00:00SPEAKER- Okay, I have a problem.
00:04SPEAKER- Go on.
00:06SPEAKERThat's vague and broad, but hey,
00:08SPEAKERwe're here to tackle problems.
00:09SPEAKER- So in the olden times, consoles were things
00:12SPEAKERthat lived in the cabinet under my TV.
00:15SPEAKERAnd then I would, you know,
00:16SPEAKERwhen I wasn't using the console, I would close the door.
00:18SPEAKERWhen I used the console, I would open the door, right?
00:20SPEAKERSo they're nice and out of the way
00:21SPEAKERand you don't have to look at them, which I like.
00:23SPEAKERBut now in the modern context,
00:26SPEAKERI have all these docks attached to my TV.
00:28SPEAKERI have one for the Steam Deck and I have one for the Switch
00:31SPEAKERand I have one for the Switch 2
00:32SPEAKER'cause we are a mixed mode Switch 1 and Switch 2 family.
00:37SPEAKER- Wait, hang on.
00:37SPEAKERMost important question,
00:38SPEAKERwhere is your Animal Crossing island?
00:40SPEAKER- We all have our own, we got multiple Switches
00:43SPEAKER'cause everybody wanted to make
00:44SPEAKERtheir own Animal Crossing island.
00:45SPEAKER- Right, okay.
00:47SPEAKER- This is what we, look, this is what we did
00:49SPEAKERwith our Biden bonus in 2021 or whenever that was.
00:52SPEAKER- That's one way to tackle it, sure.
00:53SPEAKER- Yeah, so, okay, so here's the problem though.
00:56SPEAKERWell, okay, one of them is easy
00:57SPEAKER'cause Gina doesn't ever use the Switch on the TV.
01:00SPEAKERSo her dock is just the places that she plugs in her Switch
01:03SPEAKERto charge, right?
01:04SPEAKERSo she's a handheld only.
01:05SPEAKER- Yeah, real quick to define the problem,
01:07SPEAKERyou need vertical lifting space, is that correct?
01:09SPEAKER- You need vertical lifting space,
01:10SPEAKERbut ideally I want something I don't have to look at.
01:13SPEAKERBut also I do like playing games on the TV,
01:16SPEAKERso I wanna be able to use it attached to the TV occasionally.
01:18SPEAKER- Sure, my instinct is to say,
01:20SPEAKERoh, just put the docks behind the TV,
01:22SPEAKERbut then you have to like contort your spine
01:24SPEAKERin a curve around the TV to get to the dock.
01:27SPEAKER- Yeah, and also the TV is too close to the wall,
01:29SPEAKERthis doesn't work.
01:30SPEAKERSo what do people do?
01:33SPEAKERLike I have a Steam Deck dock and a Switch 2 dock,
01:35SPEAKERthe Switch 1 dock's gonna go away
01:36SPEAKER'cause the kiddo and I are both Switch 2d up now and like-
01:40SPEAKER- Wait, you have two Switch 2s?
01:42SPEAKER- Yeah.
01:43SPEAKER- Man, you have two Switch 2s to my zero?
01:46SPEAKER- I mean, look, I'm a professional games person.
01:49SPEAKER- Oh, okay, what's that like?
01:51SPEAKER- It's up and down, it doesn't pay great.
01:54SPEAKER- My girlfriend literally just got back from Costco
01:56SPEAKERlike two hours ago, sent me a photo of like stacks,
01:59SPEAKERsome stacks of Switch 2s at Costco.
02:01SPEAKER- She wants a Switch 2, clearly.
02:03SPEAKER- I should've had her just pick one up.
02:05SPEAKER- Look, here's the thing,
02:06SPEAKERthat Animal Crossing update's coming, right?
02:08SPEAKER- It's true, yeah.
02:09SPEAKER- We're, there's now jockeying going on in the house
02:11SPEAKER'cause right now my daughter's island
02:14SPEAKERis on her Switch Lite still,
02:16SPEAKERand my wife's island is on her Switch OLED,
02:20SPEAKERand my island is on my original Switch,
02:22SPEAKERso there's two available slots for new islands right now.
02:26SPEAKER- Okay.
02:27SPEAKER- And even though they've given like,
02:29SPEAKERlike the Resetti powers to get rid of the flower problem
02:32SPEAKERthat plagues every island that hasn't been touched
02:34SPEAKERin three years, exists now, as of January,
02:39SPEAKERit's still a problem.
02:40SPEAKERLike I, like everybody wants a clean start,
02:43SPEAKERso two of us are gonna get to have their brand new island,
02:46SPEAKERand then I'm never gonna play Animal Crossing again.
02:49SPEAKERSo that's- - Sounds like a good plan.
02:51SPEAKER- Yeah. - I'll tell you what I do.
02:53SPEAKER- Yeah, what do you do?
02:54SPEAKER- Now that there are some prerequisites to this.
02:56SPEAKER- Okay.
02:57SPEAKER- Or there's one prerequisite,
02:58SPEAKERwhich is to have very large floor standing speakers.
03:02SPEAKER- Yeah.
03:03SPEAKER- Switch dock sits on top of a floor speaker real nice.
03:06SPEAKER- Yeah, but I, but yeah, that,
03:08SPEAKERthe problem is I don't wanna see it.
03:10SPEAKERI definitely don't want multiples.
03:11SPEAKER- At that point,
03:13SPEAKERlike what else are you gonna put on top of your speaker?
03:15SPEAKER- I have Wall-E and the BDRE on my speakers.
03:19SPEAKER- Okay. - They're both made of Lego.
03:21SPEAKER- You may be constructing
03:22SPEAKERan impossible set of requirements here.
03:24SPEAKER- Look, I'm a simple man.
03:26SPEAKER- Accessible and like, you know, again,
03:28SPEAKERwe need like aerial landing space over the dock,
03:32SPEAKERbut invisible, like accessible,
03:34SPEAKERbut not seen, like obscured by things.
03:38SPEAKERI'm not sure that maybe they pick one or the other.
03:41SPEAKER- I just had an idea.
03:42SPEAKER- Right?
03:43SPEAKER- I think if I drill a hole in the floor
03:45SPEAKERand run a long HDMI cable down through the crawl space,
03:49SPEAKERI could bring it back up at my chair.
03:51SPEAKER- Okay.
03:52SPEAKER- And then the switch dock just plugs in next to my chair
03:55SPEAKERso I can seamlessly transition.
03:57SPEAKER- I love this.
03:59SPEAKER- From playing on the TV to playing in my hands.
04:04SPEAKER- Now there are length limitations on the HDMI cable,
04:06SPEAKERespecially depending on what,
04:08SPEAKERwhich switch we're talking about
04:09SPEAKERand what signal is coming out of it.
04:10SPEAKER- It's funny you mentioned this
04:11SPEAKER'cause I did a video about this at PC World.
04:13SPEAKERIf you can get a passive one-way HDMI cable.
04:17SPEAKER- Oh sure, you get a fiber HDMI cable.
04:19SPEAKER- Yeah, that's up to 50 meters.
04:21SPEAKER- I have one as a matter of fact.
04:22SPEAKER- Yep, I can do a lot less than that
04:24SPEAKER'cause it won't be 50 meters.
04:25SPEAKERThe biggest problem is I'll have to drill a real big hole
04:29SPEAKERto get the HDMI cable through the end point through
04:33SPEAKER'cause it's not like ethernet
04:34SPEAKERwhere you can just run the cable up
04:35SPEAKERand then put the ends on for HDMI, I don't think.
04:38SPEAKER- I have good news for you.
04:39SPEAKER- Yeah, what's up?
04:40SPEAKER- You own your house.
04:41SPEAKER- That's true.
04:42SPEAKER- You own that floor.
04:43SPEAKER- That's true.
04:44SPEAKER- You can put as many holes in that floor as you want.
04:46SPEAKER- I don't wanna have a way for the snails
04:48SPEAKERto get from the snail.
04:50SPEAKERHave I not told you about the snail go-go-tho
04:52SPEAKERunder my crawl face?
04:54SPEAKER- For fuck, no.
04:56SPEAKER- So look, it sometimes gets a little wet in there
04:59SPEAKERwhen it rains.
05:00SPEAKERWe have a big like three inches of rain in one day
05:02SPEAKERand then dormant snail eggs hatch
05:06SPEAKERand then they're under there and there's nothing to eat
05:08SPEAKER'cause it's, you know, snails.
05:10SPEAKERAnd then they just let loose the mortal coil
05:13SPEAKERafter they make a bunch of big shells
05:15SPEAKERand after they've eaten all the whatever
05:16SPEAKERgrows on the mud down there.
05:18SPEAKERAnd then it's just like when you crawl around,
05:20SPEAKERit's just the remnants of snails
05:22SPEAKERthat have let loose the mortal coil
05:24SPEAKERthat are just crunching their bones
05:26SPEAKERunder your knees and hands
05:28SPEAKERas you're belly crawling through the muck.
05:30SPEAKER- That doesn't sound so bad.
05:32SPEAKER- It's not great.
05:33SPEAKER- You get snails when it rains, we get ants.
05:35SPEAKER- Yeah.
05:36SPEAKER- I think I would take the snails honestly.
05:38SPEAKER- We get ants too.
05:39SPEAKER- Ants are, you gotta put a barrier,
05:41SPEAKERyou gotta put a deadly poison barrier around your domicile.
05:45SPEAKER- Wait, what kind of poison are we talking?
05:47SPEAKER- Anti-ant poison.
05:48SPEAKER- Such as?
05:49SPEAKER- I don't know, they touch it and then they think (gags)
05:53SPEAKER- Well, I guess I'll get right on that.
05:55SPEAKER(upbeat music)
06:09SPEAKER(upbeat music continues)
06:23SPEAKER- Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod.
06:26SPEAKERI'm Will.
06:27SPEAKER- I'm Brad, hello.
06:28SPEAKER- My levels look a little scary,
06:29SPEAKERbut I don't see any peaking, so I'm gonna say it's fine.
06:33SPEAKER- It's the joy of doing your own audio engineering.
06:35SPEAKER- It's true.
06:36SPEAKER- This podcast is a two man operation.
06:38SPEAKERWhat I should do, what I should do is teach my daughter
06:41SPEAKERto be an audio engineer.
06:42SPEAKER- Yes, make her earn her keep.
06:44SPEAKER- Yeah.
06:45SPEAKER- Make her earn that Animal Crossing island.
06:47SPEAKER- She could be like the Rizzler of podcasting.
06:52SPEAKER- Or every hour she spends adjusting knobs
06:54SPEAKERon your mixer while you podcast,
06:56SPEAKERthat's another hour.
06:56SPEAKER- Two V bucks.
06:57SPEAKER- Yes, there you go, that's a healthy conversion rate.
07:00SPEAKER- Two V bucks an hour, that's totally reasonable.
07:02SPEAKERShe looked at me and she's like,
07:03SPEAKER"Dad, two V bucks isn't gonna buy anything."
07:06SPEAKER- What is your, I mean, do you have ant materials
07:09SPEAKERthat you've rely on?
07:10SPEAKER- Ant materials?
07:11SPEAKER- Yeah, I like cinnamon for,
07:13SPEAKERcinnamon's very good at disrupting their, what?
07:16SPEAKER- Cinnamon's tigers, man.
07:18SPEAKER- No, no, no, it disrupts their scent trails.
07:19SPEAKERIt doesn't kill them.
07:21SPEAKER- Oh.
07:21SPEAKER- Whatever chemical signifiers ants drop.
07:26SPEAKER- Bear moans or whatever, yeah.
07:28SPEAKER- The way they form their conga lines, I guess.
07:30SPEAKER- So I go to the Ace Hardware in my neighborhood
07:33SPEAKERand I ask the old guy there,
07:35SPEAKERwhat's the deadliest shit that they have for ants?
07:37SPEAKER- Oh, it's Borax.
07:38SPEAKER- No, Borax, they're wise to the Borax here.
07:41SPEAKERThey don't eat the Borax anymore.
07:42SPEAKERThey'll just look, they'll walk right by it and look at it.
07:45SPEAKER- Oh, well, touching the Borax is what you want though.
07:48SPEAKER- Yeah, no.
07:48SPEAKER- Borax does bad things to ants.
07:50SPEAKER- Yeah, they eat it and it does,
07:52SPEAKERit disrupts their tum tums.
07:54SPEAKER- Well, it also, like, let's say you vacuum up
07:58SPEAKERa little bit of Borax into a hand vac.
08:00SPEAKER- Yeah.
08:01SPEAKER- And then vacuum up all the ants
08:02SPEAKERthat are flooding your house.
08:03SPEAKER- Oh, wow, that is grim.
08:05SPEAKER- They don't last long.
08:06SPEAKERAnd I feel terrible doing it, honestly.
08:08SPEAKER- But ants.
08:09SPEAKER- When there are hundreds of ants in your house,
08:12SPEAKERwhat other choice do you have?
08:14SPEAKER- The worst thing that ever,
08:16SPEAKERone of the worst things I've ever seen as a homeowner
08:18SPEAKERis when we had our house cleaned a few years ago,
08:22SPEAKERthe guys were using like a soap on the,
08:26SPEAKERon the, you know, like a mild soap
08:28SPEAKERon the outside of the house, basically.
08:30SPEAKERAnd the soap ran down around the edges of my patio,
08:35SPEAKERthe concrete patio in the backyard.
08:37SPEAKERAnd when apparently there were a billion ants
08:41SPEAKERliving under there, and it was like,
08:44SPEAKERit was like a scene in an Indiana Jones movie
08:46SPEAKERwhen it's like snakes, except for it was all ants.
08:48SPEAKERLike you couldn't see the concrete,
08:49SPEAKERthere were so many ants that came up.
08:51SPEAKER- Oh my God.
08:52SPEAKER- A nightmare.
08:53SPEAKER- It was like driving them out of their tunnel network.
08:57SPEAKER- They did not like the soap.
08:58SPEAKERAnd it's funny, 'cause it doesn't happen when it rains.
08:59SPEAKERIt was something about the soap that the cleaners use.
09:01SPEAKERBut anyway, we get a really toxic poison
09:03SPEAKERand use that to keep the ants from coming in.
09:05SPEAKER- Yeah, that'll do it.
09:06SPEAKER- Solves the problem.
09:07SPEAKER- Yeah, but you know what?
09:08SPEAKERThere's one problem.
09:09SPEAKER- What?
09:10SPEAKER- There's always more ants.
09:11SPEAKER- There are infinite supply of ants.
09:13SPEAKER- Anyway, I'm so sick of thinking about ants.
09:18SPEAKERLet's talk about anything else.
09:19SPEAKER- Yeah, hey, what about a theory of fun?
09:21SPEAKER- Oh. - How's that sound?
09:22SPEAKER- I like fun.
09:23SPEAKER- I was reading the internet this morning, as one does,
09:27SPEAKERand I came across Raf Koster's blog.
09:29SPEAKERRaf Koster, for folks who don't know, is a game designer
09:32SPEAKERwho worked on such games as Ultima Online,
09:35SPEAKERand a little bit of EverQuest,
09:36SPEAKERbut mostly when he was at Verant,
09:38SPEAKERit was Star Wars Galaxies was the thing he was known for.
09:41SPEAKER- That's like three very seminal online games right there.
09:44SPEAKER- Yeah, and to be clear, Raf wrote a book
09:47SPEAKERcalled "A Theory of Fun" like, I don't know,
09:49SPEAKER15 or 20 years ago now, that's like a children's,
09:51SPEAKERI think he illustrated it himself,
09:53SPEAKERbut it's like illustrated like a children's book.
09:55SPEAKERIt basically explains what, it's his shot
09:59SPEAKERat defining what a game is.
10:00SPEAKER- Yeah, I've never met him before,
10:02SPEAKERbut he might be the first game designer
10:04SPEAKERthat I can remember who seemed to be approaching
10:07SPEAKERthe topic of game design from sort of an academic angle.
10:12SPEAKERHe was the first one I was seeing like,
10:14SPEAKERoh, he's doing talks on, and he's written books on,
10:16SPEAKERand et cetera, et cetera, like kind of really
10:18SPEAKERbreaking down analytically the science,
10:21SPEAKERif you want to call it that,
10:22SPEAKERof designing fun and engaging games.
10:24SPEAKER- Before like the NYU game design seminar
10:27SPEAKERwas in effect or any of that stuff,
10:31SPEAKERRaf was keeping it real in "Star Wars Galaxies"
10:35SPEAKERby making a game that was basically just life simulator,
10:38SPEAKERbut in "Star Wars."
10:40SPEAKERIt was very much a predecessor to,
10:45SPEAKERI like everything from like "Power Wash Simulator"
10:47SPEAKERand "Home Repair Simulator" and all those kinds of weird,
10:51SPEAKERhey, here's a piece of life
10:52SPEAKERthat some people don't get to access,
10:54SPEAKERso we're going to make a video game about it stuff.
10:56SPEAKERIt just like the things you were replicating were,
11:00SPEAKERoh, I'm going to be a Twi'lek dancer,
11:02SPEAKERor I'm going to be a smuggler,
11:05SPEAKERor I'm going to be a medic or whatever,
11:07SPEAKERlike the jobs were boring.
11:09SPEAKERIt didn't, the game didn't do great, is my understanding.
11:11SPEAKEROther than like, had it not been a "Star Wars" game,
11:13SPEAKERit would have been shut down in like 15 minutes, I think,
11:15SPEAKERbut I read this article.
11:20SPEAKERThe article is called "Game Design is Simple Actually,"
11:23SPEAKERand it's interesting.
11:24SPEAKERHe talks about the biological basis for fun
11:27SPEAKERand why people enjoy games and stuff like that,
11:29SPEAKERwhich was interesting.
11:31SPEAKER- There is a depiction of a dopamine molecule
11:33SPEAKERin the first like 500 words of this article.
11:38SPEAKERSo it's that kind of thing.
11:39SPEAKERBut I guess we should say this article
11:41SPEAKERis kind of a 20-plus year later follow-up to "Theory of Fun."
11:46SPEAKER- I'd say that's fair.
11:47SPEAKER- He links to it right at the beginning
11:49SPEAKERand kind of expanding on some of the concepts in that book.
11:53SPEAKERBut the point of this is that when I was reading this,
11:58SPEAKERwe started talking about old games
12:00SPEAKERand how online went over the last 30-ish years
12:06SPEAKERat this point, has gone from being like,
12:09SPEAKERwhen we were kids, getting to play a game
12:12SPEAKERwith a multiplayer, getting to play a multiplayer game
12:14SPEAKERwith somebody who was like as good at games as you were
12:17SPEAKERwas a rare treat.
12:18SPEAKER- Oh yeah, that was a like sleeping over
12:22SPEAKERmy friend's house this weekend
12:23SPEAKERor my cousin from two hours away is coming up
12:26SPEAKERfor Thanksgiving.
12:27SPEAKERLike it was definitely not an everyday thing,
12:30SPEAKERlike kind of every, maybe once a month
12:32SPEAKERif you were lucky kind of thing.
12:34SPEAKER- Yeah, and like God bless her,
12:36SPEAKERmy grandmother would always play games with me.
12:38SPEAKERShe was always down to play.
12:40SPEAKERShe was always, she was a computer person,
12:42SPEAKERbut like a univac ENIAC type computer person,
12:45SPEAKERnot a-
12:45SPEAKER- That's the best kind of computer person.
12:47SPEAKER- I mean, in retrospect,
12:49SPEAKERI wish I had asked her a lot more questions than I did.
12:52SPEAKERBut she would play, like she would play two player stuff,
12:55SPEAKERbut she was terrible at video game.
12:56SPEAKERLike just really just abysmally bad.
13:00SPEAKERAnd so, yeah, it was sleepovers and like birthday parties
13:04SPEAKERand stuff like that.
13:05SPEAKERAnd also there weren't a whole lot.
13:07SPEAKERLike there was stuff like, like when I went to college,
13:09SPEAKERwe were playing like Madden and NHL
13:11SPEAKERand those kinds of like EA classic 16 bit sports games.
13:17SPEAKERBut like there weren't,
13:18SPEAKERlike Doom didn't exist at that point, right?
13:21SPEAKERAnd Doom came out and it became,
13:23SPEAKERit was a land game in the lands at my school,
13:27SPEAKERbut like nobody could play it in their room
13:30SPEAKERwith other people.
13:31SPEAKERIt was just a single player thing.
13:33SPEAKERSo the idea today is we're gonna do kind of a brief history
13:36SPEAKERof online games and kind of hit the high points,
13:39SPEAKERhit those inflection points where everything changed.
13:43SPEAKERAnd we're gonna talk about some stuff,
13:45SPEAKERthere's some stuff we're not gonna talk about.
13:46SPEAKERLike we're not gonna talk about the weird online
13:50SPEAKERor satellite based delivery mechanisms for 16 bit games
13:53SPEAKERthat were mostly in Japan, I think.
13:55SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, I'm gonna say the words
13:56SPEAKERto tell of you here shortly, but that's not a focus.
13:59SPEAKERAnd that's not online gaming either.
14:01SPEAKERI mean, that is remote connectivity on a game console,
14:04SPEAKERbut not for the purpose of playing with people.
14:06SPEAKER- Yeah, it was just for downloading
14:07SPEAKERlike 256 kilobyte games, right?
14:10SPEAKER- I mean, they did, well,
14:11SPEAKERthey made like a special version of Zelda
14:13SPEAKERfor that thing actually.
14:13SPEAKERSo there were interesting games for it,
14:16SPEAKERbut still explicitly a local only thing
14:19SPEAKERonce you downloaded the games.
14:22SPEAKERThe one other thing that comes to mind
14:23SPEAKERthat we don't have written in the notes here
14:25SPEAKERis arcades early on.
14:26SPEAKERI mean, that is still very much a,
14:29SPEAKERin fact, that is the ultimate version
14:30SPEAKERof you have to be in the same room with people
14:33SPEAKER'cause that's everybody has to go to a public space
14:35SPEAKERand pay money to play together.
14:37SPEAKER- Did like those Battletech pods were networked,
14:40SPEAKERbut they were just local, right?
14:41SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, the Battletech centers were just like
14:44SPEAKEReffectively LANs before people really knew colloquially
14:47SPEAKERwhat the word LAN was.
14:49SPEAKERAnd eventually like LAN parties,
14:51SPEAKERlike there was a real kind of prior to broadband
14:55SPEAKERbeing widely available, there was a huge,
14:58SPEAKERlike there was a LAN party going on in a major city
15:01SPEAKERsomewhere in the United States pretty much every weekend
15:03SPEAKERin like 1997, right?
15:05SPEAKER96, 97.
15:08SPEAKERAnd then that stuff all kind of died out
15:09SPEAKERas people started getting broadband.
15:12SPEAKERLike to go to a LAN party at that time,
15:14SPEAKERlike I went to DC Con a few times,
15:16SPEAKERwhich was in Washington DC unsurprisingly.
15:19SPEAKERAnd it was like you paid 30 bucks to get in
15:22SPEAKERand that 30 bucks got you half of a four foot section
15:26SPEAKERof a folding table and a folding chair,
15:29SPEAKERor some people, the fancy people brought their own chairs.
15:34SPEAKERBut then you would lug in your beige tower
15:36SPEAKERand your 17 inch CRT and a pair of headphones
15:40SPEAKERand you would sit there and you'd play Command and Conquer
15:42SPEAKERand like honestly, there was usually some sort of network
15:46SPEAKERserver with a bunch of shareware or quoting the shareware,
15:52SPEAKERprobably pirate versions of games in a lot of cases.
15:55SPEAKER- Oh yeah, I've never been to a LAN party,
15:57SPEAKERbut the stories were legendary of all the downloading
16:00SPEAKERand swapping of pirated games.
16:02SPEAKERAnd I assume pornography and other such things.
16:04SPEAKER- It was pornography, anime, like that was the first place
16:07SPEAKERI saw Dragon Ball probably was at a LAN party.
16:09SPEAKERThere was just dudes that would come
16:11SPEAKERand they'd set up their computers,
16:12SPEAKERthey'd just sit and watch Dragon Ball.
16:15SPEAKERThere was almost always somebody
16:18SPEAKERwho brought a significant other,
16:20SPEAKERtypically it was like a teenage girlfriend
16:22SPEAKERwho was really upset that she,
16:24SPEAKERthere'd be a bad breakup or two at LAN parties.
16:26SPEAKERLike it was like summer camp with no counselors
16:30SPEAKERor nobody really in charge.
16:32SPEAKERAnd a lot of people would just dump their,
16:33SPEAKERlike I was in my probably late teens, early 20s,
16:37SPEAKERI was in college when I went to the DC cons
16:40SPEAKERand I was probably in the sweet spot
16:41SPEAKERin terms of ages of people,
16:43SPEAKERbut there were definitely some kids
16:44SPEAKERthat were too young to be there
16:45SPEAKERand there were definitely some creepy old guys
16:47SPEAKERprobably 15 years younger than I am now.
16:49SPEAKERSo it was seedy in a way that like,
16:53SPEAKERa lot of stuff at that time wasn't so much.
16:55SPEAKER- Dude, I bet it was open network shares
16:57SPEAKERfor miles at that point, right?
16:59SPEAKER- Like if somebody had a worm, it would have been just nasty
17:03SPEAKERand yeah, everybody had open network shares.
17:04SPEAKERYou just go hit people's machines and see what they had.
17:07SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm sure there was zero authentication going on.
17:09SPEAKERIt was just after like hit browse for networks
17:12SPEAKERand network shares and 300 of them or whatever.
17:16SPEAKER- Windows 98 or NT4 days.
17:18SPEAKER- Yeah, like that's how it was when I got to college.
17:20SPEAKERYou know, like that was kind of still at the tail end
17:21SPEAKERof like the dorm was you could like just browse
17:23SPEAKERfor public network shares and find like dozens of them
17:28SPEAKERfrom people's machines on the land.
17:30SPEAKER- Well, and I don't think they segmented the land.
17:32SPEAKERAnd the other thing about this is oftentimes
17:33SPEAKERthe reason they do the file servers is people,
17:36SPEAKERlike they didn't have internet connections
17:38SPEAKERbecause like getting an internet connection for 200 people
17:40SPEAKERwould have cost a fortune.
17:41SPEAKER- Yeah, it was basically, it was functionally
17:43SPEAKERkind of impossible unless they brought like a T1 in
17:45SPEAKERor something, right?
17:46SPEAKER- Yeah, but that would have cost $5,000
17:48SPEAKERand like it's not gonna make sense for the weekend.
17:51SPEAKERSo yeah, the file servers were there ostensibly
17:53SPEAKERto hold patches so you could all get on the same version
17:57SPEAKERof whatever game you were trying to play.
17:59SPEAKERAnyway, and this was all of course before Steam
18:00SPEAKERor any of that stuff.
18:01SPEAKERSo it was like you had a CD, you put it in the drive,
18:03SPEAKERthen you downloaded the patch from File Planet
18:05SPEAKERor the file server or whatever.
18:07SPEAKER- Yes, but well after the point at which
18:08SPEAKERwe were going to start.
18:09SPEAKER- Yeah, in the beginning.
18:13SPEAKER- Yes.
18:14SPEAKER- That's just what I had.
18:15SPEAKERThat's all I got.
18:17SPEAKERWe started in the early nineties.
18:19SPEAKERIt's probably the beginning for me.
18:20SPEAKER- We've got a little bit of prehistory in the notes.
18:22SPEAKERI mean, we talked about, you know,
18:23SPEAKERlike it was a going to other people's houses
18:25SPEAKERto play games on consoles.
18:26SPEAKER- Yeah.
18:27SPEAKER- I think it is worth noting that consoles
18:29SPEAKERtypically required some kind of relatively expensive add on
18:32SPEAKERto play more than two players at one time.
18:34SPEAKER- Yeah, until the N64 and the Dreamcast.
18:37SPEAKER- Or if you had a turbo graphics and adapter
18:38SPEAKERto play more than one person at a time.
18:41SPEAKERCause the turbo graphics shipped
18:42SPEAKERwith literally one control report on it.
18:44SPEAKER- Look, this might be a hot take, Brad.
18:46SPEAKERI don't think the turbo graphics was a very good console.
18:48SPEAKER- Yeah, like let's say it probably punched
18:52SPEAKERabove its weight in some cases, but sure.
18:54SPEAKERI think you're probably right.
18:56SPEAKERBut the point is it was, you know,
18:57SPEAKERit was it was consoles in people's houses
18:59SPEAKERand you were lucky to get more than two players at once.
19:01SPEAKERIt was arcades and it was muds.
19:04SPEAKER- Well, so there were muds and when online services started
19:07SPEAKERlike BBSs or later stuff like AOL and Prodigy and CompuServe
19:11SPEAKERthere were kind of, there were some online games
19:13SPEAKERin those types of situations.
19:16SPEAKERBut yeah, muds, for people who don't know muds,
19:18SPEAKERmud stands for multi-user dungeon.
19:20SPEAKERThey're basically, imagine multiplayer Zork
19:23SPEAKERthat in some cases.
19:25SPEAKER- Dude, I think I'm gonna have to stop you.
19:27SPEAKER- Yeah.
19:28SPEAKER- I fear we are maybe old enough at this point
19:30SPEAKERthat we can't even just drop the Zork reference
19:32SPEAKERwithout spelling out the fact that Zork
19:34SPEAKERwas a text only game.
19:36SPEAKER- Yeah, so in order to do things in Zork,
19:38SPEAKERyou said like you had two word commands.
19:40SPEAKERIt was like go west or go left, turn left or look around
19:44SPEAKERand you interacted with a text-based world using text.
19:47SPEAKERAnd sometimes there were pictures that were kind of like
19:49SPEAKERtied to individual rooms or whatever.
19:51SPEAKER- Yeah, but at its most basics,
19:52SPEAKERthe Zork style text parser game was quite literally
19:55SPEAKERjust white text on a black background
19:56SPEAKERand you just typed what you were doing.
19:57SPEAKERIt was kind of like an interactive novel exactly,
20:01SPEAKERbut it was extremely imagination based, let's say.
20:04SPEAKER- Yeah, and in the early to mid 80s,
20:07SPEAKERthere were, late 80s even, there were a lot of these.
20:09SPEAKERLike there was a Douglas Adams version of Hitchhiker's Guide
20:11SPEAKERto the Galaxy that was text-based.
20:14SPEAKERThere were games in the adventure series,
20:16SPEAKERlike adventure and pirate adventure and stuff like that.
20:18SPEAKERThere were a bazillion of these.
20:21SPEAKERAnd then Mudds took that basic framework
20:23SPEAKERand then would put like a D&D based RPG adventure
20:29SPEAKERon top of it, right, that you could go in with your friends.
20:31SPEAKERSo you would go in and this all usually took place
20:35SPEAKERon like VAX or Unix machines or sometimes BBSs, I guess.
20:39SPEAKERAnd you would start in a place you have shared inventories,
20:42SPEAKERyou could pass things around, but it was all text-based.
20:45SPEAKERAnd then they ranged from like extremely gamey
20:49SPEAKERand like hardcore role players,
20:50SPEAKERlike some of the Star Wars ones specifically
20:53SPEAKERwere like if you didn't role play effectively,
20:55SPEAKERthey would just kick you out and ban you
20:57SPEAKERand you'd have to make a new account.
20:58SPEAKERTo things like Lambda Mu,
21:00SPEAKERwhich was a user extensible, user extensible Mudd.
21:04SPEAKERSo like you could find, you could, for example,
21:07SPEAKERif you got somebody to give you permission in their room,
21:09SPEAKERyou could hook, you could hook your room
21:12SPEAKERonto like a lantern or something in their room.
21:15SPEAKERAnd like, so there was a kind of status
21:18SPEAKERbased on how close you were to the main loading room
21:20SPEAKERwhere everybody started.
21:22SPEAKERAnd that was a really social,
21:23SPEAKERlike that thing was basically like IRC
21:25SPEAKERwith user configurable rooms
21:27SPEAKERand also weird dungeons that just,
21:31SPEAKERpeople would just build whole campaigns
21:32SPEAKERthat just branched off of the main structure of the Mu.
21:35SPEAKER- What was the networking scope of the average Mudd
21:37SPEAKERor at least the early Mudd?
21:39SPEAKERLike this was pre widespread internet access.
21:41SPEAKERWas it like local to whatever university
21:43SPEAKERyou were at or something?
21:45SPEAKER- Well, so I didn't use them until probably '94,
21:50SPEAKERI would guess was the first time I found a Mudd.
21:53SPEAKERAnd they were online at that point.
21:55SPEAKERThere was an article in Wired about Mudds at one point,
21:57SPEAKERand they listed like four that were then immediately
21:59SPEAKERimpossible to get into,
22:00SPEAKERbut that led a bunch of people to other stuff like Lambda Mu
22:03SPEAKERand the Star Wars Mudds and stuff like that.
22:05SPEAKER- Like just quick Wikipedia skim.
22:07SPEAKERIt seems like the earliest Mudds were at kind of universities
22:10SPEAKERand were confined to those lands, of course.
22:13SPEAKER- Yeah, it makes sense.
22:14SPEAKERBut the heyday for Mudds was like pre windows 95
22:20SPEAKERpost endless September.
22:24SPEAKER- Looks like CompuServe had at least one.
22:26SPEAKER- Yeah, so CompuServe and AOL were interesting
22:29SPEAKERand prodigy in those kind of big, they weren't exactly,
22:32SPEAKERthey were ISPs, but they also provided other services too.
22:35SPEAKERLike AOL provided a less internetty internet experience.
22:41SPEAKERSo they filtered out some of the bad stuff.
22:43SPEAKERAnd like they, at least in the beginning,
22:46SPEAKERbefore it was like unlimited usage while you're on,
22:50SPEAKERthey had games that cost money to play
22:52SPEAKERwhile you were playing them.
