What was your first Online gaming experience?

[Audball]

What was everybody's first experience with Online gaming?

My first time was when my dad showed me how to play Medal of Honor: Allied Assault online through GameSpy (I think).

I was BLOWN AWAY that all those lil soldiers running around were real people!!! I was Terrible at the game back then but I still had so much fun, even if I probably never got a single kill.

[candycanearter07]

COD Black Ops 2 probably. I never got to play online but watching my brother play online with all the..interesting..language was an experience.

[xXWebMasterXx_Gina]

It's hard to narrow the exact timeline down; but I'm going to go with Neopets as my first "official" online gaming experience since it was the reason why I created my very first email address!

I know Neopets isn't the most traditional online game, and I seldom even engaged with the social aspects outside of trading the occasional item; but, just now having an email address and being able to make accounts with Neopets and endless other games and sites, I wasn't just surfing the web anymore, I was now a part of it 

[crow-queen]

I think Toontown
My parents didn't have internet until I was a little older so I would play Toontown at my grandparents' house on the desktop computer. I didn't have money for the subscription, so I only ever did a 3 day trial at a time. My dad played video games when I was a kid but not really online until a while after my parents got internet.
I have always enjoyed playing online games, but it was only when I started playing Final Fantasy 14 a couple of years ago, that I began to treat online games as a way to actually interact and make friends with other people. Mostly I didn't interact with other players in games except from very minimally. I just liked that they made a game feel a bit more alive

[ConnorTheVGFan78]

I remember back when I was in first grade (around 2006) I would occasionally hang out at this one friend's house after school since we shared a school bus stop. Sometimes, we would hang out around his family's computer and play either an old version of Train Simulator or Roller Coaster Tycoon 2.

But then one day, he decides to show me this new game called ToonTown Online. The only stuff I heard or seen about it beforehand was from the Disney Channel commercials. It wasn't quite like anything I'd seen before, and it took me a bit to realize that the other characters in the game were real people. It was really cool to get to experience something like it for the first time.

Eventually that friend moved away and, besides the occasional Call of Duty session at my cousin's house, I wouldn't have much interaction with online gaming. It wouldn't be until 2012 when my family finally ditched dial-up internet and got high-speed installed that I was able to get my own ToonTown account and comfortably play on my own PC.

[crow-queen]

It wasn't quite like anything I'd seen before, and it took me a bit to realize that the other characters in the game were real people. It was really cool to get to experience something like it for the first time.

omg i know what you mean about not realising the other characters were real people! i kind of didn't believe it a little bit when i was little bc it was too amazing, i just thought that maybe it was just one of those things that wasn't quite true but ur expected to suspend ur belief,

Spoiler

like when adults tell you Santa is real (i was always very skeptical about this but went along with it anyway)

[close]

[Misanthropic Monster™]

My first ever online gaming experience was Diablo 2 LOD, swiftly followed by StarCraft and then the OG Counter Strike (back when it was just a Half Life MOD).

I then got into things like Unreal Tournament, Quake, Tribes, etc.

Nowadays I mostly play FFXIV, Valorant, League of Legends and CSGO if I am playing anything online.   

[Audball]

I know Neopets isn't the most traditional online game, and I seldom even engaged with the social aspects outside of trading the occasional item; but, just now having an email address and being able to make accounts with Neopets and endless other games and sites, I wasn't just surfing the web anymore, I was now a part of it 

I played so much neopets growing up! I still log on every so often with my original account from back then.

But then one day, he decides to show me this new game called ToonTown Online.

I think Toontown

Lots of ToonTown love!
Sadly I never got to play that one because my parents were NOT down to pay a monthly membership for anything, and when they eventually caved to that, it was for RuneScape for me.

[bby]

i guess poptropica since i could play it at school? i didn't have good internet in my childhood so there wasn't anything i could really play at home.

i tried to play wow when burning crusade came out, but i couldn't :(

there were also some forums i used to be a part of to try and do hogwarts roleplays if they count.

[VulgarAlien]

i had a whole spiel about poptropica written here just to remember it was actually wizard101! i used to watch my brother play that, and we both had to be like, absolute babies. I remember us figuring out there was a chat and it Blew our MINDS. that was the first time i realized all the other wizards were real people, and to this day it freaks me out that i just didnt know

[BlazingCobaltX]

My mind initially went to online console gaming until a post here about Neopets reminded me that online internet spaces count too! Going by the metric of "first time I created an email", my first online game was Habbo Hotel.

The first time playing a full game with online features... My memory is a bit fuzzy on whether I did online multiplayer on Mariokart DS, but I know for sure that I was playing with others on MKWii. I remember taking the "ask your parents for permission to go online"-notice very seriously, so I really went to my mom to ask if I could go online. I think her first answer was no, until I explained that it wasn't harmful to the device or me.

[nuclearblues]

definitely club penguin from 6-10, though I certainly treated it like a singleplayer game. logically I knew the other penguins were other people, but I can't concretely recall ever typing anything into chat. I begged my mom for a membership because I really wanted the green puffle, but it didn't have the usual "kids online virtual world monetization structure FOMO" associated with it. the first time I *really* got into an online game with the mindset that I was playing was team fortress 2 when I was 13 or 14. it definitely wasn't perfect and I usually avoided voice chat entirely as a not-quite-out trans guy because violent misogyny was not always unavoidable, but I have a lot of good memories associated with it. I pop in every now and again, but the bot problem is rather notorious (though it does seem to be getting better).

[soju]

I think my first exposure to online gaming would've been Roblox. I was visiting a friends house when he showed me the game on his family's desktop and I was blown away. I was obsessed with Lego as a kid, and Roblox just looked like a virtual version of that and hooked me immediately. This would've been sometime in late 2006 and I still have access to my account, though I haven't played much since 2012

[Cobra!]

I remember Mario Kart DS being my first online experience, but I don’t remember much from it.

[CyberCat2000]

Remember back when Yahoo had little webgames that are usually classic board games or card games? That's kind of my first experience with online gaming. I recall Yahoo Towers being a favorite; it's a Columns-like puzzle action game that can get chaotic fast!


Besides this, I may be one of the few people who remembers Club Penguin's predecessor, Penguin Chat. Anyone else?