopamine molecule in the first, like, 500 words of this article. But.

So it's that kind of thing. But I guess we should say this article is kind of a 20 plus year later follow up to Theory of Fun. I'd say that's fair. He links to it right at the beginning and kind of expanding on some of the concepts in that book.

But the point of this is that when I was reading this, we started talking about old games and how online went over the last 30-ish years at this point.

has gone from being like when when we were kids getting to play a game with a multiplayer can you play a multiplayer game with somebody who was like as good at games as you were was a rare treat oh yeah that was a that was a like sleeping over at my friend's house this weekend or my cousin from two hours away is coming up for thanksgiving like it was a definitely not an everyday thing like kind of a every maybe once a month if you were lucky kind of thing yeah and like

God bless her. My grandmother would always play games with me. She was always down to play. She was a computer person. univac eniac type computer person not a that's the best kind of computer person i mean in retrospect i wish i had asked her a lot more questions than i did

But but but she would play like she would play two player stuff, but she was terrible at video game, like just really just abysmally bad. And so, yeah, it was sleepovers and like birthday parties and stuff like that. And also. There weren't a whole lot like there was stuff like like when I went to college, we were playing like Madden and NHL and those kinds of like EA classic 16 bit sports games. But but like there weren't.

Doom didn't exist at that point. Doom came out and it was a LAN game in the LANs at my school, but nobody could play it in their room with other people. It was just a single-player thing. So the idea today is we're going to do kind of a brief history of online games and kind of hit the high points, hit those inflection points where everything changed.

And we're going to talk about some stuff. There's some stuff we're not going to talk about. Like, we're not going to talk about the weird online or satellite based delivery mechanisms for 16 bit games that are mostly in Japan, I think. Yeah. I mean, I'm going to say the words to tell of you here shortly. But that's not a focus. And that's not online gaming either. I mean, that is remote connectivity on a game console, but not for the purpose of playing with people.

It was just for downloading like 256 kilobyte games, right? I mean, they did. Well, they made like a special version of Zelda for that thing, actually. So there were interesting games for it, but but still explicitly a local only thing once you downloaded the games.

The one other thing that comes to mind that we don't have written in the notes here is arcades early on. Oh, yeah. I mean, that is still very much a like, in fact, that is the ultimate version of you have to be in the same room with people because everybody has to go to a public space and pay money.

play together did like those battle those battle tech pods were networked but they were just local right yeah yeah the battle tech centers were just like effectively lands before people really knew colloquially what the word land was And eventually, like land parties, like there was a real kind of prior to broadband being widely available. There was a huge.

Like there was a LAN party going on in a major city somewhere in the United States pretty much every weekend in like 1997, right? 96, 97. And then that stuff all kind of died out as people started getting broadband. To go to a LAN party at that time, like I went to DCCon a few times, which was in Washington, D.C., unsurprisingly. And it was like you paid 30 bucks to get in, and that 30 bucks got you half of a four-foot section of a folding table.

and a folding chair or some people the fancy people brought their own chairs um but then you would you would lug in your beige tower and your 17 inch crt and a pair of headphones And you would sit there and you'd play command and conquer. And like, like, honestly, there was usually some sort of network server with a bunch of.

Shareware or quoting the shareware pirate, probably pirate versions of games in a lot of cases. Oh, yeah. I've never been to a LAN party, but the stories were legendary of all the downloading and swapping of. pirated games and i assume pornography and other such things it was pornography anime like that was the first place i saw dragon ball probably was at a land party there was just

There was just dudes that would come and they'd set up their computers. They'd just sit and watch, watch a dragon ball. There was. Almost always somebody who brought a significant other. Typically, it was like a teenage girlfriend who was really upset that she that like like there would be a bad breakup or two at LAN parties like it was like it was like summer camp with no counselors or nobody really in charge.

And a lot of people would just dump their like like I was in my probably late teens, early 20s. I was in college when I went to the DC cons. And I was probably in the sweet spot in terms of ages of people, but there were definitely some kids that were too young to be there. And there were definitely some creepy old guys. Great. Probably 15 years younger than I am now. So it was seedy in a way that like, you know.

A lot of stuff at that time wasn't so much. Dude, I bet it was open network shares for miles at that point, right? Like if somebody had a worm, it would have been just nasty. And yeah, everybody had open network shares. You just go hit people's machines and see what they had. Yeah, I'm sure there was zero authentication going on. Right. It was just ever like proud hit, hit browse for networks and network shares.

that would have been like 300 of them or whatever because that's windows 98 or mt4 days yeah like that's how it was when i got to college you know like that was kind of still at the tail end of like the dorm was you could like just browse for yeah public network shares and find like dozens of them from people's machines on the land. Well, and I don't, I don't think they segmented the land. And the other thing about this is oftentimes the reason they do the file servers.

is people like they didn't have internet connections because like getting an internet connection for 200 people would have cost a fortune. Yeah, it was basically, it was functionally kind of impossible unless they brought like a T1 in or something, right? Yeah, but that would have cost $5,000 and like it's not gonna make sense for the weekend. So, yeah, the file servers were there ostensibly to to hold patches so you could all get on the same version of whatever game you're trying to play.

Anyway, and this was all, of course, before Steam or any of that stuff. So it was like you had a CD, you put it in the drive, then you downloaded the patch from file planet or the file server. Yes. Yes. But well, after the point at which we were going to start. Yeah. In the beginning. Yes, that's just what I had. That's all I got. It started in the early 90s is probably the beginning for me.

We've got a little bit of prehistory in the notes. I mean, we talked about, you know, like it was a going to other people's houses to play games on consoles. Yeah. I think it is worth noting that consoles typically required some kind of relatively expensive add-on to play more than two players at one time.

Yeah, until the N64 and the Dreamcast. Or if you had a TurboGrafx, an adapter to play more than one person at a time. Because the TurboGrafx shipped with literally one control report on it. Look, this might be a hot take, Brad. I don't think the TurboGrafx was a very good console. Yeah, like, let's say it probably punched above its weight in some cases, but sure, I think you're probably right. But the point is, it was, you know, it was consoles in people's houses.

And you were lucky to get more than two players at once. It was arcades and it was MUDs. Well, so there were MUDs. And when online services started, like BBSs or later stuff like AOL and Prodigy and CompuServe. There were some online games in those types of situations. But yeah, MUDS, for people who don't know, MUDS stands for multi-user dungeon. They're basically, imagine multiplayer Zork that in some cases...

Hang on, I have to stop you. Yeah. I fear we are maybe old enough at this point that we can't even just drop the Zork reference without spelling out the fact that Zork was a text-only game. Yeah. So in order to do things in Zork, you said like you had two word commands. It was like go west or go turn left or look around. And you interacted with a text based world using text. And sometimes there were pictures that were kind of like.

tied to individual rooms or whatever. Yeah, but at its most basics, the Zork style text parser game was quite literally just white text on a black background and you just typed what you were doing. It was kind of like an interactive.

I don't want to say novel exactly, but it was extremely imagination based, let's say. Yeah. And in the early to mid 80s, there were late 80s. Even there were a lot of these like there was a Douglas Adams version of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that was text based.

There were games in the adventure series, like Adventure and Pirate Adventure and stuff like that. There were a bazillion of these. And then MUDS took that basic framework and then... would put like a like a dnd based rpg adventure on top of it right that you could go in with your friends so you would you would go in and this all usually took place on like vax or unix machines or sometimes bbs's i guess

And you would start in a place you have shared inventories, you could pass things around, but it was all text based. And then they ranged from like extremely gamey and like hardcore role players, like some of the Star Wars, some of the Star Wars ones specifically were like. if you didn't role play effectively they would just kick you out and ban you and you have to make a new account to things like lambda moo which was a user extensible um user extensible mud so like you could find

You could, for example, if you got somebody to give you permission in their room, you could hook. You could hook your room onto like a lantern or something in their room and like. So so there was a kind of status based on how close you were to the main loading room where everybody started. And that was a really social like that thing was basically like IRC with with user configurable rooms and also.

weird dungeons that just people would just build whole campaigns that just branched off of the main structure of the of the moo What was the networking scope of the average mud or at least the early mud? Like this was pre widespread internet access. Was it like local to whatever university you were at or something? Well, so I didn't use them until probably 90.

four i would guess was the first time i found a mud um and they were online at that point there was an article in wired about muds at one point and they listed like four that were then immediately impossible to get into but that led a bunch of people to other stuff like lambda moo and the

The Star Wars MUDs and stuff like that. Like just just quick Wikipedia skim. It seems like the earliest MUDs were at kind of universities and were confined to those lands, of course. Yeah, it makes sense. But but the heyday for MUDs was like.

Pre Windows 95 post post endless September. Looks like CompuServe had at least one. Yeah. So CompuServe and AOL were interesting and prodigy in those kind of big. They weren't exactly they were ISPs, but they also provided other services to like like AOL provided a less Internet Internet experience. So they filtered out some of the bad stuff and like they they at least in the beginning.

Before it was like unlimited usage while you're on, they had games that cost money to play while you were playing them. So like some BBSs would charge you based on time spent in the game. CompuServe definitely did that. So if you started the wrong thing, you could end up racking up like 50 or $100 worth of game time by playing these games on their servers. So the people who knew better were kind of like, hey, man, I'm just going to go play a mud on the Internet where it's real.

But if you were on CompuServant and know better, then you would probably do that. Yeah. Okay. So we're past the text days. It's the early 90s. Yes, I will. Real quick, I'll jump in here and just mention in a little more detail the. I guess what I would call like early experiments with console network connectivity. But again, this was not in both cases, this was not for the purpose of playing with other people. Super Famicom only in Japan, not outside of Japan. So Super Nintendo never got this.

Had the Satellaview add-on, which was a satellite modem. That's crazy. And I've never spent a ton of time looking at a Satellaview. I'm like vaguely aware of it. My understanding, though, is that all of the games you got through it were exclusive. There might have been some. Maybe there were some SNES games or Super Famicom games that were also at retail that you could download through this thing. But most of the games I'm familiar with on this tell of you were.

exclusive to the system that's wild and i don't think you could keep them as long as you wanted either i think they stayed until you powered off right i'm not sure actually no because some of these games on this table i'm looking at i have a

have a unique broadcast weeks listing. Wow. And most of these are between one and four weeks long, so you might have only been able to keep them for that long. I'm not actually sure. Talk about FOMO. Again, it's a little out of the scope of, you know, we're talking about online multiplayer here, but... There was a remake of Zelda one for super Famicom available exclusively through this television. That's wild. So that's, that's kind of like the, it's a BS legend of Zelda.

What's the BS stand for? I'm not sure. A lot of the games have a BS prefix on them, and I've never actually known what that stood for. Anyway, that's the Japanese. Yeah, anyway, it's possible. But anyway, you know, this was a giant thing you could plug into Super Famicom and get satellite sort of uplink connectivity with it. Does that mean Nintendo made dishes? Is there like a Nintendo branded satellite dish out there? Don't actually know.

That's wild. I guess you could tell who had this to tell of you because you'd see the dish on their house. You'd be like, oh, hell yeah, that's my Famicom, Super Famicom dish. I'm going to go over to Steve's house. Oh, yes. Okay. User required a separate purchase or rental of a satellite dish and receiver. Wow. So not a small investment to get this stuff. Hard to believe it didn't work out. Yes. There was also the Sega channel, which was...

Kind of similar, except it was over coax cable. Yeah, Sega was kind of all in on the Internet. They had the thing for the Genesis that I think nobody really realistically had. But then they did a modem for the Saturn, and then the Dreamcast came with one built in, right?

Yes, there's a Dreamcast shipped with a modem built in. The Sega channel was just a way to download games over cable effectively. And I don't know. I don't know a ton about the Saturn modem and what the capability was there. But Dreamcast, I feel like by the time Dreamcast came out. Most people at least kind of knew what dial-up internet was. Yeah, Dreamcast came out in 97 or 98. It was late. 99. 99. Everybody knew by then. The famous Dreamcast released in 99. Yeah, of course. Yes.

They were doing multiplayer servers and stuff like that by the Dreamcast time, which I think we'll get to in the future. Yes. Getting out of order here just a little bit. But in 1993, when Doom came out...

It was an IPX game locally, but you could play modem to modem. It had modem play, as did most of the shooters that came after that, right? So Duke Nukem, Rise of the Triad. As well as multiplayer RTSs like Warcraft 2 and Command & Conquer and Red Alert and all those kinds of games. I think it topped out at, what, four players on an IPX network?

Four players on IPX network for Doom, for sure. And then necessarily, of course, it was only head-to-head over a modem. Yeah, actually, I think Doom eventually had eight players, but that might have been later.

uh descent also was a it was a popular modem to modem game and like we had at my university we had a message board where you could put your phone number up uh to if you wanted to play multiplayer games with people like there was a a cork board you just jammed a card with your phone number on which is really funny in retrospect that's fun i i've i've certainly never done this but i know doom supported this and i assume a good number of other games as well

You could play over null modem cable head to head as well. Yeah, you could. You needed. So it's like it was like a serial cable, but two of the pairs were reversed so that the send on the send on one was lined up with the receive on another. Right. But that obviously is kind of dragging two computers basically into the same room or down the hall from each other. Well, it was a LAN party. It let you have a two-person LAN party in a world where...

Like network cards were still two or 300 bucks at that point. Oh, sure. They weren't built into the motherboard yet. But every, every computer had a serial port. Every computer had a serial port. Yeah. I think I've probably said this before, but doom.

Doom head to head against my friend across town over the modem. I am quite sure is the first time I ever saw somebody move around in a game on my screen when they were. Oh, yeah. When they were miles away from me. Like just foundational mind blowing moment. When it didn't move like a, like a player, like a, like a NPC, basically like, yes. Like seeing, seeing the character moving around and knowing it was my friend across town, moving the character was just like.

That was it, man. Well, and the characters were moving. The characters moved a lot faster than the NPCs did. So it was it was a real thing that was I used to play with my friend Marty and we both had 14 for modems when it was time to upgrade. We bought these janky, I've talked to this in the podcast before, we bought these janky modems that would let you basically split half of the bandwidth for a GSM audio call and then use the other half for a modem.

so we would talk to each other while we like we had voice while we were while we were shooting we had headsets that plugged into the into the modem which was really weird I assume you were just getting like half the bandwidth. Yeah, but it was fine. 9600 baud or something like that. Yeah, it was fine for the game purposes. Games don't necessarily, they don't move a lot of data, right? Latency is important in multiplayer gaming, but throughput is not as much. Well, and.

and uh doom doom and most of these games were peer-to-peer games so there wasn't a server there wasn't a client it was everybody was running on the same data and if it desynced then you had to reconnect yeah and also strangely These most of these games had dialers and stuff built in. So you didn't have they were DOS games. Like it wasn't like you were connecting to each other with Windows or something. And then you would switch over to the to the game. It was just like.

You load it up and you had to put your modem strings into the game and know the person's phone number and type it in the game. The game did the dialing. In fact, like now that you mentioned that, like. moving the network stack out of the game itself into a more generalized platform on which the game was running is like kind of one of the actual that's that's the first one yeah big big points of evolution as this stuff matured yeah absolutely

Real quick, before we move on, though, my other story, I've probably mentioned this before, too. My cousin, who lived about two hours away, who I mentioned earlier, loved Warcraft 2. Oh, who didn't? Had absolutely nobody to play it with.