22:53SPEAKERSo like some BBSs would charge you based on time spent
22:56SPEAKERin the game, CompuServe definitely did that.
22:59SPEAKERSo if you started the wrong thing,
23:01SPEAKERyou could end up racking up like 50 or $100 worth
23:03SPEAKERof game time by playing these games on their servers.
23:06SPEAKERSo the people who knew better were kind of like,
23:08SPEAKERhey man, I'm just gonna go play a Mudd on the internet
23:10SPEAKERwhere it's real.
23:12SPEAKERBut if you were on CompuServe and didn't know better
23:13SPEAKERthen you would probably do that.
23:15SPEAKER- Yeah.
23:16SPEAKER- Okay, so we're past the text days.
23:19SPEAKERIt's the early nineties.
23:21SPEAKER- Yes, I will, real quick, I'll jump in here
23:23SPEAKERand just mention in a little more detail,
23:25SPEAKERthe, I guess what I would call like early experiments
23:28SPEAKERwith console network connectivity.
23:31SPEAKERBut again, this was not, in both cases,
23:33SPEAKERthis was not for the purpose of playing with other people.
23:36SPEAKERSuper Famicom only in Japan, not outside of Japan.
23:39SPEAKERSo Super Nintendo never got this.
23:41SPEAKERHad the Satellaview add on, which was a satellite modem.
23:44SPEAKER- That's crazy.
23:45SPEAKER- And I've never spent a ton of time looking
23:47SPEAKERat a Satellaview, I'm like vaguely aware of it.
23:50SPEAKERMy understanding though, is that all of the games
23:52SPEAKERyou got through it were exclusive.
23:54SPEAKERThere might've been some, maybe there were some SNES games
23:57SPEAKERor Super Famicom games that were also at retail
24:00SPEAKERthat you could download through this thing.
24:02SPEAKERBut most of the games I am familiar with on the Satellaview
24:04SPEAKERwere exclusive to the system.
24:06SPEAKER- That's wild.
24:07SPEAKER- And I don't think you could keep them
24:09SPEAKERas long as you wanted either.
24:10SPEAKER- I think they stayed until you powered off, right?
24:12SPEAKER- I'm not sure.
24:14SPEAKERActually no, because some of these games on this table
24:16SPEAKERI'm looking at have a unique broadcast weeks listing.
24:20SPEAKER- Wow.
24:22SPEAKER- And most of these are between one and four weeks long.
24:24SPEAKERSo you might've only been able to keep them for that long.
24:26SPEAKERI'm not actually sure.
24:27SPEAKER- Talk about FOMO.
24:28SPEAKER- Again, it's a little out of the scope of, you know,
24:30SPEAKERwe're talking about online multiplayer here,
24:31SPEAKERbut there was a remake of Zelda 1 for Super Famicom
24:35SPEAKERavailable exclusively through this Satellaview.
24:37SPEAKER- That's wild.
24:38SPEAKER- So that's kind of like the, it's a BS Legend of Zelda.
24:42SPEAKER- What's the BS stand for?
24:43SPEAKER- I'm not sure.
24:45SPEAKERA lot of the games have a BS prefix on them
24:47SPEAKERand I've never actually known what that stood for anyway.
24:50SPEAKER- That's the Japanese, yeah, anyway.
24:53SPEAKER- It's possible.
24:54SPEAKERBut anyway, you know, this was a giant thing
24:55SPEAKERyou could plug into a Super Famicom
24:56SPEAKERand get satellite sort of uplink connectivity with it.
25:00SPEAKER- Does that mean Nintendo made dishes?
25:01SPEAKERIs there like a Nintendo branded satellite dish out there?
25:04SPEAKER- Don't actually know.
25:06SPEAKER- That's wild.
25:07SPEAKERI guess you could tell who had the Satellaview
25:09SPEAKER'cause you'd see the dish on their house.
25:11SPEAKERYou'd be like, oh hell yeah,
25:12SPEAKERthat's my Famicom, Super Famicom dish.
25:15SPEAKERI'm gonna go over to Steve's house.
25:17SPEAKER- Oh yes, okay.
25:18SPEAKERUser required a separate purchase or rental
25:21SPEAKERof a satellite dish and receiver.
25:22SPEAKER- Wow.
25:23SPEAKER- So not a small investment to get this stuff.
25:26SPEAKER- Hard to believe it didn't work out.
25:27SPEAKER- Yes, there was also the Sega channel,
25:30SPEAKERwhich was kind of similar except it was over coax cable.
25:33SPEAKER- Yeah, Sega was kind of all in on the internet.
25:35SPEAKERThey had the thing for the Genesis
25:37SPEAKERthat I think nobody really realistically had,
25:40SPEAKERbut then they did a modem for the Saturn
25:42SPEAKERand then the Dreamcast came with one built in, right?
25:44SPEAKER- Yes, the Dreamcast shipped with a modem built in.
25:46SPEAKERThe Sega channel was just a way to download games
25:48SPEAKERover cable effectively.
25:50SPEAKERAnd I don't know a ton about the Saturn modem
25:53SPEAKERand what the capability was there,
25:54SPEAKERbut Dreamcast, I feel like by the time Dreamcast came out,
25:58SPEAKERmost people at least kind of knew
26:00SPEAKERwhat dial-up internet was.
26:01SPEAKER- Yeah, Dreamcast came out in '97 or '98.
26:04SPEAKERIt was late. - '99.
26:05SPEAKER- '99, everybody knew by then.
26:06SPEAKER- The famous Dreamcast released a 9999.
26:10SPEAKER- Yeah, of course. - Yes.
26:12SPEAKER- Like they were doing multiplayer servers
26:14SPEAKERand stuff like that by the Dreamcast time,
26:16SPEAKERwhich I think we'll get to, that's in the future.
26:19SPEAKER- Yes, getting out of order here just a little bit.
26:22SPEAKER- But in 1993 when Doom came out,
26:25SPEAKERit was an IPX game locally,
26:27SPEAKERbut you could play modem to modem.
26:28SPEAKERIt had modem play as did most of the shooters
26:31SPEAKERthat came after that, right?
26:32SPEAKERSo Duke Nukem, Rise of the Triad,
26:35SPEAKERas well as like multiplayer RTSs like Warcraft II
26:40SPEAKERand Command & Conquer and Red Alert
26:42SPEAKERand all those kinds of games.
26:43SPEAKER- I think it topped out at what,
26:45SPEAKERfour players on an IPX network?
26:47SPEAKER- Four players on an IPX network for Doom, for sure.
26:49SPEAKER- And then necessarily, of course,
26:51SPEAKERit was only head to head over a modem.
26:53SPEAKER- Yeah, actually, I think Doom eventually had eight players,
26:57SPEAKERbut that might've been later.
26:59SPEAKERDescent also was a popular modem to modem game.
27:03SPEAKERAnd like we had, at my university,
27:06SPEAKERwe had a message board
27:08SPEAKERwhere you could put your phone number up
27:10SPEAKERto if you wanted to play multiplayer games with people.
27:13SPEAKERLike there was a cork board,
27:15SPEAKERyou just jammed a card with your phone number on,
27:16SPEAKERwhich is really funny in retrospect.
27:17SPEAKER- That's fun, that's fun.
27:19SPEAKERI've certainly never done this,
27:20SPEAKERbut I know Doom supported this
27:22SPEAKERand I assume a good number of other games as well.
27:24SPEAKERYou could play over no modem cable head to head as well.
27:26SPEAKER- Yeah, you could.
27:27SPEAKERYou needed a, so it was like a serial cable,
27:30SPEAKERbut two of the pairs were reversed
27:31SPEAKERso that the send on one
27:34SPEAKERwas lined up with the receive on another.
27:36SPEAKER- Right, but that obviously is kind of dragging
27:38SPEAKERtwo computers basically into the same room
27:40SPEAKERor down the hall from each other.
27:41SPEAKER- Well, it was a LAN party.
27:43SPEAKERLike it let you have a two-person LAN party
27:46SPEAKERin a world where like network cards
27:48SPEAKERwere still two or 300 bucks at that point.
27:50SPEAKER- Oh, sure.
27:51SPEAKER- Like they weren't built into the motherboard yet.
27:52SPEAKER- But every computer had a serial port.
27:54SPEAKER- Every computer had a serial port, yeah.
27:57SPEAKER- I think I've probably said this before,
27:58SPEAKERbut Doom head to head against my friend across town
28:01SPEAKERover the modem,
28:03SPEAKERI am quite sure is the first time I ever saw somebody
28:05SPEAKERmove around in a game on my screen when they were,
28:08SPEAKER- Oh yeah.
28:09SPEAKER- When they were miles away from me,
28:11SPEAKERlike just foundational mind blowing moment.
28:14SPEAKER- When it didn't move like a player,
28:15SPEAKERlike a NPC, basically.
28:18SPEAKER- Yes, yes.
28:19SPEAKERLike seeing the character moving around
28:21SPEAKERand knowing it was my friend across town moving the character
28:23SPEAKERwas just like, that was it, man.
28:26SPEAKER- Well, and the characters were moving,
28:27SPEAKERthe characters moved a lot faster than the NPCs did.
28:30SPEAKERSo it was, it was a real thing.
28:32SPEAKERThat was, I used to play with my friend, Marty,
28:34SPEAKERand we both had 14.4 modems when it was time to upgrade.
28:38SPEAKERWe bought these janky,
28:39SPEAKERI've talked to this in the podcast before,
28:41SPEAKERwe bought these janky modems that would let you basically
28:44SPEAKERsplit half of the bandwidth for a GSM audio call
28:49SPEAKERand then use the other half for a modem.
28:52SPEAKERSo we would talk to each other while we like,
28:55SPEAKERwe had voice while we were, while we were shooting,
28:56SPEAKERwe had headsets that plugged into the,
28:59SPEAKERinto the modem, which was really weird.
29:01SPEAKER- I assume you were just getting like half the bandwidth
29:04SPEAKERthat you were knowing was like 9600 baud
29:05SPEAKERor something like that.
29:06SPEAKER- Yeah, it was fine for the game, for the game's purposes.
29:09SPEAKER- Games don't necessarily, they don't move a lot of data,
29:11SPEAKERright, the latency is important in multiplayer gaming,
29:13SPEAKERbut throughput is not as much.
29:15SPEAKER- Well, and Doom and most of these games
29:18SPEAKERwere peer-to-peer games, so there wasn't a server,
29:20SPEAKERthere wasn't a client, it was everybody was running
29:23SPEAKERon the same data and if it desynced,
29:25SPEAKERthen you had to reconnect.
29:27SPEAKERAnd also strangely, these,
29:30SPEAKERmost of these games had dialers and stuff built in.
29:32SPEAKERSo you didn't have, they were DOS games,
29:35SPEAKERit wasn't like you were connecting to each other
29:36SPEAKERwith Windows or something,
29:38SPEAKERand then you would switch over to the, to the game.
29:40SPEAKERIt was just like, you loaded it up
29:42SPEAKERand you had to put your modem strings into the game
29:44SPEAKERand know the person's phone number and type it in.
29:47SPEAKER- The game, the game did the dialing.
29:48SPEAKERIn fact, like now that you've mentioned that,
29:50SPEAKERlike moving the network stack out of the game itself
29:54SPEAKERinto a more generalized platform
29:55SPEAKERon which the game was running is like,
29:58SPEAKERkind of one of the actual.
30:00SPEAKER- That's the first one, yeah.
30:01SPEAKER- Big points of evolution as this stuff matured.
30:04SPEAKER- Yeah, absolutely.
30:05SPEAKER- Real quick, before we move on though,
30:06SPEAKERmy other store, I've probably mentioned this before too.
30:09SPEAKERMy cousin who lived about two hours away,
30:10SPEAKERwho I mentioned earlier, like loved Warcraft 2.
30:13SPEAKER- Oh, who didn't?
30:14SPEAKER- Had absolutely nobody to play it with.
30:18SPEAKERHe just, he volunteered.
30:20SPEAKERI mean, I was certainly grateful for this.
30:21SPEAKERHe volunteered to eat all of the long distance fees
30:23SPEAKERfor as much as I would play that game with him.
30:25SPEAKER- Wow.
30:26SPEAKER- So I cannot even imagine how much he racked up
30:29SPEAKERin long distance fees playing that game, but it was fun.
30:32SPEAKER- Well, so around this time, Descent, like I said,
30:36SPEAKERDescent wrought all the build games, Doom, Warcraft,
30:40SPEAKERthe Raven, Hexen, or Heretic, I guess, games.
30:45SPEAKERAll, you could play modem to modem.
30:47SPEAKERThere were also a handful of modem to LAN FPS services.
30:51SPEAKERSome BBSs would do this where you could like,
30:55SPEAKERbasically tunnel into a BBS and then use that
30:57SPEAKERto do like an IPX portal or something to give you multiplayer.
31:02SPEAKERThere were also some dedicated services like Duango,
31:04SPEAKERand then there was Kali, which was a kind of shareware thing
31:07SPEAKERthat did the same thing, more for,
31:10SPEAKERthat's more the other way.
31:10SPEAKERThat's more for playing IPX games on TCP/IP networks.
31:15SPEAKER- Yeah.
31:16SPEAKER- But yeah, so like you could, even if you had just a modem
31:20SPEAKERand weren't on a LAN, you could play Doom with four players,
31:22SPEAKERwhich I remember doing a couple of times.
31:23SPEAKERBut also, Duango was like 15 bucks a month back then,
31:27SPEAKERwhich was an incredible amount of money in 1993 or '94,
31:29SPEAKERwhenever that was.
31:30SPEAKER- So like Duango was a centralized service
31:32SPEAKERthat you dialed into.
31:33SPEAKER- They had local nodes though, Duango did.
31:35SPEAKERSo like you had to have,
31:37SPEAKERlike most of them were in bigger cities that I lived in.
31:40SPEAKERSo like Knoxville, I think had one ISP you could call in,
31:44SPEAKERbut like if you looked at what they had in Dallas or Houston
31:47SPEAKERor DC or New York, it would be like hundreds,
31:50SPEAKERdozens of nodes.
31:52SPEAKERSo yeah.
31:53SPEAKER- But the reason I bring that up though
31:54SPEAKERis that Duango was like a big commercial service.
31:56SPEAKERKali was just shareware though.
31:57SPEAKERSo like, what were you dialing into?
32:00SPEAKER- Well, so Kali was more, it was more, like I said,
32:05SPEAKERit was for letting you play IPX protocol games
32:08SPEAKERon TCP/IP networks.
32:09SPEAKERIt was the other way.
32:10SPEAKER- Oh, duh, right, okay, that was Kali.
32:11SPEAKERKali was, you already have an active internet connection.
32:13SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
32:14SPEAKERThat was like if you lived in the LAN
32:15SPEAKERand you wanted to play Doom,
32:17SPEAKERbut your network didn't have IPX running on it,
32:19SPEAKERyou could play or they were blocking IPX.
32:22SPEAKERAnd then Quake happened,
32:23SPEAKERwhich we talked about Quake here a lot.
32:25SPEAKERQuake, it turns out, is foundational
32:27SPEAKERfor a lot of technologies.
32:28SPEAKER- I think we did, we did a whole episode
32:29SPEAKERabout Quake's 25th birthday, didn't we?
32:31SPEAKERSo we probably don't need to belabor too of that,
32:34SPEAKERtoo much of that material, but I still contend,
32:36SPEAKERI think Quake is the most influential game of all time,
32:39SPEAKERas much for the technologies that it spawned
32:41SPEAKERand made popular as for any game design elements.
32:44SPEAKER- Yeah, like being the first real 3D accelerated game
32:47SPEAKERor the first, there were other 3D accelerated things before,
32:50SPEAKERbut it was the one that matters.
32:52SPEAKER- Yes, it was the one that sold cards.
32:53SPEAKERI mean, I've done the spiel before,
32:54SPEAKERbut re-acceleration, full 3D worlds, mods, custom maps.
32:59SPEAKER- Mouse controls.
33:00SPEAKER- Yeah, mouse look, skins, client-side prediction
33:04SPEAKERwith like when Quake World came out.
33:06SPEAKER- Portals that let you go from one server to the other.
33:08SPEAKER- Like, I think, I'm pretty sure it was,
33:10SPEAKERI'm pretty sure it was the first first-person shooter
33:12SPEAKERthat worked over TCP/IP out of the box.
33:14SPEAKERI could be wrong about that.
33:15SPEAKERI'm not saying, I'm not saying it was the first game
33:17SPEAKERto work over TCP/IP.
33:18SPEAKER- I think Dark Forces had a TCP/IP mode before maybe.
33:21SPEAKER- No, no, that was modem only.
33:22SPEAKER- That was modem only?
33:23SPEAKER- Yes, definitely.
33:24SPEAKERI don't know.
33:25SPEAKERI'm sure there's something, but for all,
33:27SPEAKERlike, look, it was the first client server,
33:30SPEAKERfirst-person shooter I played.
33:32SPEAKERIt was the first thing that had client-side prediction.
