Before the Beginning: Multiplayer gaming

I remember my first multiplayer game: I was in 6th form (back in 1995) and I had just bought a 14400bps modem. My best mate came over to my house to help me set it up and we agreed with another colleague to wait for us at 6:01pm. The chosen game was iD's DooM. A game which I had lost myself in after buying a Lm12 book on how to create levels. at 5.59pm we still did not have the modem settings up and working and were actually helping my dad bringing up the new tiles for the bathroom from the ground to the first floor.

At 6.04pm we tried the settings for one more time and this time it was dialling! Unfortunately our colleague had got fed up of waiting and answered the phone himself. Since I had no phone in my room we yelled over to my parents to get the phone (just minutes after yelling at them not to touch the phone!) We told him the story and got him to wait for us again. We tried again, waited for the dialling, for his modem's reply, for the handshake. It was working!... then the game started to load.

It was exhilarating. Seeing pixels on my CRT screen being lighted at the command of another person - who I knew personally! I still remember him opening a door, and faced with a horde of monsters in an un-lit room, he fired his rocket launcher into the midst. Unfortunately there was a monster right at the door and with the blast he was thrown against the wall outside my field of view. Splendid - you never saw a monster do that!

Co-op

My days with DooM grew more intensive as me and my best mate, nicknamed Green Trooper, connected every evening at 6:01pm (it was cheaper after 6pm) and played all of DooM and DooM ][ co-operatively. We grew into best buddies, knowing each others moves, inventing acronyms to speed up our communication (e..g "JL" short for "Jien Left" meaning I will take the left part - ergo, you take the right side).

Deathmatch

Later on I made friends with an ex-acquaintance from school, nickname DaemoN, who was more into deathmatch gaming then co-op. Now there is a large difference between computer AI and human intelligence - and I was just about to find out. I remember seeing his eyes in that Trooper helmet cartoonish character of his. I felt like a hunted bird running around whilst he shot out at me. But with time I got better. I remember being cornered in a room with no ammo left, just a chainsaw, and he was challenging me by shooting with the doublebarrel shotgun on the wall opposite the entrance - then I made my move - I timed the shots and on the reload, I emerged chainsaw in hand and scarred his face with it enough to clear a path towards the exit. I was proud of myself that day.

Saturday Matches

More friends joined in and we fell into a pattern: every saturday at 9am I would leave home with my PC straddled to my car with seatbelts, take it to my friend's house and spend till 6pm playing Starcraft or Diablo. Optrex was of the essence for those tired eyes.

Pentium Parties
Just like Bottle Parties - but you bring your Pentium instead of a bottle. These were annual events, usually after the exams, where 8 of us would converge at somebody's place and link up to the network (BNC's at that time - Black Vomit managed to nick a router for our last one) and play Starcraft or Quake for the whole day. Our last one was in 2000AD.

Today these are organised on a national scale and called LAN Parties.

Internet
The Internet was not feasable both in speed and cost to play games over it until 2002AD. I had a bad debut on the Net, but that is best left for the next post.