Your first online gaming moment?

[hudson]

The year was 2002. With ping averaging around 150ms, I was being blown away playing Medal of Honor Allied Assault online. My first online experience. Blew me mind it did. Mooching around Stalingrad shooting other players. From there I went to Battlefield 1942!

What was your first online gaming experience?

[tokyochojin]

Chu Chu Rocket in 1999 for me. The lag was abysmal but it really was a magical thing for me as I never had a PC growing up. Then I picked up Phantasy Star Online which was on a whole other level.

To be honest, I haven't really bothered with gaming online since the Dreamcast.

[charlesr]

I can barely remember. I remember playing Flash games of pool and stuff in a browser against randos.

Quake (1996) via Wirepay on dual ISDN lines was epicness.

I think I played Doom or Doom 2 online before though somehow.

And F1GP (Microprose) 1to1 via dial-up in 1993?

[Baseley09]

Would've been Quake 3 ( on a mac maybe a G3 tower!? ), or in my own home with PSO or Chu Chu rocket. Loved playing DC online, 56k n all. What a time to be alive.

[Neon Ignition]

Chu Chu Rocket, then Phantasy Star Online.

Wouldn't massively bother with again all the way until the immense Warhawk on PS3

[wakka]

Good idea for a thread!

Randomly I think it would probably be the PC version of Red Faction, in probably 2001. I have no idea why I didn't get this game on PS2. I think my Dad might have just bought a new PC at the time and I wanted something to try on it.

Anyway, while the single player was pretty great, the online multiplayer was pretty awful, and I remember mostly getting killed a lot.

The first time online gaming really clicked for me wasn't until Ridge Racer 6 at the launch of the 360. Including a headset with the console was a really great idea. I remember my very first race online, blowing past all 11 other racers and jumping to my feet in triumph at the finish line

I played that online a lot and used to have a regular Thursday night game of it with people from Greenhillzone, when that was still a thing. Good memories.

I've never been a big online player, but occasionally something something grabs me. I played tons and tons of Mario Kart 8 online back on the WiiU, and nursed a profound addiction to deathmatching on Modern Warfare from November 2019 to circa November 2020.

[phillv85]

The first game I ever played online was Warhammer: Dark Omen. You could only play head to head but it was bloody good fun.

[QualityChimp]

Hmmm, good question!

I definitely did some LAN stuff - lugging a CRT monitor to a friend's house was a faff!

I also remember hogging the phone line to play some stuff, but I also played a lot of games with bots like Quake III, Unreal Tournament, Half-Life and Counterstrike, so my memory is hazy and these were circa 2000.

However, my clearest memory was with the Xbox 360, playing Perfect Dark Zero at launch.
Playing capture-the-flag with some rando kid in America, talking to each other in realtime, when this was only possible in penpal letters as a kid myself was mind-blowing. We did some amazing co-ordinated raids together where one of us would drive a hovercraft and the other would jump on the bonnet with the flag!

It was early days of the internet where the conversation was a lot nicer, asking what the weather is like, what the time is there and is it nice where they live, rather than talking about the suspected sexuality of other players and the promiscuity of their mothers.

[importaku]

Duke nukem 3D or blood were my first ever online games when I had my old 486. For consoles it was my GameCube playing pso and dialling to japan to segas servers. Nowadays I barely game online as most people on my switch friend list don’t have the same games as me so if I do play against people it’s against random japanese most of the time

[endo]

The first time I actually played anything online against a human opponent was, I think, X-Men vs Street Fighter in an emu via Kaillera back in 2000 I think. It was a bit laggy but I remember being suitably impressed that it worked.

After that I faffed about with the odd emu-based bit of multiplayer until I signed up for Xbox Live to play Halo 2 and Outrun 2. I remember being properly blown away the first time I heard voices coming out of the headset and being able to race smoothly with people all over the world. I remember caning Burnout 3 online around that time too. Third Strike in the SF collection that came out around then as well. I absolutely hammered that game. I had around 3500 matches in the end, but that was absolutely nothing compared to some of the top-ranked players. IIRC the person at number 1 didn't have an amazing win/loss ratio, they'd just played tens of thousands of matches.

Nowadays, it's Halo and a smattering of SF/KOF that account for pretty much all of the online stuff I play. Souls games too, but not PvP, just the odd bit of co-op/summoning, etc. so not really the same thing.

[Asura]

Quake (1996) via Wirepay on dual ISDN lines was epicness.

I think mine was playing Duke Nukem 3D via Wireplay too, around that time. I tried the Dreamcast too, with stuff like PSO... In both cases the latency made it very difficult to enjoy.

However, I tend to think of playing Tribes 2 in and Unreal Tournament in 2001, as that was the first time I had a broadband internet connection at home. Playing it on Wireplay was an interesting novelty but this was the first time I really enjoyed playing online.

[fuse]

Would've been Diablo around 97/98, and mainly because the online experience for that was pretty damned seamless and idiot-proof. Amazingly I still keep in contact with a large group of my friends from back then! Around the same time but technically not online, I also used to play modem-to-modem Quake with school mates a fair bit, and then we started doing some LAN bits which is even more not-online, but it was with some later mods and more prominently the launch of Quake 2 that I started going through the slightly more involved process of playing online, searching for the best servers and so on.

Don't think I took a console online until the Wii!

[dataDave]

Quake on the PC. July 1997.

I started my Modern Apprenticeship as a web designer the week after leaving school, purely because my mate said the company would likely give me a PC to take home.

I got a PC and modem with free internet after 5pm and weekends, as the company was also a business-only ISP. It was great, and so fast considering there wasn’t much traffic at those times. Four green bars every single time. So good.

[Brad]

Some MUD type affair on the Sun Workstations at uni in about 1990 I think.

[Colin]

Like many here, it would've been Phantasy Star Online as well. Never really played it that much as if I remember rightly the internet deal we were on at the time could in no way be described as cheap, but a friend and I were very, very impressed to be playing alongside other players from such distant lands. (I'd have been impressed if it been someone in the neighbouring town to be fair!)

If there's one form of gaming that's never been for me though, it's online. To be painfully honest I love games but I'm not that great at them especially as I get older, and I have no issue admitting that these days I default right to easy setting for almost everything. Every time I've tried online it's all a bit breakneck fast, and everyone seems to be **** hot at whatever the game is. Where as me, I just like to plod through things at my own pace. I am the sloth of gaming.