In terms of PC network gaming, though, the current scene can be traced back to one father: Id. "Doom was really a phenomenon," states Dave 'Fargo' Kosak, creative director at www.planetquake.com. "You could get four people together on a network and go at it - that first moment where you could see your friend walking around on your screen; that was magic for just about everyone who experienced it. Doom kicked the door wide open, it made multiplayer the 'next big thing'. Id Software also took it to a new level with Quake. Quake introduced dedicated servers, Internet gameplay, and 16-player gameplay, not to mention ways for users to extend the life of a game by modifying it (which was possible with Doom but made easy by Quake). You no longer needed a gaming 'service' to play games online. Plus, with QuakeWorld, id tweaked the Quake engine to make it more robust, given the realities of the Internet (lag!). Quake really turned online gaming to an art form".

"Art form" might sound like an exaggeration, but creating a decent multiplayer game - one that inspires and stimulates enough players to make it a profitable online commodity - is a rare skill. Which is why names like Quake II, Half-Life, Command and Conquer and Warcraft II keep cropping up in discussions about multiplayer gaming, despite the fact that there are hundreds of alternatives.


Creme De La Creme

So what makes a good multiplayer experience? What separates the Quakes of this world from the pre-patched Unreals (a hideously juddery experience)? Well, it's a long story, and it probably starts here: Ease of use. Consoles have got this off to a fine art - just plug in a multi-tap (or if you have an N64, bung four joypads straight into the machine), and you're away.

On the PC, however, things are slightly more complicated. Unless you have the luxury of a LAN, multiplayer gaming means Internet gaming and getting onto the Internet, subscribing to a multiplayer service and then finding a server can be a mind-numbingly complex procedure - not helped by the fact that many developers used to write their multiplayer levels at the very end of the dev cycle, so the games lacked decent client software (ie. the code that connects your computer to the Internet server).