[sempron64]

It's amusing to me that in the 90s you could easily play Quake or Doom with your friends by calling their phone number over the modem whereas now setting up any sort of multiplayer essentially requires a server unless you use some very user-unfriendly NAT busting.

[ryandrake]

Glad you mentioned DOOM! Sometimes people forget that DOOM supported multiplayer as early as December 1993, via a serial line and February 1994 for IPX networking. 4 player games on a LAN in 1994! On release, TCP/IP wasn't supported at all, but as the Internet took off, that was solved as well. I remember testing an early-ish version of the 3rd party iDOOM TCP setup driver from my dorm room (10 base T connection) when I was supposed to be in class, and it was a true game changer.

[jandrese]

What was even more amazing is you could daisy chain serial ports on computers to get multiplayer Doom running. One or more of those links could even be a phone modem.

Downside is that your framerate was capped to the person with the slowest computer, and there was always that guy with the 486sx25 who got invited to play.

[bombcar]

Or slave two copies to yours and get "side view" which was only supported for a few releases IIRC - https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Three_screen_mode

[badocr]

Yes, Doom with multi-monitors! There's (at least) one video on Youtube showing it in action with 3 monitors plus a fourth one with the map: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3NQQ7bPf6U#t=1798.333333

[bigjimmyk3]

Someone tried running that in one of the campus computer labs when I was a student, and the (probably misconfigured) IPX routers amplified it into... a campus-wide outage. Seems weird to me, but that's what the big sign on the door said the next day.

The perpetrator was never caught.

[mrguyorama]

You usually just need to forward a port or two on your router. That gets through the NAT because you specify which destination IP to forward it to. You also need to open that port in your Windows firewall in most cases.

Some configuration, but you don't have to update the port forwarding as often as you would expect.

The reason you can't just play games with your friends anymore is that game companies make way too much money from skins and do not want you to be able to run a version of the server that does not check whether you paid your real money for those skins. Weirdly, despite literally inventing loot boxes, Valve does not suffer from this sometimes. TF2 had a robust custom server community that had dummied out checks so you could wear and use whatever you want. Similar to how Minecraft still allows you to turn off authentication so you can play with friends who have a pirate copy.

[bitwize]

Starcraft could only do internet play through battle.net, which required a legit copy. Pirated copies could still do LAN IPX play though, and with IPX over IP software you could theoretically do remote play with your internet buddies.

By the way, this is why bnetd is illegal to distribute and was ruled such in a court of law: authenticating with battle.net counts as an "effective" copy protection measure under the DMCA, and providing an alternate implementation that skips that therefore counts as "circumvention technology".

[rurban]

Multi-player started with Doom 2. Original doom was single player only. Doom 2 was for 4 players which I used in my mod ArsDoom. Quake then extended it to scale via a dedicated quake server.

[klaussilveira]

You can kinda solve that problem with STUN servers. Most games on Steam use Steam Datagram Relay, which also solves this: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/multiplayer/stea...

It's like in-engine Hamachi. Works really well with P2P games.

[Lammy]

I played a lot of Brood War with my friends like this.

[kamranjon]

I wonder if there is a way to use tailscale to make it easy again?

[blackcatsec]

Quite literally folks have done this for decades using Hamachi.

[sempron64]

Hamachi and STUN were what I was thinking of when I referred to user-unfriendly NAT busting. It's true that these are not much harder to get working than a modem, but they don't match up with modern consumer expectations of ease-of-use and reliability on firewalled networks. It would be nice if Internet standards could keep up with industry so that these expectations could be met. It's totally understandable where we've landed due to modern security requirements, but I still feel something has been lost.

[klaussilveira]

But how are you going to circumvent the user firewall? He still has to open ports there, even using STUN or Steam Relay or Hamachi.

[blackcatsec]

Hamachi does not require you to open any ports on your firewall by nature. Except maybe the local firewall (Windows firewall, likely) which apps should automatically get asked for when they try to use a port.

[blackcatsec]

I mean, internet standards kept up. IPv6 is a thing, and some form of dynamic IPv6 stateful firewall hole punching a la UPnP would be useful here. Particularly if the application used the temporary address for the hole punch--because once the address lifetime ends, it's basically not going to get used again (64-bit address space). So that effectively nullifies any longer term concerns about security vulnerabilities.