So this multiplayer thing is big, and it's getting bigger. But is it new? The answer, of course, is no. Space Wars, written by MIT graduate Steve Russell in 1962, is widely credited as the first ever videogame and, guess what? It had no single-player mode - it ran across an old PDP-1 mainframe and was designed for two competitors.

Later, in 1979/80, Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle created a game called MUD (multi-user dungeon) on Essex university's DEC-10 mainframe. MUD allowed multiple users to log on and explore a text-based Dungeons and Dragons world, talking to other players and discovering various treasures along the way. Later still, the game was connected to the ArpaNet - the early university-run predecessor of the Internet - and US students were immediately hooked. Consequently, hundreds of similar, online, text-based adventures (generically known as MUDs - or MUSHs, MOOs, MUCKs and MUSEs) have been set up, and we've now got modern graphic-based equivalents such as Meridian 59 and Ultima Online.

The arcade has also spawned its fair share of multiplayer archetypes. Of course, the two-player option has always been pretty much mandatory and key examples are hard to pick out of the milieu (although Ikari Warriors, Street Fighter II and Double Dragon all introduced long-running gameplay features). In terms of three and four-player games though, the mid to late '80s saw several agenda-setters such as Atari's racer, SuperSprint, the RPG hack 'em up, Gauntlet, (one of the first coin-ops to feature four-player, co-operative play, and a fantastic game to boot), Sega's Quartet and Konami's Track and Field. The latter also inspired Epyx's 'Games' series: the finest multiplayer sports titles of the 8bit home computer era.

The '90s have seen yet more growth. Sega's Virtua Racer, for example, prompted a craze for link-up cabinets (ie. game cabinets that could be linked together to allow multiplayer action), which still flourishes today, while big novelty games like Final Furlong, Dance Dance Revolution and Brave Fire Fighters always have room for two players at the very least - presumably so you have someone else to laugh at while you're making a fool of yourself.

This decade also saw the birth of the multi-tap - a handy joypad add-on enabling SNES, Mega Drive and more recently, PlayStation owners to participate in four-eight player gaming sessions. Bona Fide classics of this age have been Bomberman, Smash Court Tennis, Secret of Mana, ISS Pro, Micro Machines, NBA Jam, and GoldenEye (which actually doesn't require a multi-tap, but is the key four-player console game of the late '90s, so we'll let it off).