33:35SPEAKERSo that meant that like you could play
33:37SPEAKERon high lag connections
33:38SPEAKERand you'd have a pretty good experience, all that stuff.
33:41SPEAKERBut it didn't work with modem to modem
33:43SPEAKERand it required TCP/IP, which was, which was,
33:46SPEAKERit's funny, when they released the test,
33:47SPEAKERit required a specific multiplayer,
33:49SPEAKERa specific network card to work.
33:51SPEAKER- Was it network card or TCP/IP stack?
33:54SPEAKER- Both.
33:54SPEAKER- I believe, wasn't it?
33:55SPEAKERI'm pulling from the memory banks here.
33:57SPEAKERWas it the Beam and Whiteside?
33:59SPEAKER- That seems something like that.
34:00SPEAKERSomething that started with B for sure.
34:01SPEAKER- TCP/IP.
34:03SPEAKER- Anyway.
34:04SPEAKER- Yes, Beam and Whiteside software.
34:06SPEAKER- Yeah.
34:06SPEAKER- I think that was the only network stack
34:08SPEAKERthat thing worked with, anyway.
34:10SPEAKER- That was because that's what they used
34:11SPEAKERat the offices that did.
34:12SPEAKER- Yeah, that was the whole story of that game.
34:14SPEAKERLike the whole reason Quake World happened,
34:16SPEAKERlike the big John Carmack apology and plan file
34:19SPEAKERthat he wrote was, sorry, I have a T1 to my house.
34:22SPEAKERI didn't realize what the lag was gonna be like.
34:24SPEAKERIt's game over a modem.
34:25SPEAKER- Wow.
34:26SPEAKER- Anyway, like suffice to say,
34:28SPEAKERthe Quake is kind of the inflection point
34:30SPEAKERfor multiplayer gaming from primordial beginnings
34:33SPEAKERto some early version of what we would recognize today.
34:37SPEAKER- Yeah, well, it was the first time
34:40SPEAKERthat anybody did a server client game.
34:42SPEAKERAnd that means it was also the first time
34:44SPEAKERthat somebody shipped server code for their game
34:47SPEAKERthat anybody could run, right?
34:49SPEAKERSo you were able to download a piece of software
34:51SPEAKERfrom id's FTP site and run your own Quake server.
34:54SPEAKERAnd there was a whole configuration file.
34:56SPEAKERThere were mod support,
34:57SPEAKERall this other stuff we've talked about before.
34:59SPEAKERBut that client server thing,
35:02SPEAKERit turns out was an important concept and it comes up.
35:05SPEAKER'Cause after that, pretty much everything
35:07SPEAKERbecame client server.
35:08SPEAKERThere's hardly any peer-to-peer stuff for a really long time.
35:12SPEAKER- Yep, yep.
35:12SPEAKERAnd that leads right into, I guess, is EverQuest like,
35:17SPEAKERoh, sorry, I was gonna say, is EverQuest the first MMO,
35:19SPEAKERbut no, Ultima Online was before that.
35:21SPEAKER- Well, and there was stuff before that too,
35:22SPEAKERbut Ultima Online was the first commercial thing
35:24SPEAKERthat was wildly successful.
35:27SPEAKERIt was a kind of isometric top-down MMO
35:33SPEAKERthat was kind of weirdly open-ended.
35:37SPEAKERLike Star Wars Galaxies later,
35:39SPEAKERwhich we talked about a little bit ago,
35:41SPEAKERit didn't exactly tell you what to do.
35:43SPEAKERLike it shipped with a manual and a map of the world.
35:45SPEAKERAnd then it would ask you some questions
35:48SPEAKERand you chose some stuff.
35:49SPEAKERAnd then it would dump you out in a forest someplace
35:51SPEAKERand you'd just end up punching trees for awhile
35:53SPEAKERuntil you got enough wood to maybe make a bow.
35:55SPEAKER- The original tree puncher.
35:57SPEAKER- I mean, kind of, yeah.
36:00SPEAKERIt's funny, my experience playing UO, I bought it.
36:03SPEAKERI was like, this looks cool.
36:04SPEAKERI've never played an Ultima game before.
36:06SPEAKEROnline seems neat.
36:07SPEAKERI went home, I looked at the manual on the way home
36:10SPEAKERand it was like, hey, if you want to be a knight,
36:14SPEAKERyou should probably consider blacksmithing
36:16SPEAKERand you'll need ore if you want a blacksmith.
36:18SPEAKERSo go get good at mining.
36:20SPEAKERI'm sorry, can I just stop you for a second?
36:21SPEAKERCan I quote you on that?
36:23SPEAKEROnline seems neat.
36:25SPEAKER- Online seems neat, yeah.
36:26SPEAKER- You know, I once thought as you do.
36:28SPEAKER- I mean, look, it was a simpler time, Brad.
36:30SPEAKER- It sure was.
36:31SPEAKER- But so I punched some rock out of the walls
36:33SPEAKERor pickaxed some rock out of the walls.
36:36SPEAKERI loaded it up on my backpack.
36:37SPEAKERI was super encumbered.
36:39SPEAKERI walked from there to town where the forge was.
36:43SPEAKERAnd there's like one bridge
36:45SPEAKERwhere you're out of the no PVP zone.
36:47SPEAKER- I'm getting excited.
36:49SPEAKERI know where this is going.
36:50SPEAKER- On that path.
36:51SPEAKERAnd I immediately got murked
36:53SPEAKERwith like six hours or four hours or something,
36:55SPEAKERsome incredible amount of time punching rocks.
36:57SPEAKER- Amazing.
36:58SPEAKER- And so I logged out and never played it again.
36:59SPEAKER- Really?
37:00SPEAKER- Yeah, I was like, this game is wasting my time
37:03SPEAKERat a high level, F these guys.
37:05SPEAKER- Well, that's, you know,
37:07SPEAKERI might've had a similar response
37:09SPEAKERif I'd had something like that happen.
37:10SPEAKERLike these days I think back on Ultima Online as like,
37:13SPEAKERman, I wish I'd had that experience.
37:14SPEAKERI never touched it.
37:16SPEAKERI was just like, that seems like such a foundational.
37:19SPEAKER- It had a monthly fee too.
37:20SPEAKERIt's worth saying that it was 10 bucks a month
37:22SPEAKERto play Ultima Online.
37:24SPEAKER- Certainly.
37:24SPEAKERI mean, I just was also never into Ultima.
37:26SPEAKERSo I just was not attracted to it to begin with,
37:28SPEAKERbut also the idea of a monthly fee for a game
37:31SPEAKERwas pretty rough at that time.
37:32SPEAKER- It was insane.
37:33SPEAKERAnd the fact that it was a game
37:35SPEAKERwhere you were gonna be abused by the other players
37:37SPEAKERfor $10 a month, it was like, I didn't have time for that.
37:39SPEAKER- And that's what makes it so notable in historical context
37:42SPEAKERbecause the entire evolution of these types of games,
37:45SPEAKERyou know, right up until now
37:46SPEAKERwith like maybe extraction shooters starting to move back
37:48SPEAKERin that more savage, anything goes direction,
37:52SPEAKERbut like that was a game that like did it
37:54SPEAKERbefore the rules had been established, you know,
37:56SPEAKERbefore they had put up the guard rails
37:58SPEAKERthat would ensure people had a good time
38:00SPEAKER'cause you clearly did not.
38:01SPEAKER- I actually think when that game launched,
38:03SPEAKERthey might not have had no PVP zones.
38:05SPEAKERI can't remember.
38:06SPEAKERI feel like there was a legacy of older
38:10SPEAKERkind of proto MMO mud things
38:14SPEAKERthat I can never remember the name of the famous one,
38:16SPEAKERbut I think it's Meridian '59, 1996 video game
38:21SPEAKERdeveloped by Archetype Interactive
38:22SPEAKERand published by the 3DO company.
38:25SPEAKERIt was the first 3D graphically,
38:27SPEAKERmassively multiplayer online role-playing game
38:30SPEAKERand ran for years and years and years
38:32SPEAKERfrom the people who made Niantic eventually.
38:34SPEAKER- Oh, wait, what?
38:35SPEAKER- Yeah, John Hanke developed,
38:37SPEAKERit was on the development team, yeah.
38:39SPEAKER- Niantic people made Meridian '59, really?
38:41SPEAKER- Oh, that's what it says.
38:42SPEAKER- Wild. - The director
38:44SPEAKERwas Charles Sellers.
38:45SPEAKERI didn't know that, that's wild.
38:46SPEAKERAnyway, so yeah, it wasn't the first one of these,
38:49SPEAKERbut it was the first one that you'd go buy in the store
38:51SPEAKERand stuff like that.
38:52SPEAKERAnd then sometime after that,
38:55SPEAKERmultiplayer became much more common
38:57SPEAKERand much less of a weird thing.
38:59SPEAKER- Yeah, if you look at the timeline,
39:00SPEAKERI always think UO came out later,
39:02SPEAKERbut it was '97, which was only a year after Quake.
39:05SPEAKERAnd at that point, Diablo was, I think, '96.
39:09SPEAKERI think that was the same year as Quake.
39:11SPEAKER- Well, and I guess the difference between Ultima Online
39:13SPEAKERand Quake is Quake was a single-player game
39:15SPEAKERthat also had multiplayer.
39:16SPEAKERUltima Online, you could only play
39:18SPEAKERif you paid the fee and played online.
39:20SPEAKER- Yes, with other people.
39:21SPEAKER- Yeah.
39:22SPEAKER- But Diablo came out around the same time.
39:24SPEAKERIt had Battle.net.
39:25SPEAKERStarCraft came out in '98, also had Battle.net.
39:27SPEAKERThose games were, if not multiplayer first,
39:31SPEAKERextremely multiplayer-centric.
39:33SPEAKERAnd Diablo II, even more so than the first Diablo.
39:35SPEAKERIt was definitely a period where every big game coming out,
39:39SPEAKERit felt like, with the exception of point-and-click
39:41SPEAKERadventure games, all the biggest games coming out
39:44SPEAKERwere starting to incorporate multiplayer very rapidly.
39:47SPEAKER- I remember reading a lot of interviews back then,
39:49SPEAKERand the conversation would be,
39:50SPEAKERwell, what's your multiplayer mode like?
39:53SPEAKERAnd as a result, we got a bunch of really weird
39:55SPEAKERsingle-player games that had really, really weird
39:57SPEAKERmultiplayer modes.
39:58SPEAKER- Tell me about Z multiplayer.
40:01SPEAKER- So it's funny you say that you viewed those
40:03SPEAKERas multiplayer games.
40:04SPEAKERI never played StarCraft or Diablo Online.
40:06SPEAKER- Really?
40:07SPEAKER- Never once.
40:08SPEAKER- I never played Diablo a lot, period, in the '90s,
40:10SPEAKERfor whatever reason, but StarCraft was,
40:12SPEAKERI mean, I played through the StarCraft campaign
40:14SPEAKERand loved it.
40:15SPEAKERIt was absolutely a classic game on those merits alone.
40:18SPEAKER- Yeah.
40:19SPEAKER- But it very much, StarCraft very much became
40:21SPEAKERa multiplayer game for me after that.
40:23SPEAKER- Diablo II was when I started playing Diablos,
40:26SPEAKERand I spent a lot of time playing that.
40:28SPEAKERBut I played it when I was living with somebody
40:29SPEAKERin San Francisco, and we played on a LAN, so.
40:32SPEAKEROkay, so then EverQuest came out.
40:34SPEAKERThat was '99.
40:35SPEAKER- Yes.
40:36SPEAKER- It was kind of crazy to think that we got from Quake
40:38SPEAKERto EverQuest in three years.
40:40SPEAKER- Yeah, 'cause EverQuest was a 3D
40:42SPEAKERmassively multiplayer online game
40:44SPEAKERin the vein of Meridian 59, but it was wildly popular.
40:50SPEAKERI think maybe more in the game development spaces
40:52SPEAKERthan in the general populace,
40:54SPEAKER'cause when you talk to game developers now,
40:56SPEAKEReverybody played EverQuest, if they're of a certain age.
41:00SPEAKERBut it was a 3D, looked kind of like Quake,
41:03SPEAKERlike low poly characters, 3D world,
41:06SPEAKERbut with the trappings of an RPG around it.
41:08SPEAKERLike it had a big, it had buttons on Windows,
41:11SPEAKERlike an old Ultima, or like an old RPG.
41:14SPEAKERAnd it was truly enormous numbers of people,
41:19SPEAKERbut you could play it on a relatively modest computer
41:22SPEAKERwith a 3D accelerator and a modem.
41:24SPEAKERAnd--
41:25SPEAKER- Much like Ultima Online was extremely willing
41:28SPEAKERto waste your time in large quantities.
41:31SPEAKER- Yeah.
41:32SPEAKER- Like EverQuest is the MMO
41:33SPEAKERwhere infamously you lost experience when you died.
41:37SPEAKER- Yeah.
41:38SPEAKER- I never played EverQuest, but like you--
41:39SPEAKER- Oh, I played EverQuest.
41:41SPEAKER- Well, then I'm sure you know this way better than I do,
41:43SPEAKERbut you would hear the stories about like,
41:45SPEAKERyou could die in such a way that the gear you had on,
41:48SPEAKERyou could no longer use because you had de-leveled
41:50SPEAKERto the point that you were not high enough level
41:52SPEAKERto use your equipped gear anymore.
41:54SPEAKER- Well, okay, so EverQuest came out of muds
41:57SPEAKERand a lot of the muds were really opaque
42:00SPEAKER'cause they were made for weirdos, right?
42:02SPEAKERAnd so the people who made EverQuest didn't do things
42:06SPEAKERlike put text in the game that explained what spells do.
42:08SPEAKERYou had to try them out to see what happened.
42:10SPEAKER- See, that sounds amazing to me now.
42:12SPEAKER- It was, in many ways, it was very future looking
42:18SPEAKERin like an experimental way.
42:21SPEAKERNow, was it punishing?
42:23SPEAKERYeah.
42:23SPEAKERWere there some levels that required as much XP
42:25SPEAKERas every level that you'd gotten up until that point?
42:28SPEAKERYeah.
42:30SPEAKERLike did they put a bunch of bosses in the game
42:32SPEAKERthat they didn't think anybody would be able to beat
42:34SPEAKERjust to see if it would work out?
42:35SPEAKERYeah.
42:36SPEAKERWere there zones that you could get into
42:41SPEAKERthat didn't have safe spots at the entrance?
42:44SPEAKEROh, absolutely.
42:46SPEAKERSo like you'd zone into a raid zone
42:48SPEAKERand you had to get the people who had good connections
42:50SPEAKERto go in first so that they could like set up
42:53SPEAKERa beach head basically.
42:54SPEAKER- Wow.
42:55SPEAKER- And like one time when we were doing one of the raids,
42:57SPEAKERit was playing a fear, playing a hate or something like that.
43:00SPEAKERWe wiped at such a high level that we couldn't get back in
43:03SPEAKERto get our bodies and we had to get another guild
43:05SPEAKERto come in and help us.
43:06SPEAKERSo there were like 80 people packed in there,
43:09SPEAKERall just getting owned constantly.
43:12SPEAKERWas the pathing in that game so bad
43:14SPEAKERthat if you walked into some of the zones
43:16SPEAKERand just fired off an AOE spell and then zoned out,
43:19SPEAKERit would train every monster in the zone to the entrance?
43:22SPEAKERYeah, 100%.
43:24SPEAKERWas it truly incredible and in like a punishing way
43:28SPEAKERthat I would never tolerate now?
43:29SPEAKEROh yeah, absolutely.
43:31SPEAKERLike there was a spell that I had on my main character
43:33SPEAKERthat I didn't know what it did until the third
43:35SPEAKERor fourth expansion came out.
43:37SPEAKER- That's amazing.
43:38SPEAKER- It was like a launch spell.
43:39SPEAKERIt's like I got it on the fourth day I played.
43:41SPEAKER- Incredible.
43:42SPEAKER- It was an aggro debuff for the record
43:43SPEAKERso you could shrink the aggro radius,
43:45SPEAKERbut like it's not visible.
43:46SPEAKERYou don't have any way of knowing,
43:48SPEAKERbut it became clear that you needed that to pull to like,
43:52SPEAKERlike some of the best moments in that game
43:53SPEAKERwere clearing, were pulling singles off of like a raid boss.
43:59SPEAKERSo you'd get all the ads, you'd pull them,
44:01SPEAKERyou had to kill them in less than the respawn time
44:03SPEAKERso you could then tag the boss.
44:04SPEAKERAnd anyway, the game is incredible.
44:06SPEAKERAlso, no one should play EverQuest.
44:08SPEAKER- And yet many people still do.
44:09SPEAKER- Yeah, but okay, so they launched, EverQuest launched,
44:12SPEAKERthey sold 10,000 copies on day one,
44:13SPEAKERwhich was in, when you read the interviews about this now,
44:17SPEAKERthey're like, yeah, it was a huge number.
