I remember when the Atari first came out. I was just a little kid, and was lucky enough to have a dad who wanted to give us the best and most fun toys, so one day he came home with the Atari 2600. It was big and bulky, the graphics were kind of comical, and the games mostly inscrutable to a four-year-old, but it managed to start a lifelong love affair with video games for me.
Nearly thirty years later now and the love affair is still going strong. The difference is that the Atari 2600 and its subsequent followers have been replaced by consoles, computers and handhelds, all of them featuring the most important revolution in gaming: video games you can play online.
It’s nearly impossible to quantify the way that the internet has changed our lives, almost all for the better, but there’s no more clear and obvious example to use than with the world of gaming. Back “in the day,” as kids say, games were limited to the number of controllers, the number of players the game itself could accommodate, the number of friends you could have in the same room. Well now, games you can play online get rid of all those limitations and replace them with the simple truth that the internet makes limitations a thing of the past.
The best video games you can play online cover just about every genre. A massively multi-player online roleplaying game, for example, is by definition “online.” This genre takes old favorites like Final Fantasy and Warcraft and puts them in a situation where you enter and alternate world full of fellow gamers like yourself, and can then choose to either work together for a similar goal or fight against each other for bragging rights.
MMORPGs for short, they’ve taken up a special niche in the gaming community. World of Warcraft is by far the biggest and most successful of the massively multi-player online roleplaying games featuring over twelve million monthly subscribers. That alone accounts for more than half of all MMORPG players.
OF course MMORPGs aren’t then only games you can play online. Another favorite genre of online gamers is the first-person shooter game, or FPS for short. The original was called Castle Wolfenstein, released in the early ’90s for computer gaming. Updates and breakthroughs in trasnfer rate and graphics eventually led to CounterStrike, the FPS that really broke down doors and became one of the most popular games you can play online.