It was the early 50s that brought us NIMROD, the first real computer game, and system. Despite resembling a blinking, grey refrigerator, it was a draw at the 1951 Festival of Britain and gave the public a taste of what was to come. The release of 'Spacewar!' in the early 60s saw another big jump, the first game playable on multiple stations, while the 'Brown Box' prototype a few years later pioneered the home console format with two controls and a multigame program system. Still, such early creations were firmly a niche object. For something to build a community and language, it needs to be accessible.

While the groundwork of the future internet was being laid, a little company named Atari appeared, and soon game development truly hit its stride. With 1972's Pong the world was greeted with the first commercially successful video game, helping establish the industry and the first home console, the Magnavox Odyssey. Be it around your friend’s house or at the arcades that had begun sprouting up in every town, the anticipation for a new game release grew and grew.

While the developers busied themselves with inventing genres like the platformer and shooter, companies such as Xerox help develop one of the first local area networks (LAN). Before long joysticks were added to the appropriate controls, cartridges were made for consoles, and the original gaming magazines were published. Due to the additional choice in gaming options, devotees were formed, and thus communities. The video game fanatic was born.

January 1, 1983, saw the internet brought to life alongside the first wave of personal computers, Bill Gates' Donkey software allowing budding developers to learn BASIC code. It was a slow start, but it didn't take long for fans to find one another. With the arrival of IP Multicast, online gaming was ready, but it took the world at large a while to figure out how to implement it successfully. While Sega and Nintendo duked it out for home console dominance, gamers made their own fun with LAN Parties.

Utilizing a local area network, friends and strangers alike would lug their now retro gear into a room or rented space, plug in, and get stuck into some collective fun. Thanks to classics such as 'Pathways into Darkness' and 'Doom' (both released 1993) first-person shooters (FPS) and online gaming as we know it took shape. The network effect, though now the latest buzzwords in startups, flourished like never before.

Deathmatches, free-for-alls, patches, and XP, became common jargon for those who'd caught the gaming bug. Even in the more simplistic realm of SNES and Sega Genesis, the average owner would know the importance of graphical capabilities or the difference between a fighting game and a flight simulator. By the mid-nineties, the first pay-to-play internet services were launched, and behemoths of the MMORPG genre like Warcraft were released. Sega, Nintendo, and Atari all try to push online gaming forward but find net speeds and pricing challenging to work with. It is the PC gamer who keeps pushing the boundaries, further building the concept of social gaming.

As the games grew more complex, the language did too, imagination now the only barrier between a developer and a boundary-pushing release. A rhythm-based game with a rapping dog? No problem. How about a sci-fi platformer where the protagonist must save his friends from the biggest meat processing factory in the universe? An award-winning classic. Annoying NPCs (AI-controlled characters), floaty controls and unbeatable final bosses plagued - and sometimes delighted - fans globally.