44:19SPEAKERAnd it's really funny in 2025 to think about 10,000 copies.
44:23SPEAKERBeing a huge number of copies of the game sold.
44:27SPEAKERAccording to this PC Gamer article
44:29SPEAKERabout the dawn of the MMO, Breaking the Internet,
44:32SPEAKERthe story of EverQuest, the MMO that changed everything,
44:36SPEAKERthey had so much traffic into their data center,
44:38SPEAKERwhich was just a cold room with a couple of computers in it
44:41SPEAKERin San Diego that they shut down the main pipe
44:44SPEAKERin and out of San Diego.
44:45SPEAKER- Yeah, first of all,
44:46SPEAKERI don't think we could even use the word data center
44:47SPEAKER'cause I assume were these servers
44:49SPEAKERjust on the parentheses in their office?
44:52SPEAKER- It said a server room that was really cold.
44:54SPEAKERSo I assume it was like,
44:56SPEAKERI think about that, remember that old server room
44:58SPEAKERthat was upstairs at the CNET headquarters
45:00SPEAKERback in the old days?
45:01SPEAKERI think that.
45:02SPEAKER- Yeah, probably something like that.
45:03SPEAKERI mean, were they,
45:04SPEAKERI can't remember if they were part of Sony at that time.
45:05SPEAKER- They were not yet.
45:06SPEAKER- Okay.
45:07SPEAKER- Sony had famously cut them loose
45:09SPEAKER'cause they thought this was gonna be a debacle
45:10SPEAKERand then bought them back immediately when it launched.
45:13SPEAKER- Right, so this is like,
45:14SPEAKERI mean, this is not only pre data center, I assume,
45:16SPEAKERthis is probably like pre co-location
45:19SPEAKERas a just like turnkey solution
45:21SPEAKERthat anybody could pay for.
45:22SPEAKERMaybe that sort of thing existed by this time.
45:25SPEAKER- They were co-location places by that point,
45:27SPEAKERbut like-
45:28SPEAKER- It was still pretty grassroots,
45:29SPEAKERpresumably compared to now,
45:31SPEAKERor even compared to like five years later
45:32SPEAKERwhen World of Warcraft came out.
45:34SPEAKER- Yeah, the thing that they said in that PC Gamer article
45:36SPEAKERis they were talking about like
45:37SPEAKERthe servers crashing every few hours.
45:39SPEAKERSo like three guys had to stay in the room
45:41SPEAKERand just walk around pressing the buttons
45:43SPEAKERwhen they rebooted.
45:44SPEAKER- In parkas is what the story says.
45:46SPEAKER- Yeah.
45:47SPEAKER- Like they literally were wearing heavy coats
45:48SPEAKERto stay in this air con climate controlled room.
45:50SPEAKER- They're from San Diego.
45:51SPEAKERSo it could have been like 62.
45:53SPEAKER- Yeah, fair.
45:53SPEAKER- Like, you know, whatever.
45:54SPEAKER- Yeah, but I mean, that's the big line from this story
45:57SPEAKERis that, yes, because all the servers were in San Diego
46:00SPEAKERand internet infrastructure
46:02SPEAKERwas much less robust at the time,
46:04SPEAKERbut yes, they consumed effectively all the bandwidth
46:07SPEAKERin and out of San Diego.
46:08SPEAKER- Yeah.
46:09SPEAKER- Took down a bunch of other companies'
46:10SPEAKERinternet access as well.
46:12SPEAKER- Yep.
46:13SPEAKERSo, okay, so that was the dawn,
46:15SPEAKERlike you owe an EverQuest kind of the beginning
46:18SPEAKERof multiplayer online paid experiences.
46:20SPEAKEREverQuest also had a $10 a month fee
46:23SPEAKERand in addition to buying new expansions
46:26SPEAKERand all the other stuff that you had to do.
46:29SPEAKERAnd then around that time,
46:31SPEAKERaround the time of the Half-Life launch,
46:34SPEAKERHalf-Life Heretic, all of the fall of Quake Engine games,
46:38SPEAKERI guess is what I think of that as,
46:41SPEAKERa bunch of third-party services kind of rose up
46:43SPEAKERand some of these had existed for a minute
46:45SPEAKERto service Quake, like GameSpy existed as a tool
46:48SPEAKERthat you used to browse the master list of Quake servers
46:52SPEAKERto see which one was closest to you.
46:53SPEAKER- Didn't it start as QuakeSpy before it became GameSpy?
46:56SPEAKER- Yeah, it was QuakeSpy first and then it became GameSpy
46:58SPEAKERand then eventually it ended up being bought by IGN
47:00SPEAKERand enrolled into IGN.
47:01SPEAKER- And then becoming like a games press outlet
47:04SPEAKERon top of the server browser, weird.
47:06SPEAKER- Well, the server browser went away.
47:07SPEAKER- Yeah.
47:08SPEAKER- GameSpy, the last thing I remember seeing
47:10SPEAKERGameSpy running was, I think Wii,
47:12SPEAKERso there were a couple of Wii multiplayer games
47:14SPEAKERthat used GameSpy services.
47:16SPEAKER- That's right, they had a whole middleware component.
47:18SPEAKER- Yeah, but so these became what eventually
47:21SPEAKERwe would call middleware, right?
47:22SPEAKERThey were portals that you could use
47:25SPEAKERto do the multiplayer matchmaking and all that stuff
47:28SPEAKERwithout having to build that internally.
47:30SPEAKERAnd they were things like GameSpy, MSN had one,
47:33SPEAKERYahoo had one, Heat.net was one,
47:36SPEAKERthe World Opponent Network or the Sierra Online Network,
47:39SPEAKERwhich those things were related,
47:42SPEAKERwas where you played early Source Engine games
47:43SPEAKERor early Valve games, I guess, and mods,
47:46SPEAKERlike Counter-Strike and Half-Life Deathmatch
47:48SPEAKERand stuff like that.
47:50SPEAKERAnd those were, like it's weird,
47:53SPEAKER'cause some of those were just pure multiplayer portals.
47:55SPEAKERSome of them also, like Yahoo and MSN had card games
47:59SPEAKERand you could play Yahtzee and stuff
48:02SPEAKERwith people from around the world.
48:04SPEAKERSo you could always get a game of hearts going
48:05SPEAKERon the Yahoo Games Network or MSN Games Network.
48:09SPEAKERIt was a weird time.
48:10SPEAKER- You know what never goes out of style?
48:11SPEAKER- Yep.
48:12SPEAKER- And EverQuest, I meant to say earlier,
48:15SPEAKERwe got to give it up for EverQuest,
48:17SPEAKERcertainly the only classic game on this list
48:19SPEAKERthat is still getting expansions to this day.
48:21SPEAKER- Really?
48:22SPEAKERUO is not still going?
48:23SPEAKER- Oh, I don't think so.
48:25SPEAKERI don't think you've been able to play Ultima Online
48:27SPEAKERfor a long time.
48:28SPEAKER- Oh, maybe.
48:29SPEAKER- Oh, wait a minute, hang on, what?
48:31SPEAKEROkay, no, I think I'm wrong
48:33SPEAKERand this might actually be the second time
48:34SPEAKERI've made this exact mistake on this podcast,
48:36SPEAKERbut I think Ultima Online is still running.
48:39SPEAKER- It seems like there's something there,
48:40SPEAKERBroadsword owns it now.
48:41SPEAKER- A company called Broadsword appears to be running it now
48:43SPEAKERand according to both their site and Wikipedia,
48:47SPEAKERsomething called Ultima Online New Legacy
48:49SPEAKERis also in development
48:51SPEAKERand was supposed to start an alpha test last October,
48:54SPEAKERbut I'm not sure that it actually ever did.
48:57SPEAKERSo I need to read more about that
48:59SPEAKER'cause maybe the classic UO experience is coming back and-
49:02SPEAKER- You could do it all over again.
49:03SPEAKER- I could still give it a shot at some point,
49:05SPEAKERbut anyway, so UO and EverQuest,
49:07SPEAKERboth incredible staying power, I guess.
49:11SPEAKER- Turns out once you have an MMO audience going,
49:13SPEAKERpeople don't stop playing.
49:14SPEAKER- That's true, EverQuest literally like clockwork
49:17SPEAKERevery like first week of December,
49:19SPEAKERevery year since it came out has gotten a new expansion.
49:22SPEAKER- Yep.
49:23SPEAKER- There's another one due a month from now.
49:25SPEAKER- And I mean, they named,
49:27SPEAKERI think they named the studio that owns that now
49:29SPEAKERafter one of the characters in original EverQuest, so.
49:34SPEAKER- Also, the game's called EverQuest,
49:35SPEAKERpretty appropriate that it's still going.
49:37SPEAKER- EverQuest 2, less so though, it turns out.
49:40SPEAKEREverQuest 2, I went to preview events for EverQuest 2,
49:44SPEAKERI covered that game at launch.
49:45SPEAKERIt didn't quite do the same business.
49:47SPEAKER- It had real performance, but anyway,
49:49SPEAKERwe don't have to get into that, but okay.
49:51SPEAKER- Real quick, end of the '90s here,
49:52SPEAKERlet's just dip back into consoles briefly
49:54SPEAKER'cause I can't help myself.
49:56SPEAKERAnd I mean, I think it's an interesting parallel track
49:59SPEAKER'cause the consoles were so integrated
50:00SPEAKERand so not computers back at that time.
50:03SPEAKER- Well, but it was interesting 'cause like Sega was really,
50:07SPEAKERSega was always hot on multiplayer online
50:10SPEAKERand Sony kind of ignored it completely, right?
50:13SPEAKER- For a while, I will say this is kind of a footnote really,
50:17SPEAKERbut the 64DD, which was the writable,
50:20SPEAKERthe magneto optical disc add-on for the Nintendo 64,
50:24SPEAKERwhich only came out in Japan,
50:25SPEAKERso this is why I know next to nothing about it,
50:27SPEAKERhad a 28 by eight modem built into it,
50:29SPEAKERwhich I did not realize.
50:31SPEAKERAnd apparently Nintendo got some ways along
50:33SPEAKERon working on an online gaming service for 64DD
50:37SPEAKERthat never happened.
50:38SPEAKER- That seems unlikely.
50:39SPEAKER- And they were working with Netscape on it.
50:42SPEAKER- I mean, that makes sense.
50:43SPEAKER- And the reason for that, at least according to Wikipedia,
50:45SPEAKERthe reason for that is that the management of Netscape
50:48SPEAKERhad all come from SGI.
50:50SPEAKERAnd of course, SGI famously did the graphics hardware
50:52SPEAKERin the N64.
50:53SPEAKER- Wow, I didn't know that.
50:54SPEAKER- So there was already some working relationship
50:56SPEAKERbetween different people there,
50:58SPEAKERand so there was some progress made there.
51:00SPEAKERThat never happened.
51:01SPEAKERThe Dreamcast is a much more important kind of milestone
51:04SPEAKERon the lineage of video game console online multiplayer,
51:09SPEAKERthough the Dreamcast shipped with a 56K modem
51:12SPEAKERbuilt into it.
51:13SPEAKERAnd that was modular and could come out
51:15SPEAKERand you could replace it
51:16SPEAKERwith an ethernet broadband adapter instead.
51:18SPEAKER- That's rad.
51:19SPEAKER- There was a version of Quake 3 for Dreamcast,
51:22SPEAKERfamously that had cross-play.
51:24SPEAKER- That's such a terrible idea.
51:26SPEAKER- You could play a Quake 3 on a Dreamcast
51:29SPEAKERover a modem or broadband,
51:30SPEAKERor maybe it was just broadband against people on a PC.
51:32SPEAKER- You also could use a web browser on the Dreamcast.
51:36SPEAKER- Yes, yes, I have no memory of what that was like, but yes.
51:40SPEAKER- It was a disc, just like everything else you put it in,
51:43SPEAKERthen you'd either get web browser 1.0 or 2.0.
51:46SPEAKER- Yeah, 'cause there was no permanent storage
51:48SPEAKERon the Dreamcast.
51:49SPEAKER- Yeah.
51:50SPEAKER- There was a service called SegaNet,
51:52SPEAKERwhich I very vaguely remember the logo when I pulled it up.
51:55SPEAKERI was like, "Oh, I remember SegaNet.
51:56SPEAKERIt's that blue and orange logo."
51:59SPEAKER- Yeah.
51:59SPEAKER- It was $21.95 a month,
52:01SPEAKERapparently like way more popular than I realized.
52:03SPEAKER- Well, so when you hear $21.95 a month
52:06SPEAKERfor a SegaNet service, you think,
52:08SPEAKER"Oh God, that's way too much for an online service."
52:09SPEAKERBut what you don't remember is that
52:10SPEAKERthat also included the dial-up service.
52:13SPEAKERSo in the pre-broadband internet,
52:15SPEAKERyou paid for your phone line,
52:17SPEAKERyou paid for the dial-up into the ISP,
52:19SPEAKERand then you also paid for whatever game stuff you did.
52:22SPEAKERSo it's like $21.95,
52:24SPEAKERprobably the normal good 56K broadband
52:27SPEAKERwas 15 bucks a month would be my guess.
52:28SPEAKER- Yeah.
52:29SPEAKER- So an extra six bucks to get online multiplayer
52:31SPEAKERfor Sega games was a pretty good deal.
52:33SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.
52:34SPEAKERThat seems fairly reasonable, actually.
52:37SPEAKERApparently they had over one and a half million Dreamcast
52:39SPEAKERconnect to that service.
52:40SPEAKER- That's crazy.
52:41SPEAKER- Which is like pretty fucking huge numbers
52:43SPEAKERconsidering the Dreamcast itself
52:45SPEAKERnever put up very big numbers.
52:47SPEAKER- I wonder if they had, if you had to like log,
52:50SPEAKERif you did that to register the console.
52:52SPEAKERI wonder if that's how they got that big a number.
52:54SPEAKER- I don't know.
52:55SPEAKERI mean, the bulk of that was in Japan.
52:57SPEAKER- Ah.
52:58SPEAKER- Half of that number was in Japan
52:59SPEAKERand then 400,000 in North America and 400,000 in Europe.
53:03SPEAKER- Wild.
53:04SPEAKER- But no, I, the other thing I never gave credit for,
53:09SPEAKERlike Quake 3 is the one Dreamcast online game
53:11SPEAKERthat I ever think about,
53:13SPEAKERbut I pulled up a full list
53:14SPEAKERof compatible Dreamcast online games.
53:16SPEAKERThere's like dozens of them.
53:18SPEAKERLike a few dozen.
53:19SPEAKER- Hit me the high points.
53:21SPEAKER- I mean, Chuchu Rocket, anybody?
53:23SPEAKER- That's a banger.
53:23SPEAKER- Chuchu Rocket is an excellent game.
53:25SPEAKERThere were Fantasy Star Online 1 and 2.
53:27SPEAKER- Of course.
53:28SPEAKER- Very, very notably.
53:30SPEAKER- And like unique to that platform too, right?
53:33SPEAKER- Yes.
53:33SPEAKERSega Rally 2, Street Fighter 3, Third Strike.
53:37SPEAKERLike there were multiple fighting games
53:38SPEAKERand there was a version of Unreal Tournament
53:40SPEAKERfor the Soul Calibur. - You played Soul Calibur?
53:43SPEAKER- I don't know.
53:43SPEAKERSoul Calibur was not online.
53:45SPEAKER- So the interesting thing about this,
53:47SPEAKERdid you log into a central service?
53:48SPEAKERDid you like a username and stuff with this?
53:50SPEAKERYou didn't yet, right? - I don't know.
53:51SPEAKERI don't know about that.
53:53SPEAKERI never used it.
53:54SPEAKERI can't, I can't.
53:54SPEAKERI never knew anybody that did use it.
53:56SPEAKERLike I was gonna say, like everything else
53:58SPEAKERwith the Dreamcast, this did not last very long.
54:00SPEAKER- Yeah.
54:01SPEAKER- 'Cause the Dreamcast itself lasted
54:02SPEAKERless than two years in North America.
54:04SPEAKER- Yeah.
54:05SPEAKER- Before they killed it.
54:05SPEAKER- I remember I bought one and then like three days later
54:07SPEAKERI got the, "Hey, we're not supporting this anymore news."
54:12SPEAKER- I bought mine after that announcement.
54:13SPEAKERSo I got everything for pennies on the dollar.
54:15SPEAKER- Man, that was the right choice.
54:17SPEAKERI got Samba de Migo, that's all I cared about.
54:18SPEAKER- Yep, that's worth it.
54:20SPEAKER- Crazy taxi Samba de Migo, I'm good.
54:22SPEAKER- Yes, anyway, Dreamcast like kind of weirdly
54:25SPEAKERis slightly ahead of its time
54:26SPEAKERon online multiplayer services on consoles.
54:29SPEAKER- So many things, on so many things.
54:31SPEAKER- Yeah.
54:32SPEAKER- But then the millennium happened
54:33SPEAKERand well, multiplayer came to consoles, right?
54:38SPEAKER- Yes.