He just, he, he volunteered. I mean, I was certainly grateful for this. He volunteered to eat all of the long distance fees for as much as I would play that game with him. Wow. So I cannot even imagine how much he racked up in long distance fees playing that game, but it was fun. Well, so around this time, Descent, like I said, Descent, Rot, all the build games, Doom, Warcraft, the Raven, Hexen, or Heretic, I guess, games.

All you could play modem to modem. There were also a handful of modem to LAN FPS services. Some BBSs would do this where you could like. Basically tunnel into a BBS and then use that to do like an IPX portal or something to give you multiplayer. There were also some dedicated services like Duango and then there was Kali, which was. A kind of shareware thing that did the same thing more for that's more the other way. That's more for playing IPX games on TCP IP networks. Yeah. But but yeah, so.

Like you could, even if you had just a modem and weren't on a LAN, you could play Doom with four players, which I remember doing a couple of times. But also, Dwayne Go was like 15 bucks a month back then, which was an incredible amount of money in 1993 or 94, whenever that was.

So like Dwango was a centralized service that you dialed into. They had local nodes though. Dwango did. So like you, you had to have like most of them were in bigger cities than I lived in. So like Knoxville, I think had one ISP you could call in, but.

But like if you looked at what they had in Dallas or Houston or D.C. or New York, it would be like hundreds, dozens of nodes. So, yeah. But the reason I bring that up, though, is the Wingo was like a big commercial service. Kali was just shareware, though. So like, what were you? dialing into well so collie collie was more um it was it was more like i said it was for letting you play ipx

protocol games on TCP IP networks. It was the other way. Right. Okay. That was Kali. Kali was, you already have an active internet connection. Yeah. Yeah. That was like, if you lived in the land and you wanted to play doom, but your network didn't have IPX running on it, you could, you could play or they were blocking IPX.

And then Quake happened, which we talk about Quake here a lot. Quake, it turns out, is foundational for a lot of technologies. I think we did. We did a whole episode about Quake's 25th birthday, didn't we? So we probably don't need to belabor too much of that material.

I still contend I think Quake is the most influential game of all time as much for the technologies that it spawned and made popular as for any game design elements. Yeah, like being the first real 3D accelerated game or the first like. There were other 3D accelerated things before, but it was the one that matters. Yes, it was the one that sold cards. I mean, I've done this spiel before, but 3D acceleration, full 3D worlds, mods, custom maps. Mouse controls. Yeah, mouse look, skins. Yeah.

client side prediction with like when quake world came out portals that let you go from one server to the other like i think i'm pretty sure it was i'm pretty sure it was the first first person shooter that worked over tcp ip out of the box i could be wrong about that i'm not saying

I'm not saying it was the first game to work over TCP IP. I think dark forces had a TCP IP mode before maybe that was modem only. That was modem only. Okay, definitely. I don't know. I'm sure there's something, but, but for all like, look, it was the first client server. first person shooter i played yeah um it was the first thing that had client-side prediction so that meant that like you could play on high lag connections and you have a pretty good experience

All that stuff. But it didn't work with modem to modem and it required TCP IP, which was which was it's funny when they released the test, it required a specific multiplayer, a specific network card to work. Was it network card or TCP IP stack? Both. I believe, wasn't it? I'm pulling from the memory banks here. Was it the Beam and Whiteside? That seems something like that. Something started with B for sure. TCB IP. Anyway. Yes. Beam and Whiteside software.

Yeah, I think that was the only, you know, it was the only network stack that thing worked with anyway. That was because that's what they used at the offices. Yeah, that was the whole story of that game. Like the whole reason Quake World happened, like the big John Carmack apology and plan file that he wrote.

was, sorry, I have a T1 to my house. I didn't realize what the lag was going to be like in this game over a modem. Wow. Anyway, like suffice to say, the quake is kind of the inflection point for multiplayer gaming from...

primordial beginnings to you know some early version of what we would recognize today yeah it was well it was one of the it was the first time that anybody did a server client game and that means it was also the first time that somebody shipped server code

for their game that anybody could run right so you were able to download a piece of software from id's ftp site and run your own quake server and there was a whole configuration file there were mod support all this other stuff we talked about before but but

That client server thing, it turns out, was an important concept. And it comes up because after that, pretty much everything became client server. There's hardly any peer to peer stuff for a really long time. Yep. Yep. And that leads right into. I guess is EverQuest like, well, sorry, I was going to say is EverQuest the first MMO, but no, Ultima Online was before that. Well, and there was stuff before that too, but Ultima Online was the first commercial thing that was wildly successful.

It was a kind of isometric top-down MMO that was kind of weirdly open-ended. Star Wars Galaxies Later, which we talked about a little bit ago, it didn't exactly tell you what to do. It shipped with a manual and a map of the world, and then it would ask you some questions, and you chose some stuff.

And then it would dump you out in a forest someplace and you just end up punching trees for a while until you got enough wood to maybe make a bow. Original tree puncher. I mean, kind of. Yeah. It's funny. I, my experience playing you. Oh, I didn't, I bought it. I was like, this looks cool. I've never played ultimate game before. Online seems neat. I went home. I looked at the manual on the way home and it was like.

Hey, if you want to be a knight, you should probably consider blacksmithing and you'll need ore if you want a blacksmith. So go get good at mining. I'm sorry. Can I just stop you for a second? Can I quote you on that? Online seems neat. Online seems neat. Yeah. You know, I once thought as you do. I mean, look, it was a simpler time, Brad. It sure was. But so I punched some rock out of the walls or pickaxe some rock out of the walls. I loaded it up on my backpack. I was super encumbered.

I walked from there to town where the forge was. And there's like one bridge where you're out of the no PVP zone. I'm getting excited. I know where this is going. on that path and i immediately got murked with like six hours or four hours or something some incredible amount of time punching rocks amazing and so i logged out never played it again really yeah that was it

I was like, this game is wasting my time at a high level. F these guys. Well, that's, you know, I might've had the, a similar response if I'd had something like that happen. Like these days, I think back on Ultima online as like, man, I wish I'd had that experience. I never touched it.

I was just like, that seems like such a foundational. It had a monthly fee too. It's worth saying that it was 10 bucks a month to play Ultima online. That's certainly, I mean, I just was also never into Ultima, so I just was not attracted to it to begin with, but also.

The idea of a monthly fee for a game was pretty rough at that time. It was insane. And the fact that it was a game where you were going to be abused by the other players for $10 a month was like, I didn't have time for that. And that's what makes it so notable in historical context, because.

The entire evolution of these types of games, you know, right up until now with like maybe extraction shooters starting to move back in that more savage anything goes direction. But like that was a game that like did it before the rules have been established, you know, before they.

And put up the guardrails that would ensure people had a good time because you clearly did not. I actually think when that game launched, they might not have had no PVP zones. I can't remember. I feel like there was a legacy of older. kind of proto MMO mud things. I can never remember the name of the famous one, but I think it's Meridian 59.

1996 video game developed by Archetype Interactive and published by the 3DO company. It was the first 3D graphically massive multiplayer online role-playing game and ran for years and years and years from the people who made Niantic eventually. Oh, wait, what? Yeah. John Hanke developed. It was on the development team. Yeah. I think people made Meridian 59. Really? Oh, that's what it says. Wild. The director was Charles Sellers. I didn't know that. That's wild. Anyway.

So yeah, it wasn't the first one of these, but it was the first one that like you'd go buy in the store and stuff like that. And then like. Sometime after that, multiplayer became much more common and much less of a weird thing. Yeah, like if you look at the timeline, I always think UO came out later, but it was 97, which was only a year after Quake. And at that point, like Diablo...

