That is mostly a reflection of the technical challenges involved in making almost any game work in the new digital environment and on the available hardware.
And yet, those first early games soon made their way into arcades, where much of the pleasure for a player was to test their own skill against others and to see how they appeared on a ranking of points or other measures of skill.
The pride of being on the leaderboard became a driving factor in play – as well as the pleasure of the game itself, and the social experience of playing alongside friends.
Yet even the very earliest of home video games – the table-tennis game Pong – was envisioned as multiplayer, where two players competed against one another.
ARCADE GAMES
Arcade games making their way onto home computers saw an explosion of growth in single player games (the technology to connect players and the internet itself did not as yet exist).
1980 – precursor to multiplayer
It wasn’t until the late 1980s that it became possible to connect groups of people for
game-playing – the precursor to the massive multiplayer games of the late 90s and – of course – to the eventual rise of e-sports with the first massive tournaments established in South Korea at the turn of millennium.
the biggest trend
royale style
In the last few years, perhaps the biggest trend has been the emergence of the Royale style of play.
In 2017, Player Unknown created a concept in which 100 people drop onto an island to scavenge for food, weapons and supplies – the last player standing won.
Fortnite followed hot on their heels using the same concept, and since then even old single player games have found ways to make the battle royale format work for them, from Tetris to Super Mario.