54:39SPEAKER- That's the big thing.
54:40SPEAKER- In a more earnest way.
54:42SPEAKERKind of like the Dreamcast, the PS2,
54:45SPEAKERthe PS2 got ethernet support,
54:46SPEAKERbut initially I think it was only through,
54:49SPEAKERit was definitely only through the hard drive add-on.
54:52SPEAKERThe thing I don't remember is if you could buy
54:54SPEAKERthat hard drive add-on separately,
54:56SPEAKERor I think you could buy it separately,
54:59SPEAKERbut it definitely also came in a bundle
55:00SPEAKERwith Final Fantasy XI, that was a big launch.
55:03SPEAKERIt was the big Final Fantasy VII launch on PS2 was like,
55:07SPEAKERyou get this giant enclosure that has a hard drive in it
55:09SPEAKERthat you shove in the back of your PS2
55:11SPEAKERand it has an ethernet port in it.
55:12SPEAKER- Wait, was Final Fantasy XI a multiplayer game?
55:15SPEAKER- Oh yeah, yeah.
55:16SPEAKER- Oh, okay, that was the first MMO that they did.
55:18SPEAKER- Don't get me started.
55:18SPEAKERI think it's, to this day, I said this at the time
55:21SPEAKERand I still say it, it was ridiculous
55:22SPEAKERto just give it a number.
55:24SPEAKER- Like make it a mainline game?
55:25SPEAKER- As if it was the 11th Final Fantasy game,
55:27SPEAKERbut it's an MMO that has very little to nothing
55:29SPEAKERto do with the other games.
55:31SPEAKER- Well, but isn't the whole point of Final Fantasy,
55:33SPEAKERthat each one is his own game and it stands on its own?
55:35SPEAKER- Technically, yes.
55:36SPEAKER- Yeah, look, maybe the real game was the friends
55:39SPEAKERwe made along the way, Brad.
55:40SPEAKER- Hey, check this out, Final Fantasy Online.
55:43SPEAKER- No, that's weird, nobody would play that.
55:45SPEAKER- I think that would have been a perfectly serviceable name.
55:49SPEAKERBut the PS2, like the Dreamcast,
55:51SPEAKERin fact, even more so than the Dreamcast,
55:54SPEAKERI don't think I ever gave credit
55:55SPEAKERfor how many different games it had with online support.
55:59SPEAKER- Yeah, it was wild.
56:00SPEAKER- It is way into the dozens,
56:02SPEAKERif not over a hundred, skimming this list.
56:06SPEAKERLike there are a lot of PS2 games that had online support.
56:09SPEAKER- Well, I remember, so by that time
56:11SPEAKERI was working at Maximum PC
56:12SPEAKERand Next Gen was down the hall from us.
56:14SPEAKERAnd I remember when they got a PlayStation online,
56:19SPEAKERthe first online PlayStation game that I saw
56:21SPEAKERwas a Tony Hawk, I think?
56:23SPEAKERIt was whichever one has the airport level
56:26SPEAKERand they were playing online
56:29SPEAKERand like it was a real, it was a moment, right?
56:33SPEAKERLike it was a surprising, it was a surprising weird thing.
56:37SPEAKERAnd then, yeah, and then at the same time,
56:41SPEAKERlike LAN party stuff was going still,
56:43SPEAKERlike Halo was really popular on the Xbox,
56:45SPEAKERbut it was a LAN only game and people built weird portals
56:48SPEAKERthat would let you play with other people.
56:51SPEAKERLike basically VPNs that would let them play
56:54SPEAKERwith other people across the internet.
56:55SPEAKERWasn't a great experience is my understanding
56:58SPEAKERand had some, required some shenanigans.
57:00SPEAKER- Yeah, that generation was the,
57:03SPEAKERon one hand it was the beginning of online support
57:05SPEAKERfor consoles in earnest.
57:06SPEAKEROn the other hand, it was also painfully limited
57:08SPEAKERuntil right toward the end when Xbox Live came out
57:10SPEAKERon the first Xbox and finally kind of unified this across
57:14SPEAKERor at the console level.
57:15SPEAKERAnd then we've talked about this with the Xbox 360,
57:18SPEAKERbut PS2 games, notably, like I was saying earlier,
57:23SPEAKERlike the network stack and the network,
57:25SPEAKERthere was no centralized account system
57:26SPEAKERor connectivity stuff on the console.
57:28SPEAKER- Oh yeah.
57:29SPEAKER- You had to do all of the connection stuff
57:31SPEAKERfor each game within the game as far as I remember.
57:34SPEAKERLike every time you had a game
57:35SPEAKERthat you played online on the PS2,
57:37SPEAKERyou had to go in and set up whatever account
57:38SPEAKERand set up whatever connection settings in that game.
57:41SPEAKER- Like if you didn't use DHCP,
57:42SPEAKERyou had to type in your IP address every single time.
57:44SPEAKER- Right, so like there was just,
57:47SPEAKERin fact, I think that's probably a reason
57:48SPEAKERI didn't really mess with online stuff on the PS2 very much
57:51SPEAKERbecause it was such a pain in the ass per game.
57:53SPEAKER- Yeah, it was shockingly difficult.
57:56SPEAKERThat was the beginning of wow,
57:58SPEAKERJapan doesn't understand the internet, hey.
58:00SPEAKER- Yeah, but like certain games like SOCOM
58:04SPEAKERhad a rabid fan base on the PS2.
58:06SPEAKERLike there were some online games on PS2
58:08SPEAKERthat really made an impact.
58:10SPEAKERLike there were a ton of online sports games on there.
58:12SPEAKERLike there was a lot going on there,
58:14SPEAKERbut the technology had not really caught up
58:16SPEAKERto the ambition yet.
58:17SPEAKER- But then the Xbox came out and Xbox Live shipped
58:20SPEAKERand everybody got a little headset with it, right?
58:22SPEAKER- Right, right.
58:23SPEAKERLike the Xbox famously shipped with an ethernet port
58:25SPEAKERbuilt in the first Xbox with the 360.
58:27SPEAKERLike they laid the groundwork by making sure
58:30SPEAKEReverybody could play broadband on the console out of the box
58:32SPEAKER- Even though it didn't ship for a long time.
58:34SPEAKER- Right, but then the service finally came along later on.
58:36SPEAKERAnd that was when like the modern online connected
58:40SPEAKERconsole experience really started to take shape.
58:43SPEAKER- I mean, I feel like that was for me,
58:44SPEAKERthat was Halo 2 and MechWarrior.
58:47SPEAKERMechWarrior?
58:48SPEAKER- MechAssault?
58:49SPEAKER- MechAssault, yeah.
58:50SPEAKER- On the Xbox?
58:51SPEAKER- On the Xbox.
58:52SPEAKER- Yeah, MechAssault famously,
58:53SPEAKERthe game that let you soft mod your Xbox.
58:55SPEAKER- Well, later though, yeah.
58:57SPEAKER- Via exploits, but anyway.
58:59SPEAKER- Yeah.
58:59SPEAKER- Speaking of maybe flimsy ambition,
59:02SPEAKERwe do have to mention the GameCube
59:04SPEAKERhad online support kind of barely.
59:06SPEAKERThey made a modem and an ethernet adapter
59:08SPEAKERfor the GameCube.
59:10SPEAKER- Did it ship with either of them
59:11SPEAKERor did it have just an empty slot there?
59:13SPEAKER- To my memory, there was just an empty,
59:15SPEAKERlike plastic housing that you pulled out of there
59:17SPEAKERto make room for either one of those that you bought.
59:20SPEAKERI believe there were, I had the list open
59:22SPEAKERand I have closed it.
59:23SPEAKERI think it's something like eight games shipped
59:25SPEAKERwith any kind of network support on the GameCube.
59:27SPEAKER- Yeah, the big one was Mario Kart DD, Double Dash.
59:31SPEAKER- And I think that one was LAN only.
59:32SPEAKER- It was LAN only, yeah.
59:33SPEAKER- About half of, oh here, actually,
59:35SPEAKERI've got it right in front of me.
59:37SPEAKERYes, it does eight games
59:38SPEAKERand like half of those are LAN only.
59:40SPEAKERAnd the other half have actual internet support.
59:44SPEAKER- Yeah, that seems right.
59:45SPEAKER- Kirby Air Ride.
59:46SPEAKERKirby Air Ride is another one.
59:47SPEAKER- I never played Kirby Air Ride, is it good?
59:49SPEAKER- I didn't either, I also did not play it.
59:51SPEAKERBut you know, there's a Kirby Air Riders coming out
59:54SPEAKERfor Switch 2 presently.
59:56SPEAKER- I'm a little suspicious about Kirby.
59:58SPEAKERHe seems like he's up to some business.
1:00:00SPEAKER- He seems pretty wholesome, but.
1:00:03SPEAKER- Okay, so consoles, around this time
1:00:05SPEAKERStar Wars Galaxies came out,
1:00:06SPEAKERlike 2003 Star Wars Galaxies came out.
1:00:08SPEAKERHere is another of your Raph Koster,
1:00:11SPEAKERor in fact perhaps the Raph Koster connection.
1:00:14SPEAKER- Yeah, like this was, in retrospect,
1:00:17SPEAKERI think that the Star Wars Galaxy design
1:00:22SPEAKERwas profoundly far ahead of what the technology
1:00:25SPEAKERand the players were both ready for.
1:00:28SPEAKER'Cause everything was player crafted, right?
1:00:30SPEAKERThere were no, there were a couple of settlements
1:00:32SPEAKERon each planet, but the game expected players
1:00:35SPEAKERto build houses and to build bars
1:00:37SPEAKERand to build the whole thing out.
1:00:38SPEAKER- Oh, I don't think I realized
1:00:39SPEAKERthere was like building construction in that game.
1:00:41SPEAKER- Yeah, it was limited in some way,
1:00:44SPEAKER'cause you had to like, like you had to,
1:00:47SPEAKERthere may have been empty buildings or something
1:00:48SPEAKERand you took them over, I can't remember how it worked,
1:00:50SPEAKERbut like, they expected the entire world
1:00:53SPEAKERto be made by people and for people to extend it.
1:00:56SPEAKER- That's crazy, that is, speaking of ambitious.
1:00:59SPEAKER- Well, yeah, and they made a Star Wars game
1:01:00SPEAKERwhere the way you became a Jedi
1:01:01SPEAKERwas to have random chance touch you
1:01:04SPEAKERand make you, give you force powers basically.
1:01:07SPEAKERDid you not also have to like grind
1:01:08SPEAKERand/or get some unique item or rare item?
1:01:11SPEAKER- I think eventually people kind of reverse engineered
1:01:14SPEAKERhow it worked, but when you,
1:01:16SPEAKEReventually you would get a quest
1:01:18SPEAKERthat would unlock a holocron and then that was,
1:01:21SPEAKERthat would basically open up another slot
1:01:22SPEAKERon your character slot screen
1:01:23SPEAKERthat would let you create a Jedi character.
1:01:25SPEAKER- I never played Galaxies, I knew a few people,
1:01:28SPEAKERI was a GameSpot at the time who were way into it,
1:01:30SPEAKERbut that was the reputation of that game is,
1:01:33SPEAKERhey, it's the Star Wars MMO
1:01:34SPEAKERwhere you basically can't be a Jedi.
1:01:36SPEAKERI mean, like on some level is a fascinating,
1:01:38SPEAKERlike that's, I mean, it's certainly true to the universe.
1:01:41SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:01:42SPEAKER- That a very few select number of people
1:01:44SPEAKERshould be able to become a Jedi.
1:01:46SPEAKER- And like a lot of the roles,
1:01:48SPEAKERthe game was designed so that like the combat stuff
1:01:50SPEAKERrequired people to work together in different ways.
1:01:53SPEAKERSo like, if you did too much combat,
1:01:54SPEAKERyou had to go hang out in a bar and watch somebody dance
1:01:57SPEAKERso that you're like, I don't wanna say,
1:01:59SPEAKERit's like mental fortitude or something.
1:02:00SPEAKERSo like one of your numbers would go down
1:02:02SPEAKERand you'd be able to go back out and handle it again.
1:02:04SPEAKER- And weren't there, wasn't there a player dancer class?
1:02:06SPEAKER- Yeah, there's a player dancer class.
1:02:08SPEAKERSo you were watching a human being stand there
1:02:10SPEAKERand press three, four, three, four, three, four, three, four.
1:02:13SPEAKER- It's incredible.
1:02:15SPEAKER- There were like food,
1:02:16SPEAKERI feel like there were food classes.
1:02:18SPEAKERI didn't actually, it's been 20 years since I played this
1:02:20SPEAKERand I didn't load it up, load up a Wiki page beforehand,
1:02:24SPEAKERbut yeah, it was wild.
1:02:25SPEAKERAnd it was, it's kind of like,
1:02:29SPEAKERI've never played Black Desert Online,
1:02:30SPEAKERbut I assume it's what Black Desert Online is like,
1:02:32SPEAKERor one of those, one of those like crafting MMOs
1:02:35SPEAKERwhere you're just building,
1:02:37SPEAKERI mean, it kind of reminds me of something like Valheim
1:02:40SPEAKERor Subnautica or something,
1:02:41SPEAKERbut multiplayer with hundreds of people in the server.
1:02:45SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:02:47SPEAKER- So yeah, like it definitely not a power fantasy game
1:02:49SPEAKERin a big way.
1:02:51SPEAKER- I respect, even if it was not successful
1:02:53SPEAKERand did not catch on for obvious reasons, but.
1:02:57SPEAKER- Eventually they sacked Raf and sent him off
1:03:00SPEAKERto do other things.
1:03:01SPEAKERAnd they were like, yo, everybody can be a Jedi.
1:03:03SPEAKERIf you want, you just have to grind out this amount of time
1:03:05SPEAKERand blah, blah, blah.
1:03:06SPEAKERAnd they made a real path forward
1:03:07SPEAKERand then it was never quite the same again, so.
1:03:09SPEAKER- And then they very hastily set about developing
1:03:11SPEAKERStar Wars, The Old Republic.
1:03:12SPEAKER- Well, that was.
1:03:13SPEAKER- Which, I mean, it was, it didn't come out for years
1:03:16SPEAKERbecause it was somewhat troubled in development, but.
1:03:18SPEAKER- And it was a different studio too.
1:03:20SPEAKER- Of course, yeah, that was Bioware.
1:03:21SPEAKERAnd it was post-World of Warcraft,
1:03:23SPEAKERwhich we're getting to next, but.
1:03:24SPEAKER- Yeah, I was gonna say.
1:03:25SPEAKER- But the point is that was the game
1:03:27SPEAKERthat was just lightsabers for days.
1:03:28SPEAKERI mean, it was just like, hey,
1:03:29SPEAKERyou wanna be this Jedi class or this other Jedi class?
1:03:32SPEAKERWe got Jedis here.
1:03:33SPEAKER- Well, and just to be clear,
1:03:35SPEAKERlike in the Star Wars galaxy's timeframe,
1:03:37SPEAKEREverQuest had like, you know,
1:03:40SPEAKERhundreds of thousands of players at any given time
1:03:43SPEAKERand was viewed as an enormous success.
1:03:45SPEAKERGames like Dark Age of Camelot and Shadowrun, I think,
1:03:49SPEAKERor Shadowgate, I can't remember, Shadow something.
1:03:51SPEAKER- Shadowrun. - Like Shadowrun.
1:03:52SPEAKERYeah, there were like PvP focused MMOs
1:03:55SPEAKERand there were medieval style MMOs and all these.
1:03:58SPEAKER- Anarchy Online.
1:03:58SPEAKER- Yeah, and like the ceiling was EverQuest,
1:04:02SPEAKERwhich was 600,000 players or something.
1:04:05SPEAKERAnd then WoW came out in 2004 and lit the world on fire
1:04:09SPEAKERand they immediately had like 4 million players
1:04:11SPEAKERand like it was completely.
1:04:15SPEAKER- Yeah, so A, there's your power fantasy.
1:04:18SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:04:19SPEAKER- Like WoW is your edges sanded off.
1:04:20SPEAKEREverybody's got guard rails to make sure
1:04:22SPEAKERthey keep having a good time, power fantasy.
1:04:24SPEAKER- The spells had descriptions that told you what they did.
1:04:28SPEAKERThey had numbers.
1:04:29SPEAKERWhen a guy had a quest,
1:04:30SPEAKERinstead of walking up and talking to him
1:04:32SPEAKERand just saying the words that he said back to him
1:04:34SPEAKERuntil he responded to something,
1:04:36SPEAKERyou had an exclamation point over a person
1:04:38SPEAKERand you could click a button that told,
1:04:40SPEAKERnot only did it tell you what you had to do
1:04:42SPEAKERto complete the quest, it also told you what you got
1:04:44SPEAKERif you were gonna do the quest,
1:04:46SPEAKERwhich was revolutionary in the space.
1:04:48SPEAKER- Yeah, World of Warcraft,
1:04:50SPEAKERobviously the first like true smash hit
1:04:53SPEAKERmainstream multiplayer phenomenon.
