Right now there is a small but growing haggle of techno pundits who believe multiplayer gaming is the future. Not PART of the future you understand, but THE ONLY future. Single-player gaming, they reckon, is facing extinction. In the first of a two-part feature, FG looks at virtual play of the sociable kind...
Keith Stuart

Don't panic. This is crazy talk. Gamers are not going to simply abandon the lone experience en masse so that they can spend all their time playing with other people (so to speak). There are plenty of fabulous titles - Resident Evil, Final Fantasy and Tomb Raider among them - that just couldn't translate into multiplayer terms without a complete re-hash of the intricate, narrative-based gameplay.

However, take a brief look at the videogame industry today and you can see where these pundits get their ideas from. The most eagerly awaited PC game at the moment is Quake III: Arena, which is constructed solely with the Internet and LAN multiplayer modes in mind (the single-player game is just a multiplayer one with AI rather than human-controlled opponents). And then, lurking behind id's latest mega product there's Unreal Tournament and Half-Life: Team Fortress 2, both of which are multiplayer versions of hugely popular first-person shooters.

Today's charts bear witness to this growing obsession with online gaming - at least in America. Everquest, an Internet-only multiplayer game recently topped the US PC charts for weeks, while Ultima Online: The Second Age (soon to be released in Europe with UK-based servers) has helped push EA's profits above the one billion dollar mark. Add to this the unquantifiable success of the Quake franchise and it's obvious why around 80-90 per cent of PC games now come with some kind of LAN, modem and/or Internet mode.

Even the console market is getting in on the act. Dreamcast you'll remember, has a built-in modem and Sega have recently announced that they are setting up a worldwide online gaming infrastructure, the European branch of which will be administered by BT and ICL. For the first time, console owners will be able to get together on the Net and play games - and enjoy cheaper Internet access than anyone before them. A Dreamcast costs just £200 and comes ready to get you online - you couldn't even buy a 486 PC for that. With Sony also um-ing and ah-ing about providing a modem for the PlayStation 2, consoles could well turn online gaming into a mass phenomenon.