It was, I think, 96. I think that was the same year as Quake. And I guess the difference between Ultima Online and Quake is Quake was a single player game that also had multiplayer. Ultima Online, you could only play if you paid the fee and played online. Yes, with other people. Yeah.

But like Diablo came out around the same time. It had Battle.net. Starcraft came out in 98 also had Battle.net. Like those games were, if not multiplayer first, like extremely multiplayer centric. And Diablo 2 even more so than the first Diablo. Like it was...

It was definitely a period where like every big game coming out, it felt like, you know, with the exception of like point and click adventure games, like all the biggest games coming out were starting to incorporate multiplayer very rapidly.

I remember reading a lot of interviews back then and the conversation would be, well, what's your multiplayer? What's your multiplayer mode like? And as a result, we got a bunch of really weird single player games that had really, really weird multiplayer modes. Tell me about the multiplayer. So it's funny you say that you viewed those as multiplayer games. I never played Starcraft or Diablo online. Really? I never played Diablo a lot, period, in the 90s for whatever reason, but Starcraft was...

I mean, I played through the Starcraft campaign and loved it. It was absolutely a classic game on that, on those merits alone, but yeah, but it very much Starcraft very much became a multiplayer game for me after that. Diablo 2 was when I started playing Diablos, and I spent a lot of time playing that, but I played it when I was living with somebody in San Francisco when we played on a LAN. Okay, so then EverQuest came out. That was 99. Yes.

It's kind of crazy to think that we got from Quake to EverQuest in three years. Yeah, because EverQuest was a 3D massively multiplayer online game in the vein of Meridian 59, but it was wildly popular. I think maybe more in the game development spaces than in the general populace, because when you talk to game developers now, everybody played EverQuest if they're of a certain age. But it was a 3D.

Look kind of like Quake, like low poly characters, 3D world, but with the trappings of an RPG around it, like it had a big, it had buttons on windows, like a old Ultima or like an old RPG. And. It was truly enormous numbers of people, but you could play it on a relatively modest computer with a 3D accelerator and a modem. And much like Ultima Online was extremely willing to waste your time in large quantities.

Yeah. Like EverQuest is the MMO where infamously you lost experience when you died. Yeah. I never played EverQuest. Oh, I played EverQuest. Well, then I'm sure you know this way better than I do, but you would hear the stories about like... you could you could die in such a way that the gear you had on you could no longer use because you had de-leveled to the point that you were not high enough level to use your equipped gear anymore well okay so everquest came out of muds and

A lot of the muds were really opaque because they were made for weirdos, right? And so the people who made EverQuest. didn't do things like put text in the game that explained what spells do. You had to try them out to see what happened. So that sounds amazing to me now. It was it was in many ways. It was very it was very future looking.

in in like an experimental way now was it punishing yeah were there some levels that required as much xp as every level that you'd gotten up until that point yeah um Did they put a bunch of bosses in the game that they didn't think anybody would be able to beat just to see if it would work out? Yeah. Were there zones that you could get into that didn't have safe spots at the entrance?

Oh, absolutely. So like you'd zone into a raid zone and you had to get the people who had good connections to go in first so that they could like set up a beachhead basically. Wow. And like one time when we were doing one of the raids, it was plain of fear, plain of hate or something like that. We wiped at such a high level that we couldn't get back in to get our bodies and we had to get another guild to come in and help us. So there were like 80 people packed in there.

all just getting owned constantly. Was the pathing in that game so bad that if you walked into some of the zones and just fired off an AOE spell and then zoned out, it would train every monster in the zone to the entrance? Yeah, 100%. Was it truly incredible and in like a punishing way that I would never tolerate now? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Like there was a spell that I had on my main character that I didn't know what it did until the third or fourth expansion came out.

That's amazing. It was like a launch spell. It's like I got it on the fourth day I played. Incredible. It was an aggro debuff for the record. So you could shrink the aggro radius, but like it's not visible. You don't have any way of knowing, but it became clear that you needed that to pull. to like like some of the best moments in that game were clearing were pulling singles off of like a raid boss.

So you'd get all the ads, you'd pull them, you had to kill them in less than the respawn time. So you could then tag the boss. And anyway, the game is incredible. Also, no one should play EverQuest. And yet many people still do. Yeah, but but OK, so they launched EverQuest launched. They sold 10,000 copies on day one, which was in when you read the interviews about this now, they're like, yeah, it was a huge number. And it's it's really funny in 2025 to think about 10,000 copies.

being a huge number of copies of the game sold. According to this PC Gamer article about the dawn of the MMO breaking the internet, the story of EverQuest, the MMO that changed everything. They had so much traffic into their data center, which was just a cold room with a couple of computers in it in San Diego that they shut down the main pipe in and out of San Diego. Yeah. First of all, I don't think we can even use the word data center because I assume was that were these servers just.

on the premises in their office. It said a server room that was really cold. So I assume it was like, I think about that. Remember that, that old server room that was upstairs at the CNET headquarters back in the old days. I think that. Yeah.

Probably something like that. I mean, were they, I can't remember if they were part of Sony at that time or not. They were not yet. Okay. Sony had famously cut them loose because they thought this was going to be a debacle and then bought them back immediately when it launched. Right. So this is like, I mean, this is not only pre-Data Center, I assume. This is probably like pre-co-location as a just like turnkey.

solution that anybody could pay for maybe maybe that sort of thing existed by this time but they were co-location places um by that point but but like it was still pretty grassroots presumably compared to now or even compared to like five years later when world of warcraft came out Yeah, the thing the thing that they said in that PC Gamer article is they were talking about like the servers crashing every few hours. So like.

Three guys had to stay in the room and just walk around pressing the buttons when they when they rebooted in parkas is what the story says. Yeah. Like they literally were wearing heavy coats to stay in this air climate controlled room. They're from San Diego, so it could have been like 62, like, you know, whatever. Yeah, but I mean, that's the big line from this story is that, yes, because all the servers were in San Diego and Internet infrastructure was much less robust at the time.

Yes, they consumed effectively all the bandwidth in and out of San Diego, took down a bunch of other companies' internet access as well. Yep. Um, so, okay. So that was the dawn, like you owe an EverQuest kind of the beginning of multiplayer online paid experiences. EverQuest also had a $10 a month fee.

And in addition to buying new expansions and all the other stuff that you had to do. And then around that time, when around the time of the Half-Life launch, Half-Life Heretic, all of the. the fall of Quake Engine games, I guess, is what I think of that as. A bunch of third-party services kind of rose up, and some of these had existed for a minute to service Quake.

uh like game spy existed as a tool that you use to browse the master list of quake servers to see which one was closest to you didn't it start as quake spy before it became game spy yeah it was quake spy first and then became game spy and then eventually it ended up being bought by ign and rolled into ign and becoming like a games press outlet yeah on top of the server browser weird well the server browser went away yeah

GameSpy, the last thing I remember seeing GameSpy running was, I think, Wii. So there were a couple of Wii multiplayer games that used GameSpy services. That's right. They had a whole middleware component. Yeah. But but so these became what eventually we would call middleware, right? They were portals that you could use to do the multiplayer matchmaking and all that stuff without having to build that internally.

um and they were things like games by msn had one yahoo had one heat.net was one um the world opponent network or the sierra online network which which of those things were related was where you played early Source Engine games or early Valve games, I guess, and mods like Counter-Strike and Half-Life Deathmatch and stuff like that. And those were...

Like it's weird because some of those were just pure multiplayer portals. Some of them also like Yahoo and MSN had like card games and you could play Yahtzee and stuff with with people from around the world. So you could always get a game of hearts going on.

on the yahoo games network or msn games network it was a weird time you know what never goes out of style yep it's hearts and everquest i meant to say earlier we got to give it up for everquest certainly the only classic game on this list that is still getting expansions to this day Really? UO's not still going? Oh, I don't think so. I don't think you've been able to play Ultima Online for a long time. Oh, maybe. Oh, wait a minute. Hang on. What? Okay, no, I...