1:04:56SPEAKERLike I think it's, I think it's-
1:04:58SPEAKER- Make the case that Halo 2 was probably that.
1:05:01SPEAKER- I don't think the numbers compare.
1:05:02SPEAKERWell, but I mean, that was not a game that was online only.
1:05:05SPEAKER- That's true.
1:05:06SPEAKER- I guess is the distinction I would make.
1:05:07SPEAKER- That's true.
1:05:08SPEAKER- Like plenty of people bought Halo 2
1:05:09SPEAKERand never played it online,
1:05:10SPEAKERor maybe it only did briefly or just here and there.
1:05:13SPEAKERWorld of Warcraft could only be played online.
1:05:15SPEAKER- I mean, I feel like tribes
1:05:17SPEAKERand there were multiplayer only PC games,
1:05:19SPEAKERbut not at the scale that World of Warcraft had.
1:05:21SPEAKER- Like, I mean, you tell me if this is a soft rubric here,
1:05:26SPEAKERbut like none of those games had commercials
1:05:28SPEAKERon network television featuring like prominent celebrities.
1:05:32SPEAKERYou know, that game was posting numbers,
1:05:35SPEAKERlike eight digit player numbers
1:05:36SPEAKERthat were paying $15 a month.
1:05:38SPEAKER- Yeah, that's true.
1:05:39SPEAKER- Like it was just,
1:05:40SPEAKERI think that game was at a scale of economics
1:05:42SPEAKERthat no other multiplayer game had gotten to
1:05:44SPEAKERfor multiplayer in particular.
1:05:45SPEAKERLike again, I'm not talking about like
1:05:47SPEAKERwhat was Halo 2's like lifetime take
1:05:50SPEAKERin terms of revenue or whatever,
1:05:52SPEAKERbut not all of that revenue came from Halo 2's online.
1:05:55SPEAKER- Like I don't, there was a, like to give reference,
1:05:58SPEAKERlike when Quake 1 was really popular
1:06:01SPEAKERand a bazillion people like,
1:06:04SPEAKERand like you would load up the server browser,
1:06:06SPEAKERthere would be like 2000 servers
1:06:09SPEAKERthat it would pick up worldwide, right?
1:06:11SPEAKEROr for your region.
1:06:12SPEAKERAnd like it wasn't unusual for you to hop onto a Quake server
1:06:16SPEAKERand see like blue from blues news or like a developer,
1:06:21SPEAKERsomebody with a developer name playing
1:06:23SPEAKERthat you recognize, right?
1:06:24SPEAKER'Cause it was a relatively small community.
1:06:26SPEAKERBy this time it was a big,
1:06:28SPEAKERit felt like a global phenomenon.
1:06:30SPEAKER- Yeah, yes.
1:06:31SPEAKERLike World of Warcraft, not too many years after it came out
1:06:33SPEAKERhad 15 million subscribers paying $15 a month.
1:06:37SPEAKER- And also like they had a rough launch,
1:06:39SPEAKEReverything had rough launches back then,
1:06:41SPEAKERbut like they figured it out pretty quickly
1:06:46SPEAKERand it seemed to resolve itself
1:06:48SPEAKERto the point that the game was really playable
1:06:50SPEAKERfor a large number of people at any given time
1:06:52SPEAKERin a way that wouldn't have been possible
1:06:54SPEAKERthree or four years before.
1:06:56SPEAKER- I still wish I had pots.
1:06:58SPEAKERI don't know that I ever actually had the opportunity,
1:07:00SPEAKERbut they sold server shards
1:07:02SPEAKERfrom the original like launch WoW servers.
1:07:04SPEAKER- Oh, wow.
1:07:05SPEAKER- I kind of wish I had bought
1:07:06SPEAKERa narrative server shard from launch.
1:07:09SPEAKER- That's pretty amazing.
1:07:10SPEAKER- That was the server we played on at launch
1:07:12SPEAKERand that would have been a fun thing to have.
1:07:13SPEAKERBut anyway, like WoW is,
1:07:18SPEAKERif Quake was like the first inflection point
1:07:20SPEAKERfor multiplayer, I feel like WoW was the next one
1:07:22SPEAKERwhere like suddenly everybody in the world
1:07:25SPEAKERkind of knew what online gaming was.
1:07:27SPEAKER- I mean, there was a moment
1:07:28SPEAKERwhen there was a South Park WoW episode, right?
1:07:32SPEAKERWhich was season 10, episode eight.
1:07:36SPEAKERIt aired in 2006.
1:07:37SPEAKERThis was two years after Warcraft came out.
1:07:40SPEAKER- Like that game just achieved
1:07:42SPEAKERa level of cultural penetration that nothing had before.
1:07:45SPEAKER- Yeah, I get behind this.
1:07:48SPEAKERI still think Halo 2 was pretty important for online, but.
1:07:50SPEAKER- I know, I fully agree, but I feel like Halo 2
1:07:53SPEAKERwas important among people who already played games online.
1:07:56SPEAKERI think World of Warcraft was bringing way more people
1:07:59SPEAKERinto playing games online
1:08:01SPEAKERwho had never even thought about it before.
1:08:02SPEAKER- Halo 2 was also the first time
1:08:04SPEAKERI think a lot of people had experienced voice.
1:08:06SPEAKERIt was the first big mainstream game that had voice.
1:08:09SPEAKERAnd it had both, in retrospect, it's funny
1:08:11SPEAKER'cause it had both team chat that worked over
1:08:13SPEAKERlike your headset, like a voice call,
1:08:16SPEAKERbut it also had prox chat in game.
1:08:17SPEAKERSo when you were killing somebody on the other team,
1:08:18SPEAKERyou could talk to them, which in retrospect
1:08:21SPEAKERis really funny to me.
1:08:23SPEAKER- True.
1:08:25SPEAKER- So, okay, so anyway, WoW hit,
1:08:26SPEAKERthe 360 came out a few years later.
1:08:29SPEAKER- Or the following year, actually.
1:08:30SPEAKERI mean, a lot happened very quickly.
1:08:32SPEAKERIn fact, I had forgotten Halo 2 came out
1:08:34SPEAKERlike basically the same month as World of Warcraft.
1:08:37SPEAKER- Oh yeah, right?
1:08:38SPEAKER2004 was a good year in retrospect.
1:08:40SPEAKER- I think they were both November.
1:08:41SPEAKERLet me just triple check.
1:08:43SPEAKERYes, those games were like two weeks apart.
1:08:46SPEAKERSo like Halo 2 and World of Warcraft came out
1:08:48SPEAKERand then three, you know, we did the,
1:08:49SPEAKERyou should just go listen to the full episode
1:08:51SPEAKERwe did about the Xbox 360 if you want to hear more,
1:08:53SPEAKERbut we've talked at great length about
1:08:56SPEAKERhow much the 360 did for online console infrastructure.
1:08:59SPEAKER- Well, how much it shaped the future
1:09:01SPEAKERof multiplayer games, really.
1:09:03SPEAKER- Or really just kind of defined the playbook
1:09:05SPEAKERfor what a modern online connected console would be.
1:09:08SPEAKERAnd so all that happened within a year,
1:09:09SPEAKERlike Halo 2 and WoW and then the 360
1:09:11SPEAKERall happened within a year or so.
1:09:13SPEAKER- Wild.
1:09:14SPEAKER- That was kind of, that was the moment
1:09:15SPEAKERwhere multiplayer just went mainstream and stayed there.
1:09:18SPEAKER- Yeah, and then like the post 360 era phones took off
1:09:22SPEAKERand made multiplayer games a thing.
1:09:24SPEAKERLike millions of people are playing Clash Royale every day
1:09:27SPEAKERand games like that.
1:09:30SPEAKERThe thing that's interesting to me is, you know,
1:09:32SPEAKERI have a 12 year old kid, right?
1:09:34SPEAKERAnd her expectation is that everything's multiplayer.
1:09:38SPEAKERLike she grew up playing games like Human Fall Flat
1:09:41SPEAKERand Minecraft and Roblox and Fortnite.
1:09:46SPEAKERAnd like, when she, when I bought her The Sims,
1:09:49SPEAKERI mean, she plays The Sims and she likes The Sims,
1:09:51SPEAKERbut to her, the great failing of The Sims
1:09:53SPEAKERis that there's no way for her to share
1:09:55SPEAKERthe things that she makes in The Sims
1:09:57SPEAKERwith her friends, right?
1:09:58SPEAKER- If only The Sims Online was still running.
1:10:00SPEAKER- If only The Sims Online was any good when it came out.
1:10:03SPEAKER- Fair, fair.
1:10:05SPEAKER- But like, there's no, like her table stakes
1:10:09SPEAKERfor her and her friends and her friends,
1:10:11SPEAKERher generation is stuff like Peak and Bloxburg,
1:10:16SPEAKERwhere they make something and then they show it
1:10:18SPEAKERto their friends or they do something
1:10:19SPEAKERand then they share it with their friends.
1:10:21SPEAKERAnd like, to the point that even when she's playing
1:10:24SPEAKERa single player game now, she'll often get on a call
1:10:27SPEAKERwith a friend and they'll have like windows in Discord
1:10:31SPEAKERwith their video streams of the games,
1:10:33SPEAKERthe single player games that they're playing back and forth,
1:10:36SPEAKERwhich I think is fascinating.
1:10:39SPEAKER- That's all really interesting to me objectively
1:10:41SPEAKERas a kind of social trend.
1:10:43SPEAKERAs somebody who like kind of effectively has grown up
1:10:46SPEAKERand aged alongside this medium though,
1:10:49SPEAKERkind of maybe a little depressing.
1:10:51SPEAKERLike there are so many single player games
1:10:52SPEAKERthat just don't lend themselves to multiplayer
1:10:54SPEAKERthat like, it kind of makes me worry
1:10:57SPEAKERlike if this is the direction the market is going,
1:11:00SPEAKERor our whole genre is just gonna get squeezed
1:11:02SPEAKERout of existence because people don't care
1:11:04SPEAKERabout them anymore because they aren't multiplayer.
1:11:06SPEAKER- I think the thing, like she still plays,
1:11:09SPEAKERshe still comes in here and hooks up to the CRT
1:11:10SPEAKERand plays original Super Mario Brothers, right?
1:11:12SPEAKERLike there's a place and a time for everything,
1:11:16SPEAKERbut like for her, like she would never play
1:11:18SPEAKERa single player survival crafting game, I don't think.
1:11:21SPEAKERBecause she wants the, like part of that experience for her
1:11:24SPEAKERis I'm gonna build something and then I'm gonna invite
1:11:27SPEAKERmy friend to the server and then we're gonna go
1:11:28SPEAKERon an adventure together, right?
1:11:30SPEAKER- You know, in the case of like a survival crafting game,
1:11:32SPEAKERI get it, I think I actually have the same reaction
1:11:34SPEAKERin a lot of cases there, like when that kind of silly
1:11:37SPEAKERparody game Escape from Dukov came out recently.
1:11:40SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:11:41SPEAKER- Like that's a single player game, it's not Tarkov,
1:11:44SPEAKERit's not like a first person shooter,
1:11:45SPEAKERit's a little kind of cutesy overhead game.
1:11:48SPEAKERBut it's the same style of extraction shooter
1:11:50SPEAKERand when I saw that was single player only,
1:11:52SPEAKERI was like, I don't know if I want to play one of these
1:11:54SPEAKERthat doesn't have other people in it.
1:11:55SPEAKERSo I guess I do get it for certain genres,
1:11:57SPEAKERbut like, you know, absolutely everything
1:12:00SPEAKERdoes not need to be multiplayer.
1:12:02SPEAKER- I mean, agreed, like Stardew Valley is a good example,
1:12:05SPEAKERright, 'cause she's like, that should be a thing
1:12:07SPEAKERthat she's into given the other games that she likes.
1:12:10SPEAKERAnd it's just, she's, A, it doesn't present itself
1:12:14SPEAKERas the game that it is early on in a way
1:12:16SPEAKERthat it just hasn't gotten to the point
1:12:17SPEAKERthat she's engaged with it yet.
1:12:20SPEAKERSo yeah, I don't know, like it's interesting
1:12:22SPEAKER'cause I think, I mean, I think you're right,
1:12:25SPEAKERlike I don't know, I haven't seen her dig into something
1:12:30SPEAKERlike, I remember when Fallout 3 came out, for example,
1:12:32SPEAKERand I played hundreds of hours of Fallout 3
1:12:35SPEAKERbecause I'd never played an RPG like that before
1:12:37SPEAKERand it was absolutely captivating.
1:12:39SPEAKERAnd I don't know that there's an equivalent
1:12:42SPEAKERthat's gonna grab her like that, right?
1:12:44SPEAKER- Yeah. - Yeah.
1:12:45SPEAKER- I don't know that Skyrim would do its magic on her
1:12:47SPEAKERor whatever the next Bethesda RPG is gonna be,
1:12:50SPEAKERbut there's other stuff that's happened
1:12:53SPEAKERin the last decade and a half, but the big stuff,
1:12:57SPEAKERit's funny, we had like the table stakes for voice,
1:13:01SPEAKERvoice being part of the core,
1:13:03SPEAKERwe talked about this with the 360 episode a lot,
1:13:04SPEAKERbut voice becoming a core part of the offering
1:13:06SPEAKERwith the 360 kind of squeezed out a bunch of games
1:13:10SPEAKERlike ChromeHounds, like ChromeHounds is a perfect example,
1:13:14SPEAKERis a mech game where the game handled
1:13:18SPEAKERthe in-game communication itself,
1:13:20SPEAKERbut it made it a gameplay element.
1:13:22SPEAKERSo like in order, if you wanted to talk to people
1:13:23SPEAKERthat were out of line of sight of you,
1:13:25SPEAKERyou had to build repeaters or you had to capture repeaters
1:13:28SPEAKERaround the map and stuff like that.
1:13:29SPEAKER- Yeah, like voice communication was kind of an asset
1:13:32SPEAKERthat could be interrupted or taken away from you
1:13:33SPEAKERand had to be kind of regained through some kind of strife.
1:13:37SPEAKER- Yeah, and then that kind of went away for a long time.
1:13:39SPEAKERAnd it seems like it's coming back now.
1:13:40SPEAKERI feel like the rise of the modern ProxChat games
1:13:43SPEAKERis kind of like Phasmophobia did this obviously,
1:13:46SPEAKERbut for lack of a better term, the friend slop category
1:13:50SPEAKERfrom Peak and Repo and Lethal Company and all of those,
1:13:55SPEAKERkind of build it in as a part
1:13:57SPEAKERof the core game experience now, which I like.
1:14:00SPEAKER- It's been rad seeing that come back
1:14:01SPEAKERand become a feature again,
1:14:02SPEAKERespecially now that there's much better tech to facilitate,
1:14:05SPEAKERvoice modulation and the types of things that make it fun.
1:14:09SPEAKER- Yeah, the other thing that's happened in the last decade
1:14:12SPEAKERis the cross-play, the rise of cross-play has been,
1:14:17SPEAKERI think that's maybe an Xbox One/PS4 era innovation
1:14:22SPEAKERthat really took off.
1:14:23SPEAKER- Broadly, yes, although as I rediscovered
1:14:26SPEAKERlooking into this episode,
1:14:27SPEAKERQuake 3 and the Dreamcast kind of did it first.
1:14:30SPEAKER- I don't think that was a good thing
1:14:31SPEAKERfor Dreamcast players, Brad.
1:14:32SPEAKER- No, my understanding is that it was a nightmare
1:14:34SPEAKERto play on a Dreamcast against people on a PC.
1:14:36SPEAKER- I can't imagine, I mean, look,
1:14:40SPEAKEReven playing on a Dreamcast with a single-stick controller
1:14:43SPEAKERversus people who were also in the Dreamcast
1:14:45SPEAKERand had the Dreamcast mouse and keyboard
1:14:47SPEAKERwas probably a nightmare.
1:14:50SPEAKER- I remember when Shadowrun, the game that was,
1:14:53SPEAKERthe Games for Windows game that was cross-play
1:14:55SPEAKERwith the Xbox 360 and PC,
1:14:59SPEAKERthere was nothing better than being one of the 18 people
1:15:01SPEAKERwho had that game on PC
1:15:02SPEAKERand playing against all the console people.
1:15:04SPEAKERJust victims everywhere you see.
1:15:07SPEAKER- Yep, but yes, yes, you're right.
1:15:09SPEAKERCross-play has become much more institutionalized
1:15:12SPEAKERto the extent that there are this straight up middleware
1:15:15SPEAKERthat facilitates it these days.
1:15:16SPEAKER- Yeah, and multiple, this is one of the reasons
1:15:21SPEAKERyou see Epic Online Services in a lot of games, right,
1:15:24SPEAKERis that they provide a NAT traversal and cross-play portal
1:15:29SPEAKERthat's just free if you're an Unreal Engine game
1:15:31SPEAKERor very low cost.
