History of online games

The first video and computer games, such as NIMROD (1951), OXO (1952), and Spacewar! (1961), were for one or two players sitting at a single computer which was being used only to play the game.

Eventually, in the 1960s, computers began to support time-sharing, which allowed multiple users to share use of a computer simultaneously. Systems of computer terminals were created; these meant that users did not have to be in the same room as the computer or each other. Modem links soon after meant that users did not have to be in the same building as each other; terminals could connect to their host computers via dial-up or leased telephone lines. This allowed for the creation of "host based" games, in which users on remote systems connected to a central computer to play single-player, and soon after, multiplayer games.

Later, in the 1970s, packet-based computer networking technology began to mature, allowing the creation of both Local Area Networks based on ethernet, developed in 1973 - 1975 at Xerox PARC, and Wide Area Networks, in particular the ARPANET, starting deployment in 1969, which led to the creation of the Internet (Jan 1, 1983).

This allowed for network games, in which the game created and received network packets, and systems located across LANs or the Internet could run games with each other on a peer to peer or ad hoc client-server basis.