When Did Online Gaming Start?

Java

The first example of computers networking was created by the US Government's advance research department known as DARPA. The folks at DARPA created what came to be known as ARPANET. By 1970, computers on both shores of the United States could switch packets with one another. Though this looked nothing like the internet as we know, it was the first computer network.

As the federal government was the first holder of this technology, it was undoubtedly used by the Department of Defense to create simulations over several computers. This could be thought of as the birth of networked gaming.

It wasn't until networks across the country grew large enough to be available to the general public that internet gaming took off. By 1995, millions of websites and games were available for download to anyone with an internet connection. The first examples of this were text based, RPG type games where multiple users could roleplay in a single environment over the internet. These were known as MUDs, MUCKs, MUX, etc. . . Later these kinds of games would develop graphics (Everquest was an early example) and become widely known as MMORPGs.

Many other kinds of games had networking capabilities, and favorites that did not (like Tetris), were quickly developed.

Java and later Flash would broaden this experience to browsers and soon all kinds of games including gambling would explode all over the web. Games like CounterStrike rose the popularity of First-Person Shooters (FPS) for online gaming very early on by utilizing Java. Later, engines were developed that could network FPS games outside of HTTP, opening up the full potential of computers to run such games.