Shack Chat: What was your first online gaming experience?

SCREECH. SHRIEK. Oh, sorry. Don't mind me. That was just my modem trying and failing to connect to my friend's phone line so we could frag each other in Doom II. Yes, in this week's Shack Chat, we're reminiscing about our first online gaming experiences, abysmal though many of them were.

Now, we're using the term "online" loosely here. What we want to know is, what was the first game you played by connecting with another person who wasn't in the same room? Did you play Halo 2, one of the earliest Xbox Live-compatible games and newly released this week on PC as part of the Halo Master Chief Collection? Maybe you rolled around in the MUD with multiple other users in a text-only dungeon. Or maybe you had better luck than some of us had connecting our modems to play early FPS titles like Doom and Duke3d.exe.

Read on to learn about our expeirences in those and other online (and "online") arenas. Once you've ruminated over our entries, tell us:

Question: What was your first online gaming experience?

Doom - Asif Khan, Has played online games with a 28.8 modem

The first time I saw Doom was a religious experience. My friend got a Pentium computer for his birthday just in time for Doom’s launch. It was probably a few weeks later that our group of friends tried out online play via phone modems. It was awful, but it motivated our crew to start up LAN party weekends. I had a Mac Plus at the time, so I had to jump on my friend’s computer when they were taking a break. I didn’t get a decent PC until a few years later when Quake launched.

Halo 3 - Ozzie Mejia, Which Halo came out this week again?

I might have played video games since I was five years old, but there was a long period after high school where I fell out of gaming. It wasn't until I picked up my QA job with THQ that I felt the need to get back into the game. And yes, I owned a GameCube at the time. But I wanted something else. I wanted something that was capable of going online. I wanted to be one of the cool kids who were playing Halo.

So that led to me buying an Xbox 360. And with it, I bought Halo 3. Had I played the previous two Halo games? No, but that wasn't going to stop me. Besides, I was less worried about Master Chief's story than I was about jumping into the online space and getting my multiplayer game on. I remember my thinking at the time being, "It's just like Goldeneye, right?"

No, it wasn't quite like Goldeneye, but I loved the good times with Halo 3 anyway, whether it was Team Slayer, Oddball, or King of the Hill. I even liked Capture the Flag, just because I could whack some dudes with the flag. Hee hee hee… WHACK! But nothing was better than getting that sticky grenade kill. Those are still the best.

Just don't ask me to drive. I'm pretty sure I can drive an actual warthog better than I can drive Halo's Warthogs.

Age of Empires - Sam Chandler, Guides Editor

I got my first copy of Age of Empires in a box of Kellogg’s cereal. It might have been Corn Flakes, or perhaps even Coco Pops, it doesn’t matter. For some reason, I now had one of the best RTS games released on PC, and I played the heck out of it.

A few years later, my family upgraded from dial-up to ADSL, and I experienced my first real online game. I jumped into a match against someone else in Age of Empires, never really interacted with them, and then the connection failed or the game ended. Not a great start to my online gaming career.

But upgrading to ADSL meant that I could finally experience the best online game: Halo 2. So while Age of Empires is what I used as my first experience, Halo 2 is where I cut my teeth with online gaming.

Halo 2 - Donovan Erskine, Intern

I was a mere 6 years old when my dad bought Halo 2 for me and my older brother, on the agreement that we wouldn’t try to take out rocket launching antics into the real world. We had endless fun playing with local kids on system link, but our entire world changed once we got access to Xbox Live. So many summer nights were spent playing custom matches on coagulation until the sun came up. I also recall times where we’d would try to create our own Red vs Blue episodes.

GunZ: The Duel - Brittany Vincent, Senior Editor

None of my online interactions were that significant when it comes to multiplayer gaming at an early age. I dabbled in online FPS matches as a child when I probably shouldn't have, and jumped into SOCOM with PlayStation 2, but the most important part of my online gaming history was my experience with GunZ: The Duel. That's when things really started heating up.

