How playing together has changed since 1999
From Quake to Fortnite.
Around the time Eurogamer launched, I was temping at an insurance office in Bournemouth, and I had a temping lunch break pal called Ken who I'm invoking now for two reasons. Firstly, Ken was the first person I spoke to who ever talked about "net anxiety" - the worry that one should be off making their fortune on the new frontiers of the internet. Secondly, he was the first person I met who played games online. Actual games. There was a driving game he liked, and I think he dabbled in a few shooters. It was like alchemy to me. It was like knowing - and having lunch with - an actual wizard.
Here's the thing, though: I say Ken liked the games. In truth he was like one of those writers who doesn't like writing but likes having written. Ken liked being the only person I knew who played games online, but the actual playing of games online was an irritating faff. Disconnections. Random bugs. Abuse from distant players. Huge phone bills.
I think I could tell my 10-year-old daughter about Ken and his experiences and she'd be completely baffled. She's grown up with the internet but also with the idea that the internet and games should fit together seamlessly. I got broadband long before she was born. She comes home from school and games are waiting for her, online, effortlessly social, a place to chat as much as play, an extension of the conversations she had in the playground and on the way home.
This is the story when it comes to looking at how we've played together since the days of 1999. It's the story in that, everything has changed, and changed completely. The internet simultaneously got into everything, effortlessly, and it also got completely out of the way. No more waiting for the phone to be free or hoping that the cludge of cables and modems will work. No more third-party software just to get you dialled in. Now you just play, and maybe you don't even reflect on how wild it is, that I'm this Forza car in Brighton, right, but the car next to me is someone else and they're somewhere else.
Back in 1999, for me and for a lot of us, playing together meant playing in the same room. I played a lot of Worms 2 at university, with a bunch of us rotating around the laptop, often losing entire days to this game. Worms 2 needed proximity, I think. Played online or - gasp - played solo and it just isn't as good. You need to be near the people you are prodding off an island or laughing at as they accidentally Ninja-Rope into the sea. "I had you down as a Ninja-Roper" is still one of the most savage things anyone said to me at university.
It wasn't all hotseat, though. Plenty of games had that beautiful habit of carving the screen into two or four. Mario Kart 64. GoldenEye. Couch co-op was snug and sociable and kind of grim if nobody opened a window and aired the room out. There is a reason splitscreen is still so heavily requested: it does something with multiplayer that the internet can't. It elevates it to an event.
One thing I never did much of was LAN parties, but I have Merritt K's excellent book on the subject to close the gap. It seems I was missing out on an awful lot. Here are point-and-shoot glimpses into various muddled, grimly appointed, brilliant rooms where computers have been cobbled together and cables spread over desks and up walls. Here are boxes of Mountain Dew and crisps trodden into the carpet, and the mild crime scene of the average Dominos box flung open for the crows to pick away at. Talking of crime, these pictures remind me of the photography, years earlier, of Weegee, who used to bomb around New York getting to murders before the cops showed up. Nobody's dead, but there's still a late-night, early-morning wildness to it all. People have gone too far and discovered that it's brilliant. With the indoor flash and the suburban dark visible through the occasional window, with the manic leer and sweat of Mountain-Dew-crazed Quake fans, it feels, like Weegee's pictures do, as if every night was Halloween.
From here I guess we're into the modem era, into the camaraderie of virtual dorm rooms in EverQuest or WOW. The chat continued, but it was down in a little window in a corner of the screen. The games were such serious time hogs that many had the clock running in another corner so you didn't completely lose touch with the movement of the sun around our planet while playing.
It's funny that games like this are often used as a shorthand for isolation. I'm sure players did feel isolated, and the games did fill the role of a lot of other things in people's lives. But I have also met so many people who in turn met people - properly met them - through WOW and other MMOs. I once attended a Fan Fest panel on The Matrix Online, which was dying at the time, and there was this eerie moment when I realised that I was the only person in the room who didn't know everyone else. They hadn't met in real life, necessarily, but they knew each other right down to the catchphrases and personal philosophies.
This is just the broad trajectory, of course, and my memories and experiences will be different to yours. And our exploration of the weirder, niche moments will be different too. I remember playing Robotron on the 360 and making friends with an Italian Robotron genius who was way above me in the rankings - the online leaderboard was as much a part of the magic of playing together across implausible distances as a good headshot was. I remember the Nintendo wifi dongle that allowed me, very occasionally, to get in a game of Tetris DS against a Japanese master who would absolutely destroy me. It felt so weird: I was in Hove, they were on the other side of the planet. The unseen gap somehow closed for a few minutes. It was like having a murderously precise pen pal.
Typing all this, revisiting all this, I'm inclined to say that what changed wasn't just the technology - although that's changed beyond words since the start of Eurogamer and its background in Quake eSports. What's changed is the sense of giving yourself thoroughly to the online game. It's no longer tricky to play online, which is absolutely great, but because of that it's become commonplace - also great - and because of that maybe it's lost a little of its sense of witchcraft.
One last memory: going online on the evening my friend first got XBLA on his console. First to get broadband, first to get an Xbox, first to bring them all together. We played Burnout 3, I think, which is a good start as it's the greatest game ever made, or thereabouts. But we didn't really play. We just stood on the precipice as it glitched and behaved oddly. I remember a road with no cars, but something invisible was scattering the traffic cones about.
Inevitably, it was completely brilliant.