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In the beginning, online gaming was specifically a PC thing. A place where PC users could play with and against other users on their favorite games such as Half Life, no longer would the users have to be together to face each other, now they could play against users all over the world. Half Life would start a huge wave of popularity in online gaming, with so a versatile base to build on, many fans of the game were eager to put their own twist on things. One of the first and most popular modifications was named Counter Strike. Also known as CS, the game would be based around the idea of cops and robbers, one team would be terrorists the others would be soldiers, each team would have a task to complete, be it blowing up a location or rescuing hostages, the users were always engaged both mentally and physically.

It would be a huge success and many other games would follow this platform in online gaming, in the sense that there would be one team of good guys and one team of bad guys who are set against each other in a race to the top. From Counter Strike things would get much bigger and much better. Where games such as Unreal Tournament would stick to the format of either player vs player or team vs team, other games would look to push the boundaries and try to take online gaming in a new direction.

Games such as Team Fortress Classic would bring the game to the next level. The original Team Fortress was a mod for the popular game Quake, and was another true original that sparked online gaming. But things would stick to the same genre of team vs team combat, following this genre things would get much bigger. Where games were generally held between a group of players between the numbers of 10 or 20, a game would come onto the market that would blow that number out of the water. Joint Operations would be the first game that could offer servers to host games played between 150 players. The premise was the same, a good team and a bad team working to complete their objectives. But Joint Operations did it on a much bigger scale, no longer was it small linear map, it was a huge map with cars, boats, tanks and helicopters. With a day night cycle included online gaming had reached a new level of scale.

But this was just one half of online gaming, there was another side to it. Where you had first person shooters as the number one online gaming genre, another genre was quick to steal its spot, Role Playing Games. Also known as RPG's, these games would allow the user to step into the lives of someone else, to create a character and jump into their life was something online gaming had never been able to do before, players were hooked. Hundreds of players could virtually get together, talk, swap, sell and conquer all sorts of hurdles together under their own guise. RPG's now had to be named under a different acronym since so many people were playing them, MMORPGS. Which stood for "Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games", While there had been hundreds of games before it that had made a success out of this new genre such as Ever-quest, only one game brought these games to the limelight. World Of Warcraft took MMORPG's from the basement of online gamers to the TV's and stores all around the world, and the audience loved it.

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