I actually got to play the very first H2H online flight combat game called Air Fight, sometime around 1977 or so on the
PLATO university network
I was 12 or so, and my stepfather was going to graduate school and had a friend in security at, I think, Loyola University Hospital (one of the university hospitals). He snuck me in about a dozen times to play games.
Air Fight was a modern themed (for the 1970s) jet fighter multiplayer game. it featured "planes" (dots that got larger and smaller and I think even had the + or -) with a very limited 3D landscape of a few wire frame mountains with no textures (monochrome as well). No missiles, just guns. It was very exciting launching in that F-104 and seeing that Mig-21 up on the map. Unfortunately, it was virtually unplayable (at least on that connection) since it operated at about 1-2 seconds per frame.
I spent more time playing the Star Trek game Empire, which you took command of a federation, klingon, romulan or orian cruiser, captured planets, fought other ships and eventually had a world reset. My first online kill was a romulan bird of prey I hit with three photon torpedoes (still remember the keyboard commands). 2d environment and it was quick turn based (I think) at the pace of the lag, so the lag didn't have much of an impact, as I remember.
Played a variety of apple games on my roommate’s Apple 2 system in 1986-87 (F-15 of course, a text vampire game, Bismark, and some missile attack boat game that was pretty solid, a good helicopter sim based on the Hughes 500) . Got into PC gaming when I played Interstels "Empire" (different from the PLATO empire) which was like Civ (and pre-dated it) but only the war, and was highly addictive. Then Falcon, and Finest Hour, Red Baron, Civ, Chuck Yeager's...
At the time I didn’t even think I was a geek
Charon