I spent hours and hours in this free-to-play third-person shooter in my final year of middle school and ended up making friends that I would continue spending time with throughout high school and beyond. This "K-style" shooter combined Uzis with swords and let you rock the most badass Western-style trench coat you'd ever seen when you reached a certain level. I was all about getting that trench coat, and when I did I felt like I joined the coolest club ever.

Sure, the game was ridiculously buggy and full of boosters and hackers, but it kept me busy most nights and I made important connections there. I miss the original iteration of the game and often find myself wishing I could go back now, but those operating the private servers on the old version are simply far too OP for me.

SOCOM II U.S. Navy SEALs: Bill Lavoy, Landscaping Noob

It was probably early 2004 when I picked up SOCOM II in a local Walmart. I got it because I liked the cover art, and because it came with a headset. I played offline for a bit, but eventually jumped online to give it a shot. 

The first night I played I met a group of guys with names like Viper, Burner Up, Sgt. Shorty, Benzolamas, and a whole bunch more I can’t recall. We played on a map called Sujo, which to this day remains my favorite map in any online game I’ve ever played. You either tried to attack and plant a bomb to destroy some drugs, or defended. It was insanely hard to attack on that map, but it was a challenge that our group enjoyed. In fact, we liked SOCOM II (and each other) so much, we created a clan that ran more than 30 deep at some points and competed in tournaments. We called it Rogue 7, and we of course had a website.

Over the next few years, this group largely stayed together, moving from SOCOM II to SOCOM 3. When the PS3 came out we kept playing, but once a game called Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare dropped, that was the beginning of the end, sort of. I still keep in touch with a few of those guys. Viper is one of my best friends to this day. A mentor that helped me lose the chip on my shoulder that I carried through my 20s. 

I consider myself lucky that the very first game I ever played online turned out so well for me. Lifelong friendships, and developing a passion for shooters that carried me into Battlefield 3 and Medal of Honor: Warfighter, where I made more lifelong friendships and broke into the games journalism industry.

Damn, I really miss SOCOM II.

Team Fortress 2- Josh Hawkins, Guides Guy

Before I graduated from high school in 2010, I lived a fairly sheltered life. I didn’t play all that many games outside of what I had on my consoles, and we never had any kind of online subscription services at the time. Fast forward to May 2010, when I bought a really crappy laptop with my graduation money and finally was introduced to PC gaming.

A friend of mine at the time ended up gifting me a couple of things -- mainly Battlefield Bad Company 2 and Team Fortress 2 -- but my laptop was nowhere near capable of running the Bad Company 2 all that well. Which is why I ended up picking up Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2, and Valve’s Orange Box. It was pretty easy to get into the Left 4 Dead series, but I wouldn’t really consider it my first online experience. Sure, I played with randoms, but it wasn’t until I started playing Team Fortress 2 a week or two after I installed it that I really got into the online multiplayer scene.

Team Fortress 2 was unlike anything I had ever played before. It was amazing, and fluid, and a load of fun. It was the first time I’d ever really dabbled in an online FPS, and it had a lot to offer. It also made me a load of new friends, friends which would eventually move with me over to Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2, where I’d end up sinking hundreds of hours into both games.

WarCraft 2 - TJ Denzer, Tides of News

My first online experience was with the classic RTS WarCraft 2: Tides of Darness. Having been worked out a bit in previous titles like StarCraft and Diablo, Blizzard adapted WarCraft 2 in a “Battle.net Edition” of the game. It was 4 years after WarCraft 2’s initial launch in 1995, but I remember my mind being blown at the idea of being able to take the real-time strategy I’d come to know inside and out and be able to compare my battle tactics to those of other players on the world wide web.

It was also a sobering experience, jumping into an online game for the first time. In a solitary environment, you might think you have the best strategy or pattern. However, with the advent of online gaming, all of the “pros” among us were quickly exposed to a world that showed us all of the flaws in our gameplans.

But that’s what became even more fun about it, you know? Being exposed to strategies that you otherwise would have never known about through a system that connects otherwise unreachable players together. Online gaming has come a long way since the days of Battle.net on games like the first StarCraft and WarCraft 2, for better and worse, but few revelations will ever be as eye-opening as that first time coming up against a truly good WarCraft 2 player in those early years.

StarCraft - Greg Burke, Never owned a OG Xbox

My family wasn’t a PC family. In fact I didn’t even have good internet access at all until late 2002. Sure there was AOL and 56k, but my dad only had one laptop and Computer, which couldn't run games at all and I wasn't allowed to touch it. We eventually got one of the first iMacs in 1998. The thing was meant to be an e-mail and homework machine. We eventually got satellite internet which would send down and upload back data in large packets at a time. Fine for Email and web surfing, but for Online gaming? FPS? No way. Everything would freeze for 10-15secs, then speed up 300 percent to catch up and I’d be dead before I knew what happened, Tribes, Counter-Strike, Halo 2, nothing worked online well.

So I never bought any Online games, or the OG xbox, there was really no point. However, Blizzard had recently made StarCraft, and to my shock it could run on the iMac we had, and although online was a little laggy it ran good enough for me to play with my friends. That was my first true online game experience.

WarCraft 2 over Kali - David L. Craddock, long reads editor

When I proposed this week's topic to the staff, I was certain Doom 2 was my first online gaming experience. We're using "online" loosely, here. I remember firing up the game from the setup menu in DOS, and jumping through whatever hoops we had to jump through to connect via modem. We tried both ways: My modem dialing into his, and vice verse.

And today, sitting here, I realized we couldn't get it to take. Who knows why. "Online" gaming was finicky in the '90s. I had a similar experience with Command & Conquer. I'd upgraded to a 56.6K modem, but that attempt didn't get off the ground either.

Then came Kali. If you aren't aware, Kali is a service that tricked your computer into thinking it was connected to a local network, when in reality your modem was dialing out to connect to other people. (Kali's still around today, though it's obviously less useful than it was 20+ years ago.) It provided what so many DOS-era games lacked, a universal interface that bypassed arcane command line input. For a one-time fee of $20, you could play any modem-compatible game online: Doom and Doom 2, Heretic, Hexen, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, WarCraft 2, Command & Conquer. (Kali proved such a popular way to play WarCraft 2 that Blizzard included a separate executable configured for play over the network on the game disc.)

You could even play newer games that came with their own graphical user interfaces and online networks, such as Diablo and StarCraft. Sure, you could play those games over Blizzard's Battle.net, but if you and your buddies had all plunked down your 20 bucks, why not?

Kali was magic to me. It still is, even in an age where connecting to others and playing my favorite games is as common as digital storefronts and day one patches. The little kid in me still sees video games and all their moving parts as magical, and hopefully always will.

G-Toons - Steve Tyminski, Contributing Editor

When I was in middle school, I can remember playing on the computer at my friend’s house. We would go to his house after school, watch some Toonami on Cartoon Network and play some games. There was a “card-game” type game on the Cartoon Network web site called “G-Toons” where you would make a deck of toons and play against random people online. Each toon had special abilities and highest score won the battle. At the same friend’s house, I recall playing some Xbox games like the NHL and NBA franchises online, as he was the only one of us with an Xbox Live account.

Fast-forward to my own experiences and it was all Nintendo. I did own a Dreamcast but I never hooked it up to the Internet, as we didn’t have the greatest Internet growing up. Anyway, by the time the DS was around, the family Internet was better and we had a router that could support the likes of Pokémon and Mario Kart 7, those being the games I went online with the most. Being able to trade with random Pokémon Trainers and race random people in Mario Kart was great, especially after Nintendo patched in the anti-snake driving.

Shack Staff

Shack Staff stories are a collective effort with multiple staff members contributing. Many of our lists often involve entires from several editors, and our weekly Shack Chat is something we all contribute to as a group.