Multiplayer video game
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, multiplayer gaming gained momentum within the arcade scene with classics like Pong and Tank.
Titles like Super Mario Bros. for the NES and Golden Axe for the Sega Genesis introduced cooperative and competitive gameplay.
Additionally, LAN gaming emerged in the late 1980s, enabling players to connect multiple computers for multiplayer gameplay, popularized by titles like Doom and Warcraft: Orcs & Humans.
Multi-user games developed on this system included 1973's Empire and 1974's Spasim; the latter was an early first-person shooter.
Other early video games included turn-based multiplayer modes, popular in tabletop arcade machines.
Danielle Bunten Berry created some of the first multiplayer video games, such as her debut, Wheeler Dealers (1978) and her most notable work, M.U.L.E.
Ken Wasserman and Tim Stryker identified three factors which make networked computer games appealing:[4] John G. Kemeny wrote in 1972 that software running on the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS) had recently gained the ability to support multiple simultaneous users, and that games were the first use of the functionality.
[5] The first large-scale serial sessions using a single computer[citation needed] were STAR (based on Star Trek), OCEAN (a battle using ships, submarines and helicopters, with players divided between two combating cities) and 1975's CAVE (based on Dungeons & Dragons), created by Christopher Caldwell (with artwork and suggestions by Roger Long and assembly coding by Robert Kenney) on the University of New Hampshire's DECsystem-1090.
The university's computer system had hundreds of terminals, connected (via serial lines) through cluster PDP-11s for student, teacher, and staff access.
Their article includes a type-in, two-player Hangman, and describes the authors' more-sophisticated Flash Attack.
Flight Simulator II, released in 1986 for the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga, allowed two players to connect via modem or serial cable and fly together in a shared environment.
There followed ports to a number of platforms (including Game Boy and Super NES) in 1991 under the title Faceball 2000, making it one of the first handheld, multi-platform first-person shooters and an early console example of the genre.
The first popular video-game title with a Local Area Network(LAN) version, 1991's Spectre for the Apple Macintosh, featured AppleTalk support for up to eight players.
Many mobile phones and handheld consoles also offer wireless gaming with Bluetooth (or similar) technology.
[citation needed] During the 2010s, as the number of Internet users increased, two new video game genres rapidly gained worldwide popularity – multiplayer online battle arena and battle royale game, both designed exclusively for multiplayer gameplay over the Internet.
Networked multiplayer games on LAN eliminate common problems faced when playing online such as lag and anonymity.
[11] Online multiplayer games connect players over a wide area network (a common example being the Internet).
Gamers refer to latency using the term "ping", after a utility which measures round-trip network communication delays (by the use of ICMP packets).
[13] In games with light asymmetry, the players share some of the same basic mechanics (such as movement and death), yet have different roles in the game; this is a common feature of the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) genre such as League of Legends and Dota 2, and in hero shooters such as Overwatch and Apex Legends.
A first-person shooter that adopts the asymmetrical multiplayer system is Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege.
[14] In games with stronger elements of asymmetry, one player/team may have one gameplay experience (or be in softly asymmetric roles) while the other player or team play in a drastically different way, with different mechanics, a different type of objective, or both.
