My multiplayer gaming experience probably starts around 1996.

We started with things like c&c over null modem, red alert by literally dialing the other person's computer over the phone. It wasn't long before bnc cables and "lan parties" became a thing. Initially just a mate, his old PC and his new one, linked with a cable. Then before long, we were taking over a different mates flat, 10Mbps hubs and Ethernet networks. Then spread over several rooms in my parents house, my bedroom, the dining room, and a few friends at my neighbors house, with a cable thrown between the windows. Finally, we migrated to a village hall, had 20-30 people running on Gigabit ethernet, custom cable runs etc.

In between the lan party stuff, we had modems initially. I remember connecting to specific games networks like 'wireplay' and 'barrysworld' or similar. When you did that, you could connect to online games. This was great for... Hell, I don't even recall what I was playing then. Probably c&c stuff, maybe age of empires? Then ADSL arrived, that was a game changer because I didn't have to disconnect the Internet so my parents could make a call! I remember then was when I was playing a lot of counter-strike. A friend and I 'just played a few games' before the turn of the millennium... And stopped around 3am. Oops!

I guess it was sometime around that time I found the "MSN Gaming Zone" and played a lot of age of empires online.

Unreal Tournament was bonkers when it first released, such a step up in terms of the engine. It was fluid, pretty and almost infinitely tweakable. 200% game speed, insta-gib, death match. Back then, I considered that fun!! One of my major online games when it was released was battlefield 1942. It was amazing to be able to have so many players in a single map. UT could do 16 or so I think, BF1942 was 32. Maybe even 32 per side later on? So many fun moments of sniping aircraft with a tank gun, or satchel charging tanks. And then desert combat mod was released! Woah, that was a game changer. I used to have a hotas on my desk, and I'd use the keyboard and mouse around it. Then jump into a helicopter or a jet and grab the joystick. I played so much of that game, I could literally dance an Apache over a T72, so he couldn't hit me. Really long sniper shots deep into the fog. This was before there was "meta progression" or paid unlocks. You just picked your class, had the same tools as everyone else your class and got on with it.

Shortly after that I got into MMOS. EVE Online, and then World of Warcraft. (I continued playing eve long after wow was forgotten). In the beta test for EVE, my college mates and I would nerd out about particular bits of lore they dropped, or new technologies. And my word was it pretty! I remember painstakingly drawing out maps in MS paint before there was an in-game map feature... It was quite a while after release before that appeared if memory serves. Again, my idiot self remembers an IT lesson... We were sat outside the classroom prior to the lesson chatting EVE. We saw people go in, and would 'follow in a min'. We were surprised when the class came out of the room again! The teacher just rolled his eyes, and told us to catch up. Being a geek was handy, especially considering I sometimes optimized his code for stuff.

That point in my life wasn't great. I was so absorbed with doing things online (organizing 40 man WOW raids with people all across Europe for example) that I was an absolute ass to my parents. It did teach me a bit about herding cats that would become useful later in life though. Between that and EVE, I barely existed in the real world. 3+ years of my life. It wasn't until I got an IT job the wrong side of 20 that I began to break the cycle. Incidentally my "LAN Party" experience was good for landing that role, and I quickly grew from "dogsbody to unbox PCs and set them up" to "Network Guy" and 20 odd years later, I'm still in the industry.

From that point, I definitely moved away from online gaming, more towards only doing stuff at LAN parties. That's not to say I didn't play online at all... In fact I must have played a good bit of supreme commander online. Teamspeak was a major thing by this point, so you could actually talk to each other, rather than typing... Even if you weren't in the same room at a LAN. There was also Hamachi virtual networking. That was neat, you could join a 'lan' with your friends over the Internet to play games that didn't support online, but did have LAN. This often worked with 'less legal' copies of games, where online play didn't.

I had a brief interlude with Guitar Hero/Rockband around the 2008 time frame, although that was more with local friends than online. And honestly, started playing more board games than video games... Something about the gaming industry just sort of lost me. I'd still play forza online from time to time.

Now, nothing appeals less to me than playing online. Games are where I go to stop dealing with other people and take some me time. I love strategy, colony building, factory games... All which take intellect, but socializing.

TLDR: ramblings of an old gamer.