1:15:33SPEAKERThere's also a bunch of other middleware things,
1:15:35SPEAKERjust Pragma and I can't remember the thing
1:15:38SPEAKERthat Microsoft sells, but it's PlayFab
1:15:42SPEAKERis the thing that Helldivers used.
1:15:44SPEAKERThere's a handful of others, but yeah, you can basically,
1:15:48SPEAKERwhat would have been impossible in 2007
1:15:52SPEAKERbecause the platforms wouldn't let you
1:15:54SPEAKERand really, really expensive in 2017
1:15:56SPEAKER'cause you'd have to have a 30%,
1:15:58SPEAKERlike for Destiny, for example,
1:16:00SPEAKERthey probably had a 30% DevOps team
1:16:03SPEAKERto maintain the servers that made cross-play work.
1:16:05SPEAKERNow you just buy your servers from Pragma
1:16:08SPEAKERor somebody like that and you pay for their middleware
1:16:11SPEAKERand you have a platform that allows you to do cross-play
1:16:13SPEAKERwithout really your people having to do anything,
1:16:15SPEAKERwhich is kinda nice.
1:16:16SPEAKER- Yeah, same thing for cloud infrastructure,
1:16:19SPEAKERfor server scaling, that kind of thing.
1:16:22SPEAKERLike the online infrastructure that's out there
1:16:25SPEAKERto facilitate games working across platforms
1:16:27SPEAKERand allowing you to pick up save games
1:16:30SPEAKERfrom one platform to the next and all that stuff
1:16:32SPEAKERhave become so much more accessible and democratized.
1:16:35SPEAKER- It's really interesting, do you know what,
1:16:38SPEAKERdo you remember what the WoW server looked like?
1:16:40SPEAKERWas there a rack-mounted server or was it just a beige box?
1:16:43SPEAKER- They were selling it piecemeal,
1:16:45SPEAKERI think they would refer to it as like shards or blades,
1:16:47SPEAKERwhich I think was maybe like a 1U rack each or something.
1:16:51SPEAKERI saw one at the Computer History Museum as well,
1:16:54SPEAKERthey have one down there, which I want to say,
1:16:57SPEAKERI wanna say it was like a 1U basically server box.
1:17:01SPEAKER- Just like that, like?
1:17:03SPEAKER- Maybe more than one, it could be two or even four,
1:17:05SPEAKERI don't remember, but.
1:17:08SPEAKER- But so yeah, the difference that AWS
1:17:14SPEAKERand the rise of virtualized cloud servers went
1:17:18SPEAKERis that for a while everybody's doing
1:17:20SPEAKERall of their multiplayer infrastructure in the cloud
1:17:22SPEAKERand then that stuff started getting expensive.
1:17:24SPEAKERAnd so now these days people do a hybrid approach
1:17:27SPEAKERwhere they, like if you're doing hosted servers
1:17:29SPEAKERfor your multiplayer game, you'll do like a handful
1:17:33SPEAKERto several hundred bare metal machines that you just buy
1:17:36SPEAKERand put into rack colo places around the world.
1:17:39SPEAKERAnd then you'll have some sort of load balancing thing
1:17:41SPEAKERthat spins up AWS or Azure or Google Cloud Services
1:17:44SPEAKERor whatever instances as players, as like demand spikes.
1:17:49SPEAKERSo that's why like a game like Arc Raiders can come out
1:17:52SPEAKERand have 350,000 people playing it on day one
1:17:54SPEAKERand not really have a lot of downtime.
1:17:58SPEAKERNow, as we've talked about in the past,
1:18:01SPEAKERoften on those launch days, they'll find
1:18:04SPEAKERthat having 30,000 people hitting their login server
1:18:07SPEAKERwill jack things up and that's the kind of thing
1:18:09SPEAKERyou can't really find out until you launch.
1:18:11SPEAKERSo stuff still does go down sometimes.
1:18:13SPEAKERBut generally speaking, it's a lot easier now
1:18:15SPEAKERthan it used to be.
1:18:16SPEAKER- Yeah, you know, I feel like, I mean,
1:18:17SPEAKERwe're coming off this month, Battlefield 6
1:18:19SPEAKERand Arc Raiders were two huge multiplayer only games.
1:18:23SPEAKERWell, Battlefield 6 technically has a campaign,
1:18:26SPEAKERbut you know what I mean.
1:18:27SPEAKER- Multiplayer game, yeah.
1:18:29SPEAKER- Both of those games launch, I mean,
1:18:32SPEAKERthere may be a developer from one or the other game
1:18:33SPEAKERlistening to this like rolling their eyes,
1:18:35SPEAKERbut I started to say like those games
1:18:36SPEAKERboth launched problem free as far as I could see.
1:18:38SPEAKERLike there was no, there were certainly no headlines
1:18:40SPEAKERabout like, oh, the Arc Raider servers are down again
1:18:43SPEAKERor like they both seem to have weathered enormous
1:18:46SPEAKERinitial player bases like extremely well.
1:18:49SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:18:50SPEAKER- And that's, I'm not gonna say brand new,
1:18:52SPEAKERbut it feels like that's a lot more common now
1:18:54SPEAKERthan it used to be.
1:18:54SPEAKER- Well, Arc Raiders had a little bit up and downtime
1:18:57SPEAKERon Sunday, I think, but that was it.
1:18:59SPEAKERThe last thing I remember that had a real problem
1:19:01SPEAKERwas Helldivers and I believe that that was because
1:19:04SPEAKERthe demand for that game exceeded the middlewares back end.
1:19:09SPEAKER- Yeah, I think the game is a bit of a special case,
1:19:12SPEAKERI think, in terms of expectations versus demand.
1:19:15SPEAKER- Yeah, 'cause they expected to have like 60,000 people
1:19:18SPEAKERplaying it and had 300,000 on the first day
1:19:20SPEAKERor something ridiculous.
1:19:21SPEAKERAnyway, that's also interesting 'cause like in 1999 or '98,
1:19:26SPEAKER10,000 people played EverQuest on the first day
1:19:28SPEAKERand brought down San Diego, the city's internet connection.
1:19:32SPEAKERThese days, you have 300,000 people playing
1:19:34SPEAKERon the launch weekend and everything's fine.
1:19:36SPEAKER- Yeah, everything's a lot more resilient now.
1:19:39SPEAKER- And then the last thing I wanna shout out
1:19:41SPEAKERis that people figure out NAT traversal.
1:19:43SPEAKERThey use servers to punch holes in NATs now.
1:19:48SPEAKERSo in the 360 and Xbox One and PS2, PS3 and PS4 eras,
1:19:56SPEAKERyou kind of, you fairly regularly had to open ports,
1:20:00SPEAKERnot so much anymore.
1:20:01SPEAKER- Yeah, you would still see NAT errors on like,
1:20:04SPEAKERI think Destiny 1.
1:20:05SPEAKERI remember on a PS4 seeing issues with that.
1:20:09SPEAKER- Is your NAT promiscuous, Brad?
1:20:11SPEAKER- Look, I'd rather not talk about my NATs habits
1:20:14SPEAKERand preferences in public, thank you.
1:20:16SPEAKER- There's nothing to be ashamed of, that's all I'm saying.
1:20:20SPEAKER- Yes, you're not wrong, although if we all just switched
1:20:23SPEAKERto IPv6, then this wouldn't be a problem anymore, would it?
1:20:26SPEAKER- I don't want my IP address.
1:20:29SPEAKERI don't want my computers on the public network.
1:20:32SPEAKER- Well, you still have a firewall.
1:20:34SPEAKER- I don't, yeah.
1:20:35SPEAKER- You still have a gateway and a firewall.
1:20:36SPEAKERYou just, every computer, every device in existence
1:20:39SPEAKERgets its own real, I am not advocating for IPv6.
1:20:42SPEAKERThose addresses, those addresses are--
1:20:45SPEAKER- I don't wanna have to type them in, man.
1:20:46SPEAKER- And IPv6 addresses are vomited up by Cthulhu.
1:20:49SPEAKERLike those things are not meant to be read by human beings.
1:20:53SPEAKER- Yeah, it's bad.
1:20:54SPEAKER- But anyway.
1:20:56SPEAKER- I think that's it, I think we've reached the end.
1:20:58SPEAKER- Yes, speaking of, I started to speak the infernal words,
1:21:00SPEAKERmaybe we should do an IPv6 episode,
1:21:02SPEAKERbut I'm not sure either of us are qualified to do that.
1:21:04SPEAKER- I mean, it's basically just IPv4,
1:21:06SPEAKERbut it's, you know, infinitely larger.
1:21:08SPEAKER- Yep.
1:21:10SPEAKER- Yeah, so okay, so non-comprehensive,
1:21:15SPEAKERkind of filtered through our experience, obviously,
1:21:17SPEAKERis a lot of stuff here is.
1:21:18SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:21:19SPEAKER- But I thought, like it's interesting if you just,
1:21:23SPEAKERif you're young and don't remember,
1:21:24SPEAKERdon't know what it was like to play games
1:21:27SPEAKERon the internet in the '90s,
1:21:29SPEAKERor alternately, if you just have forgotten
1:21:32SPEAKERhow much of a pain in the ass everything used to be,
1:21:34SPEAKERit's sometimes nice to think about
1:21:35SPEAKERhow easy the kids have it these days.
1:21:37SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, I have forgotten.
1:21:38SPEAKERLike looking, doing this, even this quick little survey
1:21:41SPEAKERthat we put together here,
1:21:42SPEAKEReverything that we've talked about here is so established
1:21:46SPEAKERand so much just a way of life
1:21:47SPEAKERfor people who play games these days
1:21:49SPEAKERthat I had even forgotten how ramshackle
1:21:51SPEAKERa lot of the stuff used to be.
1:21:53SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, you think about things like,
1:21:58SPEAKERlike the big pitch for Steam initially,
1:22:00SPEAKERwhen Valve sent Randy Pitchford to E3
1:22:03SPEAKERto have meetings with people
1:22:04SPEAKERand talk about this new Steam service,
1:22:07SPEAKERthe pitch wasn't, hey, you can download games
1:22:09SPEAKERand play them on your computer.
1:22:10SPEAKERIt was, yeah, we'll distribute your patches for you
1:22:13SPEAKERso you don't have to worry about that
1:22:14SPEAKERso all your players stay in sync
1:22:15SPEAKERand like your servers stay in sync.
1:22:17SPEAKERAnd that, like, it was a problem.
1:22:19SPEAKERThere were services you paid money for
1:22:21SPEAKERto download patches faster
1:22:22SPEAKERand bypass queues and all that stuff.
1:22:24SPEAKER- That was a pillar of GameSpot's paid service back then
1:22:27SPEAKERwas faster downloads for patches.
1:22:29SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, it was wild.
1:22:32SPEAKERAnd now a lot of that stuff's just easy, it turns out, so.
1:22:37SPEAKERI still also think about like early,
1:22:40SPEAKERlike downtime for early MMOs,
1:22:43SPEAKERlike EverQuest and WoW before they had virtualized servers
1:22:45SPEAKERand server images and stuff like that.
1:22:47SPEAKERIt would be like 12 hour downtime.
1:22:50SPEAKERI remember sometimes EverQuest patches
1:22:52SPEAKERwould be 12 hours of downtime
1:22:54SPEAKERand then it'd take them three more days
1:22:55SPEAKER'cause they'd jack something up
1:22:56SPEAKERand the servers would just be down that whole time.
1:22:59SPEAKERIt's wild.
1:23:00SPEAKER- I do have a vague memory of big online games like that,
1:23:02SPEAKERlike on big patch day or expansion day or whatever,
1:23:05SPEAKERlike just telling myself like,
1:23:08SPEAKERmaybe don't plan to really play much of this
1:23:10SPEAKERfor the first week.
1:23:11SPEAKER- Oh yeah.
1:23:12SPEAKER- Kind of consider release date plus one week
1:23:15SPEAKERto be the actual release date
1:23:16SPEAKERwhen you'll be able to just play whenever you want.
1:23:18SPEAKER- I feel like, and I could be remembering this wrong,
1:23:20SPEAKERI might be remembering one of the later WoW expansions,
1:23:22SPEAKERbut I feel like the WoW,
1:23:23SPEAKERthe first WoW expansion was actually worse
1:23:26SPEAKERthan the initial launch
1:23:30SPEAKER'cause they had a year's worth of players
1:23:32SPEAKERwho'd come in and dipped out
1:23:33SPEAKERand were coming back for the expansion.
1:23:35SPEAKER- I can see that.
1:23:36SPEAKER- Yeah, it was hard.
1:23:39SPEAKERGames are hard, man.
1:23:40SPEAKER- Yeah, Devolver Digital went out there on Twitter
1:23:43SPEAKERand Blue Sky, I saw they posted this both places.
1:23:46SPEAKERThey just, I enjoy their social media account.
1:23:48SPEAKEROn occasion, they went out there this week
1:23:50SPEAKERand just posted everything about making games
1:23:52SPEAKERis harder than you think.
1:23:53SPEAKER(laughing)
1:23:54SPEAKER- They're not wrong.
1:23:55SPEAKER- Which has been the repeated lesson
1:23:57SPEAKERof talking to people who make games
1:23:59SPEAKERfor the entirety of time I've been doing that.
1:24:01SPEAKER- Yeah, Rami Ismail says every game's a miracle
1:24:05SPEAKERand he's not wrong.
1:24:07SPEAKERFrom getting people to give you money to make them,
1:24:09SPEAKERto building it, to shipping it, to deciding what it is,
1:24:13SPEAKERto yeah, to getting people to buy it.
1:24:15SPEAKERTo efficiently making the dopamine release.
1:24:18SPEAKER- I mean, that's what Raf says.
1:24:19SPEAKERIt's just about making things that make you excited
1:24:22SPEAKERabout having dopamine come out.
1:24:24SPEAKEROr maybe serotonin if you're into cozy games, I guess.
1:24:28SPEAKERBut you know what else will make the dopamine come out, Brad?
1:24:31SPEAKER- What's that?
1:24:32SPEAKER- Supporting your favorite podcast.
1:24:34SPEAKER- True.
1:24:35SPEAKER- Yeah, we're listener supported.
1:24:37SPEAKERWithout you guys, we're not here.
1:24:39SPEAKERWe're not doing this every week.
1:24:40SPEAKERSo if you would like to support the show,
1:24:41SPEAKERyou'd like to keep the dream alive.
1:24:44SPEAKERI don't know if there's a dream here.
1:24:45SPEAKERI just, sometimes I just say things.
1:24:48SPEAKERYou can go to patreon.com/techpod.
1:24:50SPEAKERAgain, that's patreon.com/techpod,
1:24:53SPEAKERwhere for five bucks a month, you get access to the Discord,
1:24:56SPEAKERwhich is full of lovely nerds,
1:24:57SPEAKERtalking about lovely nerd stuff.
1:25:00SPEAKERYou get access to our monthly patron exclusive episodes,
1:25:03SPEAKERwhere we talk about ongoing projects
1:25:05SPEAKERand small things that don't warrant a whole episode,
1:25:08SPEAKERor just sometimes we just sit down
1:25:10SPEAKERand ramble about what we're, I mean, look,
1:25:14SPEAKERthese days Brad's been asking me a bunch of Linux questions,
1:25:16SPEAKERor telling me Linux answers.
1:25:19SPEAKER- You're an expert.
1:25:20SPEAKER- No, I'm not an expert.
1:25:21SPEAKERWe're intentionally not experts.
1:25:23SPEAKER- I just saw the new episode came out today
1:25:24SPEAKERand our clone was mentioned in the description.
1:25:27SPEAKERI'm curious to hear how that went.
1:25:29SPEAKER- Well, look, we can talk about that,
1:25:31SPEAKERbut you can go to patreon.com/techpod and sign up.
1:25:35SPEAKERWe appreciate everybody's support,
1:25:36SPEAKERbut we especially appreciate our executive producer
1:25:38SPEAKERto your patrons, including Jason Lee,
1:25:40SPEAKERInfelicitous Rips, Andrew Selosky, Jordan Lippett,
1:25:44SPEAKERBunny Crimes, Twinkle Twinkie, David Allen,
1:25:47SPEAKERJames Camick, and Pantheon,
1:25:49SPEAKERmakers of the HS3 high-speed 3D printer.
1:25:52SPEAKERThank you all so much.
1:25:53SPEAKER- Thank you.
1:25:54SPEAKER- And that will do it for us this week.
1:25:56SPEAKERWe would love to know your favorite online gaming memories
1:26:00SPEAKERof times past.
1:26:01SPEAKERWhat did we forget?
1:26:01SPEAKERI know we forgot some stuff.
1:26:02SPEAKERI know that we're gonna whack ourselves on the head
1:26:06SPEAKERas soon as we've mashed the stop button on this recording.
1:26:08SPEAKERSo send a note to techpod@content.town,
1:26:10SPEAKERand we will hit them at the questions episode
1:26:12SPEAKERat the end of the month.
1:26:14SPEAKERUntil then, please consider the environment
1:26:16SPEAKERbefore printing this podcast.