[2] Xtrek and Netrek are the oldest games of what is now called the MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) genre.

Netrek is essentially a greatly expanded version of Empire, a multi-user space combat game that ran on the PLATO.

Empire, in turn, is essentially a multi-user version of the seminal Spacewar!, the earliest computer video game.

Netrek divided the players into one of four teams, loosely based on the Star Trek universe; the Federation, Romulans, Klingons, and Orions (or "feds", "roms", "klis", and "oris", respectively).

Consequently, people with two or more kills are often targeted for "ogging" (a kind of kamikaze attack) just to remove the threat of them carrying armies.

When two teams each have at least four players, the server enters "Tournament Mode", or "T-Mode", in which planets can be bombed and captured.

In 1982, UC Berkeley student David Davis began writing a UNIX game called trek82, based on what he remembered of Empire when he used the PLATO system while at the University of Hawaii.

[3] Chris Guthrie joined Davis, and introduced him to Jef Poskanzer and Craig Leres, who were working on a more strategic offshoot of Empire called Conquest.

In 1986, Guthrie began porting trek83 to the newly released X Window System, producing Xtrek.

In the spring of 1988, Xtrek II was written by Scott Silvey and K. Smith, moving from a model which used X as a transport to the game having its own client–server protocol.

In the fall of 1990, UCB alumnus Terence Chang set up a public Netrek server at Carnegie Mellon University where he was attending graduate school.

In 1993, Heiko Wengler at the Technical University of Dortmund added Short Packets, an improved network protocol that reduced traffic by 40–75% and enabled competitive play via low-bandwidth connections.

As of early 2007, Netrek has seen a moderate increase in playerbase coupled with a mild renaissance in development.

In 2019, an open source Netrek client was implemented in the Swift programming language and made available in the MacOS App Store.

Netrek pioneered the use of many technologies and design features that later found their way into commercial network games, including: