Who Invented Online Games?

Answer 1

History and origin of Network Gaming (Multi-user interactive games)

Origin

MUD (Multi-User Dungeons, Multi-User Dimensions) was the first proper, workable multi-user adventure game. It pioneered the idea that a computer program that accepts connections from a number of simultaneous users over a computer network, could provide them with access to a shared adventure game. It was written by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle at Essex University on a DECsystem-10 mainframe and was originally little more than a series of inter-connected locations where you could move and chat. Initially, the game was playable only by students at the university. However due to an experimental packet-switching system (EPSS) linking Essex University to ArpaNet in the USA, in Spring 1980, external players could log in and try the game out. After a flurry of articles in computer hobby magazines around 1984, MUD's fame spread even wider. Bartle and Trubshaw formed MUSE Ltd to rewrite the game as MUD2, and run it on VAXes owned by a division of BT then known as NIS (Network Information Services). After a time, people who had played games based on MUD wrote their own multi-user games, and the process snowballed.

Answer 2

There were some character based games as early as the mid-70's. Wiki has a great paragraph at the end of the MMORPG history that gives a brief history of online game development. The gui games came, of course, much later.

Answer 3

People played chess over the telegraph in the nineteenth century. Does that count?

Answer 4

IT WAS ME!!!!!!
No not really.