Games Convention Online 2009
A brief history of online gaming.
GAMES CONVENTION ONLINE
(31 July - 2 August 2009)
Leipzig, 17 June 2009
1968 With his "Brown Box", Ralph H. Baer develops the prototype for a home console, registers the "pioneer patent" for the video game industry.
1969 Start of the internet's predecessor, ARPANET. Academics play on the university computers and develop the first e-mail games.
1972 The Odyssey console from Magnavox brings video games into the home for the first time.
1975 Atari brings out the basic "Pong" tennis game as a home game console for the television, taking its success in amusement arcades into the living-room.
1978 There are no picture images in the first online game, MUD (Multi User Dungeon) created by Richard Bartle and Roy Thrubshaw. Players roam through a medieval fantasy world via text commands.
1983 The "Control Video Corporation" can be seen as the roots of the online service AOL: the company sells console games. For the first time, the Gameline Master Modem enables a video game console to be linked to the phone network to download games.
1986 With the online game "Habitat", AOL offers one of the first online games with visuals - for up to 16 gamers playing simultaneously in one game area.
1993 The easy-to-use world wide web facilitates the mass success of online games, internet games with visuals come into being.
1995 Members of the two-dimensional animated world of Compuserve's "Worlds Away" set up and furnish homes and deal in a virtual currency. The year also sees the start of probably the first online browser game: the science fiction strategy game "SOL" from Hamburg.
1996 "Meridian 59¿ is the first online game to be sold on CD, on the internet, gamers could then take part as 3D fantasy characters.
1997 In the online roleplay game "Ultima Online¿, monsters, magicians and heroes live in the medieval world of Britannia. The subscription game is considered to be one of the first multiplayer online games (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game MMPORG).
2002 The "Second Life" world comes into being online, with "inhabitants" of the digital parallel universe creating an environment of their choosing, roaming the three-dimensional regions as mythical monsters or superwomen.
2004 Start of the online mass roleplay game "World of Warcraft". More than 11.5 million people are now enthusiastic inhabitant fans of the digital fantasy world of Azeroth, developing and training their avatars.
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