I think I'm wrong and this might actually be the second time I've made this exact mistake on this podcast, but I think Ultima Online is still running. It seems like there's something there. Broadsword owns it now. Yeah, a company called Broadsword appears to be running it now and... According to both their site and Wikipedia, something called Ultima Online New Legacy is also in development and was supposed to start an alpha test last October, but I'm not sure that it actually ever did.

So I need to read more about that because maybe the classic UO experience is coming back. You could do it all over again. I could still give it a shot at some point. Anyway, so UO and EverQuest, both incredible staying power, I guess.

Turns out once you have an MMO audience going, people don't stop playing. That's true. You know, it's true. EverQuest literally like clockwork every like first week of December, every year since it came out has got a new expansion. Yep. There's another one due a month from now. I think they named the studio that owns that now after one of the characters in the original EverQuest.

Also, you know, the game's called EverQuest. It's pretty appropriate that it's still going. EverQuest 2, less so, though, it turns out. EverQuest 2, I... I went to preview events for EverQuest 2. I covered that game at launch. It didn't quite do the same business. It had real performance. But anyway, we don't have to get into that. Yes. Real quick, end of the 90s here. Let's just dip back into consoles briefly because I can't help myself.

And I mean, I think it's an interesting parallel track because consoles were so integrated and so not computers back at that time. Well, it was but it was interesting because like Sega was really Sega was always hot on multiplayer. Yes. Online and. Sony kind of ignored it completely, right? For a while. I will say this is kind of a footnote, really, but the...

64DD, which was the writable, the magneto optical disc add-on for the Nintendo 64. Yeah. Which only came out in Japan, so this is why I know next to nothing about it. Had a 28mm modem built into it, which I did not realize. And apparently Nintendo got some ways along on working on an online gaming service for 64DD that never happened. It seems unlikely. And they were working with Netscape on it.

I mean, that makes sense. And the reason for that, at least according to Wikipedia, the reason for that is that the management of Netscape had all come from SGI. And of course SGI famously did the graphics hardware in the N64. Wow, I didn't know that. So there was already some working relationship between different people there, and so there was some progress made there. That never happened. The Dreamcast is a much more important kind of milestone on the...

Lineage of video game console online multiplayer, though, the Dreamcast shipped with a 56K modem built into it. And that was modular and could come out and you can replace it with an Ethernet broadband adapter instead. That's rad.

There was a version of Quake 3 for Dreamcast, famously, that had crossplay. That's such a terrible idea. You could play Quake 3 on a Dreamcast over a modem or broadband, or maybe it was just broadband, against people on a PC. You also could... use a web browser on the dreamcast yes yes i have no memory of what that was like but yes uh it was just a it was a disc just like everything else you put it in then you had you'd either get web browser 1.0 or 2.0

Yeah, because there was no permanent storage on the Dreamcast. Yeah. There was a service called SegaNet, which I very vaguely remember, like the logo when I pulled it up. I was like, oh, I remember SegaNet. It's that blue and orange logo. Yeah.

It was $21.95 a month, apparently like way more popular than I realized. Well, so when you hear $21.95 a month for a SegaNet service, you think, oh, God, that's way too much for an online service. But what you don't remember is that that also included the dial-up service. So in the pre broadband internet, you paid for your phone line, you paid for the dial up into the ISP, and then you also paid for whatever game stuff you did. So it's like.

Like $21.95, probably the normal good 56K broadband was $15 a month would be my guess. Yeah. So an extra $6 to get online multiplayer for Sega games was a pretty good deal. Yeah. Yeah, that seems... Fairly reasonable, actually. Apparently they had over one and a half million Dreamcasts connect to that service. That's crazy. Which is like pretty fucking huge numbers considering the Dreamcast itself.

never put up very big numbers i wonder if they had um if you had to like log if you did that to register the console i wonder if that's how they got that big a number i don't know the the i mean the bulk of that was in japan It was about half of that number was in Japan and then 400,000 in North America and 400,000 in Europe. Wild. But no, I, the other thing I never.

Gave credit for like Quake 3 is the one Dreamcast online game that I ever think about. But I pulled up a full list of compatible Dreamcast online games. There's like dozens of them. Like a few dozen. Hit me the high points. I'm in Choo Choo Rocket. Anybody? That's a banger. Choo Choo Rocket is an excellent game. There were Fantasy Star Online 1 and 2. Of course. Very, very notably. And like unique to that platform too, right? Yes. Sega Rally 2.

Street Fighter 3, Third Strike, like there were multiple fighting games. There was a version of Unreal Tournament for the Clone Cast. I don't know. Soul Calibur was not online. So the interesting thing about this, did it... Did you log into a central service? Did you like a username and stuff with this? I don't know. I don't know about that. I never used it. I can't. I can't. I never knew anybody that did use it. Like I was going to say.

Like everything else with the Dreamcast, this did not last very long. Yeah. Because the Dreamcast itself lasted less than two years in North America before they killed it. I remember I bought one and then like three days later I got the, Hey, we're not supporting this anymore. News, news. I bought mine after that announcement. So I got everything for pennies on the dollar. Man, that was the right choice. I got somebody to me go. That's all I cared about. Yep.

That's worth it. Crazy Taxi Samba de Migo. I'm good. Yes. Anyway, Dreamcast is kind of weirdly slightly ahead of its time on online multiplayer services on consoles. So many things on so many things. Yeah. Uh, but then, then the millennium happened and, um, well, multiplayer came to consoles, right? Yes. The big thing in a more earnest way. Um,

Kind of like the Dreamcast, the PS2. The PS2 got Ethernet support, but initially I think it was only through, it was definitely only through the hard drive add-on. The thing I don't remember is if you could buy that hard drive add-on separately or I...

I think you could buy it separately, but it definitely also came in a bundle with Final Fantasy 11. That was a big launch. It was the big Final Fantasy 7 launch on PS2. It was like, you get this giant enclosure that has a hard drive in it that you shove in the back of your...

Yes, too. And it has an Ethernet port in it. Wait, was was Final Fantasy 11 a multiplayer game? Oh, yeah. Yeah. That was the first MMO that they did. Don't get me started. I think it's to this day. I said this at the time and I still say it. It was ridiculous to just give it a number.

We make it a mainline game as if it was the 11th Final Fantasy game, but it's an MMO that has very little to nothing to do with the other games. Well, but it isn't the whole point of Final Fantasy. Each one is his own game and it stands on its own. Technically, yes. Yeah, look, maybe the real game was the friends we made along the way, Brad. Hey, check this out. Final Fantasy Online. No, that's weird. Nobody would play that. I think that would have been a perfectly serviceable name.

But the PS2, like the Dreamcast, in fact, even more so than the Dreamcast, I don't think I ever gave credit for how many different games it had with online support. Yeah, it was wild. It is way into the dozens, if not over a hundred. skimming this list like there are a lot of psu games that had online support well i i remember so by that time i was working at maximum pc and next gen was down the hall from us and i remember when they got a playstation

uh, an online, the first online PlayStation game that I saw was Tony, a Tony Hawk. I think it was whichever one has the airport level and they were playing online and like there, it was like, it was a real, it was a moment. Right. Like it was a surprising, it was a surprising weird thing. Yeah. And then, yeah. And then at the same time.

like land party stuff was going still like halo was really popular on the xbox but it was a land only game and people built weird portals that would let you play with other people like uh basically vpns that would let them play with other people across the internet wasn't a great experience is my understanding and had some required some shenaniganry yeah that that generation was the

On one hand, it was the beginning of online support for consoles in earnest. On the other hand, it was also painfully limited until right toward the end when Xbox Live came out on the first Xbox and finally unified this across or at the console level. And then we've talked about this with the Xbox 360, but PS2 games, notably, like I was saying earlier, like the network stack and the network, there was no centralized account system or connectivity stuff on the console. Oh, yeah.

