Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Wolphmaniac]

My first online gaming experience came in 1996, when my dad ran a null modem cable on the floor in the middle of the hallway from one room to the other to connect our two PC's so we could play the hot new "Deathmatch" mode on Doom 2.  To start a game, BOTH players at the same time had to type in an identical string of commands into DOS, with different commands for every game parameter which looked something like this (and if you screwed up even one character it would crash):

C:/DOOM2> play -lan -8250 -128 -null -modem2 -deathmatch -respawn -level17 -allkeys -allguns

I would say that this was better than Goko because despite having to crawl behind both computers and type in this crazy shit, it at least started a game 100% of the time.  Compare that to Goko right now in 2013 where I can only start a game 5% of the time.

My first foray into web-based gaming that I can remember was playing chess on chess.net in 1999.  It was WAY easier to get a game and faster to play a game on there than it is to start and play a game on Goko.

[Kirian]

My very first experiences with online gaming were Trade Wars 2002, Solar Realms Elite, and similar Door games on BBSs in the early 1990s.

It's hard to say they were *definitely* better, because most of the local BBSs has two or three lines, tops, meaning you spent a lot of time with busy signals.

[KingZog3]

I've played tons of online games. I don't remember my first, but they have all been better within their own style of game than Goko. All have had better support for players, even games who's community was quite small.

[Davio]

I played (Half-Life) Counter-Strike from Beta 4 up to when Source came out.

The year was 1999, I was 14 years old and in 3rd grade of grammar school. The school let students organize after-school activities on Fridays, sometimes supervised, in our case luckily not so much.

The school had a classroom with a couple of computers connected to a LAN for computer science class (think Lotus 123 and QBasic in those days). We happily abused them for our shoot-em-up needs.

I had such a blast that I started playing it at home when we got an internet capable computer a little wile later, and I played it a LOT. My parents can still remember bills (dial-up days) which were more than a monthly salary.

[qmech]

I can't be entirely sure, but in the spirit of the question I'll say the RSBots on IRC.  These were text-based battle simulators for the third generation of Pokemon games.  Commands were sent to the bots via PM, and the battle text appeared in #rsarena.  (This made choosing your own distinctive colours very important!)

Battles were started by PMing something like "!battle opponentName fgcolour bgcolour" to one of the bots.  My own small contribution was writing and distributing a script for mIRC to add challenge options to the right click menus.  For a short period of time I also had the top Google hit for "Suicune".

It was better than Goko.

[Ozle]

I played Ultima Online, still the greatest MMORPG ever if you liked to actually think and not just press buttons in a predetermined order

[Awaclus]

RuneScape. Totally better than Goko.

[Jimmmmm]

Neopets!

[qmech]

I'm not prepared to admit to having played either Runescape or Neopets.

[markusin]

My first online gaming experience was either the online multiplayer of Command&Conquer:Tiberium Sun, or an online implementation of Triple Triad, the card mini-game in Final Fantasy 8. I know I was at most 10 years old when I began playing Triple Triad online (then called TTX).

Tiberium Sun is now freeware, and online Triple Triad still exists in a pretty sophisticated form.

Uh, I prefer Dominion itself to Triple Triad, but I know for sure that the online gaming experience for both those games was much more fluid than Goko is now.

[pingpongsam]

Ah, remember when you bought the game and the online experience was either free or crowd-sourced?

[Obi Wan Bonogi]

Man, you guys must be young.  I know GOKO sucks but I'm not eager to dial-up a BBS to play a glitchy text-based RPG instead.

[Destierro]

I played me some Diablo 2. Man, i should boot that up again, it was a fun game.

[SCSN]

Should it be restricted to online gaming, or is any form of long-distance fine?

I heard people used to play chess by post. The lagging issues were probably a bit worse than on Goko, but you could at least start and even finish games.

[DStu]

I'm afraid I didn't play anyhting online before wow (at least can't remember atm), but from what you tell about goko it sound a bit like Patchwendsday...

[Ozle]

Obviously i know its a matter of scale. But when WOW launched it was buggy and laggy as hell and crashed all over the place

[Jack Rudd]

I heard people used to play chess by post. The lagging issues were probably a bit worse than on Goko, but you could at least start and even finish games.

They did indeed; I was one of them. Nowadays I play chess by webserver instead for the same experience.

[Kirian]

Obviously i know its a matter of scale. But when WOW launched it was buggy and laggy as hell and crashed all over the place

I think the "matter of scale" of which you speak is quite important.  I mean, there's a huge difference between 1000 players and 1000000 players.  And after a year, WOW had most (not all) of its bugs worked out.  Goko is experiencing major problems with far fewer than 1000 players, a year after it came out...

[Ozle]

I wasn't trying to justify anything for Gokoby my comment, just remembering the olden days of WOW.

[Kirian]

I wasn't trying to justify anything for Gokoby my comment, just remembering the olden days of WOW.

Sure, I know.

I remember day one.  Got up to like level 4, my guild had a huge party outside of Stormwind, we crashed Proudmoore--which was the most populous server from Day One, thanks to the ANZAC population.

[Ozle]

I remember being up till 4am logging onto Draenor.
First guild created shortly afterwards.

[soulnet]

All my online gaming prior to Goko was Tichu on BSW, then 7 wonders on BSW, then Iso.

Not a fan of moving my mouse really fast. My computer's input device, I mean.

EDIT: Actually, we have a fantasy football league here run by a newspaper (actual football, not american football) and I used to be in a sub-league run by email when I first got internet on 1992. Does that count as online gaming?

[flies]

Dial-up Warcraft (1) was much, much harder to set up, but less laggy.

BBS scorched earth was really slow.

So I woudl say that both of these were worse than Goko.

[Kahryl]

I'm pretty sure my first ever online gaming was Dragon's Gate, a text-based MUD that used to be on AOL a decade and a half ago. Cost $2 AN HOUR to play.

I created a dragon character and started wandering around lost. A female dragon character belonging to another player (at this point I was amazed and dazzled that it was actually ANOTHER PERSON behind her) kept running up to me and tackling me to the ground, then dashing off.

She did this for half an hour and I couldn't do anything. Later on she claimed this is how dragons flirt.

Still a better experience than Goko.

[Tables]

I'm not prepared to admit to having played either Runescape or Neopets.

Me neither, and I'm certainly not going to admit to having enjoyed them more than Goko! I mean, I never even played Neopets, so how could I?