XBL was NOT the first online social gaming service!

[Nerdkiller likes BD]

Some people probably already know this already but just read the title, Live was not the first online social gaming service (I don't think SegaNet/Dreamarena counts cos I didn't find anything about socalising online). The XBAND service is. It came around 8 or 9 years before Microsoft's iconic network. If you want to read all about it, Here are the links:

Wikipedia

XBAND 441 (all links to info is on bottom of page)

This service was probably not the first for online gaming but when it came for friends, it was a world for consoles. Even I thought that online gaming never came about until Sega or M$ did it. Let me know about what you think about this brillant service (Oh, and another bit of adivce, Mattel's PlayCable service for its Intellivision console was the first for downloadable content via your cable provider and a special PlayCable Adaptor, a full 20 years before XBL).

[WickyWoo]

No one ever claimed it was

However it was the first one that actually worked, and actually had a decent amount of other people to play with

XBand was a laggy as hell kludge. Seriously it was awful

Xbox Live is actually built on SegaNet

[IvanDrago]

If you want to jump in the wayback machine, does anyone remember Mplayer, Ten, and Heat? They were the original subscription based social gaming services for PC games. They were the only real way to play online as their matchmaking service emulated an IPX network tricking the game into thinking it was playing a LAN game while the data was actually transmitted over the internet. The adoption of the Quakeworld technology/scheme made that completely obsolete. There was also a program called Kali that emulated IPX networks without having any match making features. Kali only required a one time fee.

[Seboist]

Originally Posted by IvanDrago

If you want to jump in the wayback machine, does anyone remember Mplayer, Ten, and Heat? They were the original subscription based social gaming services for PC games. They were the only real way to play online as their matchmaking service emulated an IPX network tricking the game into thinking it was playing a LAN game while the data was actually transmitted over the internet. The adoption of the Quakeworld technology/scheme made that completely obsolete. There was also a program called Kali that emulated IPX networks without having any match making features. Kali only required a one time fee.

I used Heat way back around 97-98 to play Quake 2 which was the first game I played online.

[WickyWoo]

yeah, I used Kali