You had to do all of the connection stuff for each game within the game, as far as I remember. Like every time you had a game that you played online on the PS2. You had to go in and set up whatever account and set up whatever connection settings in that game. Like if you didn't use DHCP, you had to type in your IP address every single time. Right. So like that was just.

In fact, I think that's probably a reason I didn't really mess with online stuff on the PS2 very much because it was such a pain in the ass per game. Yeah, it was shockingly difficult. It was it was that was the beginning of wow, Japan doesn't understand the Internet. Hey. Yeah, but like certain games like SOCOM had a rabid fan base on the PS2. Like there were some online games on PS2 that really made an impact. Like there were a ton of online sports games on there.

Like there was a lot going on there, but the technology had not really caught up to the ambition yet. But then the Xbox came out and Xbox Live shipped and everybody got a little headset with it. Right. Right. Like the Xbox famously shipped with an Ethernet port built in the first Xbox 360. Like they they laid the groundwork by making sure everybody could play broadband on the console out of the box.

Even though it didn't ship for a long time. Right. But then the service finally came along later on. And that was when like the modern online connected console experience really started to take shape. I mean, I feel like that was for me, that was Halo 2 and MechWarrior. mech warrior uh mech assault mech assault yeah xbox on the xbox yeah yeah famously the game that let you soft mod your xbox well later though yeah via exploits but anyway yeah speaking of uh

Maybe flimsy ambition. We do have to mention the GameCube had online support kind of barely. They made they made a modem and an Ethernet adapter for the GameCube. Did it ship with either of them or did it have just empty slot there?

To my memory, there was just an empty plastic housing that you pulled out of there to make room for either one of those that you bought. I believe there were. I had the list open and I have closed it. I think it's something like eight games shipped with any kind of network support on the GameCube.

Yeah, the big one was Mario Kart DD Double Dash. And I think that one was LAN only. It was LAN only. Oh, here, actually, I've got it right in front of me. Yes, it is eight games, and like half of those are LAN only. And the other half have actual... internet support yeah that seems right Kirby Air Ride Kirby Air Ride is another one I didn't I didn't I didn't either I also did not play it but you know there's a there's a Kirby Air Riders coming out for

Switch to present. I'm a little suspicious about Kirby. He seems like he's up to some business. He seems pretty wholesome. But OK, so consoles around this time, Star Wars Galaxies came out like 2003. Star Wars Galaxies came out. Here, here is, here is another of your Raph Koster, or in fact, perhaps the main Raph Koster connection. Yeah. Like this was, this was, this was in retrospect, I think that the star Wars galaxy design was.

profoundly far ahead of what the technology and the players were both ready for because everything was player crafted. Right. There were no there were a couple of settlements on each planet, but they but the game expected players to build houses and to build bars and to build the whole thing out. Oh, I don't think I realized there was like building construction in that game.

Yeah, you it was it was limited in some way because you had to like like you had to there may have been empty buildings or something and you took them over. I can't remember how it worked, but but like. They expected the entire world to be made by people and for people to extend it. That's crazy. That is speaking of ambitious.

Well, yeah, and they made a Star Wars game where the way you became a Jedi was to have random chance touch you and make you give you force powers, basically. Did you not also have to like. grind and or get some unique item or rare item? I think eventually people kind of reverse engineered how it worked. But when you. Eventually, you would get a quest that would unlock a holocron, and then that would basically open up another slot on your character slot screen that would let you create a Jedi.

I never played Galaxies. I knew a few people. I was a GameSpot at the time who were way into it, but that was the reputation of that game is, hey, it's the Star Wars MMO where you basically can't be a Jedi, which on some level is fascinating. I mean, it's certainly true to the universe. Yeah. A very few select number of people should be able to become a Jedi. And like a lot of the roles, the game was designed so that like the combat stuff required.

people to work together in different ways so like if you did too much combat you had to go hang out in a bar and watch somebody dance so that you're like i don't want to say it's like mental fortitude or something so like one of your numbers would go down you'd be able to go back out and handle it again and work there

Wasn't there a player dancer class? Yeah, there's a player dancer class. So you were watching a human being stand there and press three, four, three, four, three, four, three, four. It's incredible. um there were like food there were i feel like there were food classes i didn't i didn't actually it's been 20 years since i played this and i didn't load it up load up a wiki page beforehand but yeah it was wild and it was it was it's it's kind of like um

I've never played Black Desert Online, but I assume it's what Black Desert Online is like or one of those one of those like crafting MMOs where you're where you're just building. I mean, it kind of reminds me of something like Valheim or Subnautica or something, but multiplayer. with hundreds of people in the server. Yeah. Um, so yeah, like it definitely not a power fantasy game in a big way. Um, I respect even if it was not successful and did not catch on for obvious reasons, but.

Eventually, they sacked Raph and sent him off to do other things. And they were like, yo, everybody can be a Jedi if you want. You just have to grind out this amount of time and blah, blah, blah. And they made a real path forward. And then it was never quite the same again. And then they very hastily set about developing Star Wars The Old Republic.

Well, that was, yeah, I mean, it was, it didn't come out for years because it was somewhat troubled in development, but that is a different studio too. Of course. Yeah. That was Bioware and, and it was post world of Warcraft, which we're getting to next, but yeah, I was going to say.

But the point is, that was the game that was just lightsabers for days. I mean, it was just like, hey, you want to be this Jedi class or this other Jedi class? We got Jedis here. Well, and just to be clear, like in the Star Wars Galaxy's timeframe, EverQuest had like, you know.

hundreds of thousands of players at any given time and was viewed as an enormous success. Games like Dark Age of Camelot and Shadowrun, I think, or Shadowgate. I can't remember. Shadow something. Shadowrun. Shadowrun. Yeah, there were like...

a pvp focused mmos and they were medieval style mmos and all these anarchy online yeah and and like the ceiling was everquest which was 600 000 players or something and then wow came out in 2004 and lit the world on fire and they immediately had like 4 million players and and like it was completely yeah so yeah so hey there's your power fantasy

Yeah. Like, wow, is your edges sanded off? Everybody's got guardrails to make sure they keep having a good time. The spells had descriptions that told you what they did. They had numbers. When a guy had a quest instead of walking up and talking to him and just saying the words that he said back to him until he responded to something, you had an exclamation point over a person and you could click a button that told not only.

Not only did it tell you what you had to do to complete the quest, it also told you what you got if you were going to do the quest, which was revolutionary in the space. World of Warcraft, obviously the first true smash hit mainstream.

multiplayer phenomenon. Like I think it's, I think it's, I think it would make the case that Halo two was probably that. I don't think the numbers compare. Well, but I mean, that was not a game that was online only. That's true. I guess is, is the distinction I would make. That's true. Like plenty of people bought Halo 2 and never played it online or maybe it only did briefly or just here and there. World of Warcraft could only be played online.

I mean, I feel like tribes and there were multiplayer only PC games, but not at the scale that World of Warcraft had. Like, I mean, you tell me if this is a soft rubric here, but like none of those games had. commercials on network television featuring prominent celebrities. That game was posting numbers, like eight-digit player numbers that were paying $15 a month.

