Bolo

By the early-90s we were starting to see viable networked multiplayer games for consumer equipment. That being said, the best experience was usually over local professional LAN setups. I remember going to my dad's workplace and setting up Doom over a local IPX network, but that would be at least a year after I had been playing Bolo. When I started college in 1992, my University was part of a program from Apple where there was a scholarship that would get you a Mac LC II in your dorm room. For many of us, we were quickly ushered into playing Bolo over AppleTalk-- that's why they were there, that is what we did with the Macs.

An incredibly fun game, Bolo allowed up to 16 players to play at once as you split into teams (formed alliances) and tried to take out the bases of the opposing team. The basic premise is tank warfare, a concept that goes back as least far as Battlezone. Using a top down 2D view, you drove around your tank, which had an engineer (a little green man) to go out and farm materials, build walls and place mines as you shot at opponents and their structures or placed mines. Maps were made of varied terrain including waterways, larger ocean areas, and bridges. Boats (albeit very fragile) were available to transport your tank. Pill boxes could be placed (and claimed) to fire at enemies, as well as recharging stations.

But it was the multiplayer modes that made Bolo so addictive, yelling down the hall to tell a teammate that the tank in the lower right had lost his man and was vulnerable. Planning assaults, protecting your teammates. For most of my freshman year, the network was locked down to local traffic, as getting access to the outside internet was limited from the computer center (or telnetting into another box and then getting out) but we could play opponents in other connected dorms and it was so much fun. While many of the CS majors would spend hours in the labs playing MUDs, the real action was happening with the "toy" macs back in the dorms as we blasted each other across the many maps of Bolo. The graphics were simple, even for 1992, but the game play was way ahead of its time.

Also a lot of the fun was how expandable the game was -- there were widely available map editors, as well as an API so you could add "brains" or bots to the game which could play by itself. By running multiple copies of Bolo, either on separate macs or the program itself multiple times on capable Macs you could face off against these Bots.