As AOL bins dial-up for good, it’s impossible to fully state the impact it had on gaming and the internet – but we’ve tried

AOL is binning off its dial-up internet service after 30 years, which, frankly, is more surprising for the fact AOL still offered a dial-up internet service than for the fact it’s closing it. Regardless, it’s a milestone moment. AOL opened the doors of the internet for millions of people; its name was synonymous with it. And yes, I know that most of those people were Americans, the acronym AOL standing for America Online after all, but AOL did operate in the UK. I vividly remember having an AOL promo disk in a cardboard sleeve. I think it came attached to a newspaper – things like that happened back in the 90s. I remember trying to use it once, too, and being whisked away to an AOL-themed portal of bite-sized internet games and fledgling news services, and beautifully ugly 90s websites. The internet back then was a proper mood (there’s a game called Hypnospace Outlaw that recreates it, if you don’t know.)

This, then, is the end of an era – an era long gone but an era nonetheless. One that, I’m sure, shaped many of your online gaming experiences. So let’s reminisce. How did dial-up gaming shape you, and what do you remember of it?

Don’t cast that spell, you’ll disconnect

For a while, I was a gaming scrounger. I’d go to friends’ houses to get my dose of internet gaming because I didn’t have a computer at home. Forever the passenger-player, until one day I got a clapped out old banger of a computer of my own. It barely ran. But it did enough, I hoped, to run Ultima Online.

I can still see the modem I had, this black plastic box probably the size of a hard-drive, and I can still hear the sounds it made. The “eee-orr, eee-orr, tka-lka-tka-lka” screech it made every time it wanted to connect, like it was an alien ship broadcasting a signal. And I can still feel the naughty nerves of knowing it was costing me dearly – or rather, costing my Dad – every time I played. I just hid that fact from him. I was focused. I wanted to play.

The problem was that the combined effect of my rubbish PC and my rubbish internet made the playing experience, well, rubbish. I’d rubber-band around as if on some latency bungee and experience frame-rates which might as well have rendered Ultima Online a point-and-click adventure. It modified my experience; the effect was so pronounced it altered what I was able to do.

For instance, I couldn’t cast – and I really wanted to cast – blade spirits. This magical summon conjured a whirling tiered cake stand of blades, which spun around in an area and sliced up whatever was near. They were great for farming. You could plonk one down and back off, then sling some spells from afar – some Corp Pors, if you know what I’m talking about (let me see those hands, fellow UO players!).

Well, you could; I couldn’t. If I tried to do it, my game crashed. It was like I was playing a volatile version of Ultima Online which might, at any time, explode. That jeopardy made it quite exciting. There’s nothing like being in the depths of a dungeon somewhere, fully in the knowledge that at any moment, you might disconnect, either because the game or computer crashed, or because someone picked up the phone from downstairs. Even player-killers didn’t inject that kind of threat into the experience.

Playing an MMO on a dial-up modem: I’ve paid my dues.

-Bertie

Fansites, Forgeries, and Early DLC

Honestly, I think even hearing that sound gives me a massive dopamine hit. But digging for specific gaming memories as dial up edges closer to being gone forever, two things come right to mind.

First of all, there’s the fansites. This is where I grew up; in many ways, it’s where my career started. A lot of that happened after the advent of broadband, though. But I remember one website especially well – now-defunct Zelda fansite Hyrule: The Land of Zelda. I’d sit in that eerie glow of the CRT computer screen until late at night, scouring pages speculating about how one could obtain the Triforce in Ocarina of Time. Had the mysterious ‘Ariana’ really discovered the last great secret of the game? I was obsessed by it; the fakery, the lies, the possibilities, the drama.

All of this is obviously fake and stupid now. But I was 10, and this was a more innocent age of the internet. There wasn’t something horrible creeping around every corner, and when your 56k connection would spend minutes loading in a page chock-full of faked screenshots of dreams come to life, you really did desperately want to believe them. I genuinely think speed contributed to the innocence of the internet then – downloading and uploading stuff took time. So you valued it all more. Now, you can have it all, instantly: content overload.

Not long after that drama, I was at the cusp of my first brush with online console gaming. The Dreamcast was ahead of its time, really: it was the Xbox before there was an Xbox, right down to having a Windows-derived operating system. My first memory of any online play is Toy Commander, the vehicle-based war game that sees you take control of Toy Armies, fighting across bedrooms and kitchens and the like. I remember marvelling at how well it worked; later, my mother would marvel at the phone bill. But my larger Dreamcast dial-up memory is connecting the console to the internet to download meagre free DLC.

The Sonic Adventure DLC is pretty rubbish by any reasonable measure. The one I remember most vividly simply dropped a bunch of Christmas Trees into the game’s hub zones that changed the music when touched. Fair enough. But, hey – at the time, it felt like complete magic. Even if it was naff magic. If you want to learn more about all of this, Jon on the excellent GVG recently acquired the DLC on a real Dreamcast in the present day!

-Alex

Next-gen Sonic was too fast for my internet

I definitely did play some PC games ‘competitively’ over dial-up back in the day, but my most vivid memory of internet access back then was the web itself and all the video game news and information I could get my hands on.

My best mate at the time used to come over with his dad’s work laptop. Nothing special about that on the face of it (although laptops weren’t that common), but the secret here was that his dad had some kind of work internet service that meant we could use dial-up for free. Sorry Mum and Dad, no one is making any phone calls for a while!

At some point in the school summer holiday of 1998, when we were fifteen, SEGA showed off Sonic Adventure for the first time. Pre-internet and world-wide-web live events were things we’d read about in magazines weeks later, sometimes months after the event itself. Thanks to my mate’s dad’s internet magic I saw a tiny video of Sonic Adventure the day after it was shown off in Tokyo. Admittedly, it took hours, but it was pure excitement. I felt like I’d stepped into the future.

I’m not sure I’ve ever been so dazzled by a video game as I was by that low-res, 4:3, 30-second video. Dial-up was amazing, wasn’t it!

-Tom

I never won a game of Command & Conquer

So, I was pretty young during the era of dial-up internet and the dawn of online PC gaming. I remember in the tiny (and I mean tiny) cottage I grew up in somewhere in the middle of Derbyshire, there was a desktop PC crammed into a small nook under the stairs. My parents ran a phone line to this terminal, and I began to fall in love with video games via Windows 98 and a dial-up connection.

A lot of my early games were given to me by my grandad, and more often than not would come in the form of demo disks collected from PC magazines that were absolutely teeming with shareware. But occasionally, I’d get a gem too: enter Command & Conquer Red Alert. I was probably about eight or nine, at a push, when playing these games, so how the hell I managed to wrangle the online lobbies and connections back then is beyond me. Probably a lot of poking and hoping for the best. But, somehow, I managed to get online with Command & Conquer, and my first taste of online gaming awaited me.

It was awful. I was, predictably, horseshit. My juvenile brain clearly couldn’t comprehend tactics like rushing out units early, or completely turtling until I could just swarm enemy bases with ease. I never won a single game. Part of that was my distinct lack of understanding about the games’ competitive mechanics (I just liked making cool bases!), and part of that was the fact that the games seemed to go on for a while. Without a doubt, whenever a game was in its closing throes, one of my parents – or my sister – would demand to use the phone line and disconnect me from the game (assumedly crashing the game for everyone else involved, as is my understanding).

So to all the adult nerds that were bullying a clueless child on C&C: Red Alert some 27 years ago, I hope it was worth hard-resetting your PC for.

-Dom

Goodbye dial-up, you’ll be missed, slowly.