Yeah, that's true. Like it was it was just I think that game was at a scale of economics that no other multiplayer game had gotten to for multiplayer in particular. Like, again, I'm not talking about like what was Halo 2's like lifetime take. Yeah. You know, in terms of revenue or whatever.

not all of that revenue came from halo twos online. Like I don't, I, there was a time like to give reference, like when quake one was really popular and a bazillion people like, and, and like you would load up the server browser. there would be like 2000 servers that it would pick up worldwide. Right. Or for your region. And like, it wasn't unusual for you to hop onto a Quake server and see like.

blue from blues news or or like a developer somebody with a developer name playing that you recognize right because it was a relatively small community by this time it was a big It felt like a global phenomenon. Yeah. Yes. Like World of Warcraft, not too many years after it came out, had 15 million subscribers paying $15 a month. And also, like they had a rough launch. Everything had rough launches back then. But.

Like they figured it out pretty quickly and it seemed to resolve itself to the point that the game was really playable for a large number of people at any given time in a way that wouldn't have been possible three or four years before. I still wish I had bought. I don't know that I ever actually had the opportunity, but they sold server shards from the original like launch. Wow. Servers. Oh, wow. I kind of wish I had bought a narrative server shard from launch.

That's pretty amazing. That was the server we played on at launch and that would have been a fun thing to have. But anyway, like wow is, you know, if, if, if Quake was like the first inflection point for multiplayer, I feel like wow was the next one where like. suddenly everybody in the world kind of knew what online gaming was i mean there was a moment when there was a south park wow episode yeah right which was uh season 10 episode 8

It aired in 2006. This was two years after Warcraft came out. That game just achieved a level of cultural penetration that nothing had before.

Yeah. Okay, I get behind this. I still think Halo 2 was pretty important for online. No, I fully agree, but I feel like Halo 2 was important among people who already played games online. I think World of Warcraft was bringing way more people into playing games online who had never even thought about it before. Halo 2 was also the first time I think a lot of people had experienced voice. It was the first big mainstream game that had voice.

And it had both in retrospect. It's funny because it had both team chat that worked over like your headset, like a like a voice call. But it also had prox chat in game. So when you were killing somebody on the team, you could talk to them, which in retrospect is really funny to me.

So, OK, so anyway, wow hit the 360 came out a few years later or the following year, actually. I mean, a lot happened very quickly. In fact, I had forgotten Halo 2 came out like basically the same month as World of Warcraft. Yeah, right? 2004 was a good year in retrospect. I think they were both November. Let me just triple check. Yes, those games were like two weeks apart.

Halo 2 and World of Warcraft came out. You should just go listen to the full episode we did about the Xbox 360 if you want to hear more. But we've talked at great length about how much the 360 did for online console infrastructure.

Well, how much it shaped the future of multiplayer games, really. Or really just kind of defined the playbook for what a modern online connected console would be. And so all that happened within a year, like Halo 2 and WoW and then the 360 all happened within a year or so. Wild. That was that was kind of that was the moment where multiplayer just went mainstream and stayed there. Yeah. And then like the post 360 era phones took off and made multiplayer games a thing like.

millions of people are playing clash royale every day and games like that um the thing that's interesting to me is you know i have a 12 year old kid right and Her expectation is that everything's multiplayer. Like she grew up playing games like human fall flat and Minecraft and Roblox and Fortnite and.

Like when she when I bought her the Sims, I mean, she plays the Sims and she likes the Sims. But to her, the great failing of the Sims is that there's no way for her to share the things that she makes in the Sims with her friends. Right. If only the Sims online was still running. If only the Sims online was any good when it came out. Fair. Fair. But but like there's no like her her table stakes for her and her friends and her.

friends her generation is stuff like peak and and uh blocksburg where they make something and then they show it to their friends or they do something and then they show they share it with their friends and and like To the point that even when she's playing a single player game now, she'll often get on a call with a friend and they'll have like windows in discord with their video streams of the games, the single player games that they're playing.

back and forth, which I think is, is fascinating. That's all really interesting to me objectively as a kind of social trend, as somebody who like kind of effectively has grown up and aged alongside this medium though. kind of maybe a little depressing. There are so many single-player games that just don't lend themselves to multiplayer that it kind of makes me worry if this is the direction the market is going.

our whole genre is just going to get squeezed out of existence because people don't care about them anymore because they aren't multiplayer. I think, I think the, you know, the thing like she still plays, she still comes in here and hooks up to the CRT and plays original super Mario brothers. Right. Like there's, there's,

a place and a time for everything but like for her like she would never play a single player survival crafting game I don't think because she wants the like part of that experience for her is I'm going to build something and then I'm going to invite my friend to the server and then we're going to go on an adventure together. Right. You know, in the case of like a survival crafting game, I get it. I think I actually have the same reaction in a lot of cases there. Like when.

that kind of silly parody game escape from duck off came out recently. Yeah. Like that's a single player game. It's, it's, it's not Tarkov. It's not like a first person shooter. It's a little kind of cutesy overhead game.

but it's the same style of extraction shooter. And when I saw that was single player only, I was like, I don't know if I want to play one of these that doesn't have other people in it. So I guess I, I do get it for certain genres, but like, you know, absolutely, absolutely everything does not need to be multiplayer. I mean, agreed. Like Stardew Valley is a good example, right? Because she's like that should be a thing that she's into, given the other games that she likes. And it's just she's.

a it doesn't present itself as the game that it is early on in a way that it just hasn't gotten to the point that she's engaged with it yet um so yeah i i don't know like it's interesting because i think i mean i think you're right like i don't know I haven't seen her dig into something like, I remember when Fallout 3 came out, for example, and I played hundreds of hours of Fallout 3 because I'd never played an RPG like that before, and it was absolutely captivating.

I don't know that there's an equivalent that's going to grab her like that. Right. Yeah. I don't know the Skyrim would do its magic on her or whatever the next Bethesda RPG is going to be. But there's other stuff that's happened in the last. you know, decade and a half, but the big, the big stuff, it's funny. We had like the table stakes for voice, voice being part of the core. We talked about this with the three 60 episode a lot, but voice becoming a core part of the offering with the three 60.

kind of squeezed out a bunch of games like Chromehounds. Chromehounds is a perfect example. It's a mech game where the game handled the in-game communication itself.

but it made it a gameplay element. So like in order, if you wanted to talk to people that were out of line of sight of you, you had to build repeaters or you had to capture repeaters around the map and stuff like that. Yeah, like voice communication was kind of an asset that could be interrupted or taken away from you and had to be kind of regained.

through some kind of strife yeah and then and then that kind of went away for a long time and it seems like it's coming back now i feel like the rise of the modern prox chat games is kind of like phasmophobia did this obviously but the the for lack of a better term, the friend slop category from Peak and Repo and Lethal Company and all of those.

kind of build it in as a as a part of the core game experience now which i like it's been rad seeing that come back and become a feature again especially now that there's much better tech to facilitate you know voice modulation and the types of things that make it fun yeah The other thing that's happened in the last decade is the cross-play. The rise of cross-play has been, I think that's maybe an Xbox One slash PS4 era.

innovation that really took off broadly yes although as i rediscovered looking into this episode quick three and the dreamcast kind of did it first i don't think that was a good thing for dreamcast players brad no my understanding is there was a nightmare to play on a dreamcast against people on a pc

I can't imagine. I mean, look. Even playing on a Dreamcast with a with a single stick controller versus people who are also in the Dreamcast and had the Dreamcast mouse and keyboard was probably a nightmare. I remember when Shadowrun, the game that was the Games for Windows game that was cross-play with the Xbox 360 and PC. Yep.

There was nothing better than being one of the 18 people who had that game on PC and playing against all the console people. Yep. Just victims everywhere you see. Yep. But yes, yes, you're right. Cross play. Crossplay has become much more institutionalized to the extent that there are this straight up middleware that facilitates it these days. Yeah. And the multiple like.

