"The world of online gaming is all about the friendships you make and the experiences you share together" (character planet)
The first computer game was designed in 1961 and was released in 1962 by a MIT students which was headed by Steve "slug" Russell, on a PDP-1 which was developed onto a DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) interactive mini computer, which at the time was a cathode-ray tube type display with a keyboard as an output. The design process involved Steve Russell, Martin Graetz and Wayne Wiitanen, it took them 200 hours to design the game. When it was released
there were more involved, they were: Steve Russell, Martin Graetz, Peter Samson, Dan Edwards, Alan Kotok, Steve Piner and Robert A Sanders. None of the men involved in creating and releasing Space war made any money out of the game.Steve Russell left MIT and was transferred to Stanford University where he introduced Computer Game Programming and Space War to an engineering Student by the name of Nolan Bushnell, who went on to write and create the first coin-operated computer arcade game.
Space Wars was the first two player game created for a computer but in 1958 tennis for two was created by William Higinbotham for entertainment purposes for the company he was working for. It was not until 1981 when the Brookhaven Bulletin did a story on him as an employee that he had speculated that he had created this game. Here is a picture of what the type of system that it was created on.
Aronson explains it as: "A two-dimensional, side view of a tennis court was displayed on an oscilloscope, which has a cathode-ray tube similar to a black and white TV tube. In order to generate the court and net lines and the ball, it was necessary to time-share these functions. While the rest of the system used vacuum tubes and relays, the time-sharing circuit and the fast switches used transistors, which by 1958 were coming into use."
Here is a picture of what it looked like. Go to the link below and look for the picture and click on the link to view a video demonstration on how the game worked and the working of the system that was used back then http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/history/higinbotham.asp.
In 1969 Rick Blomme rewrote the 1962 space war but created it to be played on a PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching operations) system. Between 1970-1977 there were many more two player games that was created for the PLATO. From there it lead to the development of the MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) in 1979 by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle, by 1980 this was known as the "classic" MUD as there were many newer versions that were created and since then technology has evolved and as the technology has evolved so has the graphics and the environment of the game.