This is one of the reasons you see Epic Online services in a lot of games, right? Is that they provide a NAT traversal and cross-play portal that's just free if you're an Unreal Engine game.

or very low cost um there's also there's also a bunch of other middleware things just pragma and like the i can't remember the thing that microsoft sells um but it's uh playfab is the thing that like hell divers used There's a handful of others, but, but yeah, you can basically, what would have been impossible in 2007 because the platforms wouldn't let you.

and really really expensive in 2017 because you've had to have a 30 percent like for destiny for example they would have they probably had a 30 devops team to maintain the servers that made cross play work now you just buy your servers from

pragma or somebody like that and you're you probably pay for their middleware and you have a platform that allows you to do cross play without really your people having to do anything which is kind of nice yeah um same thing for cloud infrastructure for server scaling

Yeah, kind of thing like like the the the online infrastructure that's out there to facilitate games working across platforms and allowing you to pick up save games from one platform to the next and all that stuff have become so much more accessible and democratized. it's really interesting the do you know what do you remember what the wow server looked like was there a rack mounted server or was it a uh was it just a beige box they were selling it

I think they refer to it as like shards or blades, which I think was maybe like a one, like one U rack each or something. I saw one at the, um, at the computer history museum as well. They have one down there. Oh, which I want to say, I want to say it was like a one U. basically server box just like like like that like like maybe more than one it could be two or even four i don't remember but huh but but so so yeah like

The difference that AWS and the rise of virtualized cloud servers went is that for a while, everybody's doing all of their multiplayer infrastructure in the cloud, and then that stuff started getting expensive.

and so now these days people do a hybrid approach where they like if you're doing hosted servers for your multiplayer game you'll do like a handful to several hundred bare metal machines that you just buy and put into rack colo places around the world and then you'll have some sort of load balancing thing that spins up aws or azure or google cloud services or whatever instances um as as players as like demand spikes so that's why

Like a game like Ark Raiders can come out and have 350,000 people playing it on day one and not really have a lot of downtime. Now, as we've talked about in the past, often on those launch days. they'll find that having 30,000 people hitting their login server will jack things up. And that's the kind of thing you can't really find out until you launch.

So stuff still does go down sometimes, but, but generally speaking, it's a lot easier now than it used to be. You know, I feel like, I mean, we're coming off this month, battlefield six and our creators were two huge multiplayer only games. Well, yeah. Battlefield. six technically has a campaign, but you know what I mean? Multiplayer game. Yeah. Both of those games launched. I mean,

There may be a developer from one or the other game listening to this, like rolling their eyes. But I started to say like those games both launched problem free as far as I could see. Like I, there was no, there were certainly no headlines about like, oh, the Dark Raider servers are down again. Or like they both seem to have weathered enormous.

initial player bases like extremely well yeah and that's and that's i'm not going to say brand new but it feels like that's a lot more common now than it used to be well arc raiders had a little bit up and down time on sunday i think but that was it

The last thing I remember that had a real problem was Helldivers, and I believe that that was because the demand for that game exceeded the middleware's back end. Yeah, I think the game is a bit of a special case, I think, in terms of... expectations versus demand yeah because they expected to have like 60 000 people playing it and had 300 000 on the first day or something ridiculous anyway that's also interesting because like in 1999

or 98 10 000 people played everquest on the first day and brought down san diego the city's internet connection These days you have 300,000 people playing on the launch weekend and everything's fine. Everything's a lot more resilient now. And then the last thing I want to shout out is that people figure out natural reversal. They, they do use servers to punch.

punch holes and nets now so you so in the 360 and xbox one and ps2 ps3 and ps4 areas you kind of yeah you fairly regularly had to open ports not so much anymore Yeah, you would still see NAT errors on, like, I think Destiny 1, I remember on a PS4, seeing issues with that. do you do is your is your nat promiscuous look i'm not i don't i'd rather not talk about my nats have habits and preferences in public man there's nothing to be ashamed of um all i'm saying yes you're not wrong although

If we all just switched IPv6, then this wouldn't be a problem anymore, would it? I don't want my IP address. I don't want my computers on the public network. Well, you still have a firewall. I don't. You still have a gateway and a firewall. You just every computer, every device in existence gets its own real. I am not advocating for IPv6. Those addresses, those addresses are. I don't want to have to type them in, man.

IPV6 addresses are vomited up by Cthulhu. Like those things are not meant to be read by human beings. Yeah, it's bad. But anyway. I think that's it. I think we've reached the end. Yes. Speaking of, I started to speak the infernal words. Maybe we should do an IPv6 episode, but I'm not sure either of us are qualified to do that. I mean, it's basically just IPv4, but it's, you know, infinitely larger. Yep.

Um, yeah, that like, so, okay. So non non-comprehensive kind of filtered through our experience, obviously is a lot of stuff here is. Yeah. Um, but I, I thought. Like, it's interesting if you just if you're young and don't remember, don't know what it was like to play games on the Internet in the 90s or alternately, if you just have forgotten how much of a pain in the ass everything used to be.

It's sometimes nice to think about how easy the kids have it these days. Yeah. I mean, I have forgotten, like looking, doing this, even this quick little survey that we put together here. Everything that we've talked about here is so established. And so much just a way of life for people who play games these days that I had even forgotten how ramshackle a lot of the stuff used to be. Yeah. I mean, you think about you think about things like.

The big pitch for Steam initially, when Valve sent Randy Pitchford to E3 to have meetings with people and talk about this new Steam service, the pitch wasn't, hey, you can download games and play them on your computer. It was...

Yeah, we'll distribute your patches for you so you don't have to worry about that. So all your players stay in sync and like your servers stay in sync. And and that like it was a problem. There were services you paid money for to download patches faster and bypass queues and all that stuff. I was a pillar of GameSpot's paid service back then was faster downloads for patches. Yeah. Yeah. It was wild. And now a lot of that stuff's just easy. It turns out. So I still also think about like.

early like downtime for early MMOs like EverQuest and WoW before they had virtualized servers and server images and stuff like that it would it would be like 12 hour downtime i remember sometimes everquest patches would be 12 hours of downtime and then then it'd take them three more days because they'd jack something up and the servers would just be down that whole time it's wild i do have a vague memory of big online games like that like

on big patch day or expansion day or whatever, like just telling myself like, ah, maybe don't plan to really play much of this for the first week. Oh yeah. Kind of, kind of consider, consider a release date plus one week to be the actual release date when you'll be able to just play whenever you want. I feel like, and I could be remembering, sorry, maybe remembering one of the later WoW expansions, but I feel like the WoW, the first WoW expansion was actually worse than the initial launch.

Because they had a year's worth of players who'd come in and dipped out and were coming back for the expansion. I can see that. Yeah. It was hard. Games are hard, man. Yeah. Devolver Digital went out there on Twitter and Blue Sky. I saw they posted this both places out there. I enjoy their social media account on occasion. They went out there this week and just posted everything about making games is harder than you think.

They're not wrong. Which has been the repeated lesson of talking to people who make games for the entirety of time I've been doing that. Yeah, it's Rami Ismail says every game's a miracle and he's not wrong. From getting people to give you money to make them, to building it, to shipping it, to deciding what it is, to getting people to buy it. To efficiently making the dopamine release.

I mean, that's what Raf says. It's just about making making things that make you excited about having dopamine come out or maybe serotonin if you're into the into the cozy games, I guess. But you know what else will make the dopamine come out, Brad? What's that?

supporting your favorite podcast true yeah yeah we're listener supported without you guys we're not here we're not doing this every week So if you would like to support the show, you'd like to keep the dream alive. I don't know if there's a dream here. I just I'm sometimes I just say things. You can go to Patreon dot com slash tech pod again.

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And that will do it for us this week. We would love to know your favorite online gaming memories of times past. What did we forget? I know we forgot some stuff. I know that we're going to... like whack ourselves on the head as soon as we've mashed the stop button on this recording. So send a note to techpot at content.town and we will hit them at the questions episode at the end of the month. Until then, please consider the environment before printing this podcast. Thank you.