From Pong to the Cloud: How Internet Performance Shaped Gaming History
Written by Jeff Austin, EVP & President of Shared Services.
You're in the final circle of a battle royale, heart pounding, hands sweaty, victory within reach. You line up the perfect shot and—lag spike. You rubber-band across the map, and you're left spectating while 404SkillNotFound claims your win.
Ironically, that moment of crushing defeat is actually the product of decades of incredible internet tech wins.
Since September 12th is National Video Games Day, it’s the perfect time to explore how internet connectivity changed gaming over the decades, completely redefining what games could be. From the days when "multiplayer" meant sitting next to your friend on the couch to today's 100-player battle royales streamed live to millions, the story of gaming is really the story of connection speeds.
The Offline Era: When games lived in isolation (1970s–early 1990s)
Back in the beginning, electronic games didn't need the internet—mostly because the internet barely existed. The original Pong® (1972) was literally two rectangles and a dot, and it was revolutionary. Games lived on cartridges, floppy disks, and eventually CDs, offering completely self-contained experiences that asked nothing of your connection speed because there was no connection to speak of.
But even in these early days, gamers craved connection. So in 1993, when id Software released Doom ®, they included something that would change everything: IPX network support. Suddenly, you could connect multiple computers via local network cables and play together, and LAN parties officially entered the chat. The technical requirements were minimal—just 9,600 baud serial connections or basic Ethernet—but the social revolution was massive.
The simplicity of this era was actually beautiful in its own way (or maybe we’re all just blinded by nostalgia). When you fired up Super Mario Bros.™ or GoldenEye 007™, you knew exactly what to expect. There weren’t any patches or updates or server maintenance outages. At most, you dramatically blew dust out of the cartridge and felt like a tech genius.
But you also got minimal shared experiences beyond passing the controller to your buddy when you died.
Dial-Up Days: The dawn of digital connection (mid-1990s-early 2000s)
Then came the phone lines, and everything slowly, painfully, but inevitably changed.
Dial-up internet peaked at 56k (though you rarely got the full 56 kilobits per second due to phone line quality), and early online gaming had to work within these brutal constraints. But developers got creative. Really creative.
The BBS underground
Before the World Wide Web took off, hardcore gamers discovered Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs). These were like private clubs you'd dial into directly—no ISP required. Games like Trade Wars 2002 and The Pit turned simple text interfaces into addictive multiplayer experiences. You'd dial in, make your moves, and hang up. Other players would do the same throughout the day, creating asynchronous multiplayer gaming that worked around dial-up's limitations.
The technical genius here was in the game design. Since you couldn't maintain persistent connections, games were built around turn-based mechanics and store-and-forward messaging. A single turn in Trade Wars might generate just a few kilobytes of data, which was perfectly manageable over a 14.4k modem.
The MUD revolution
Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) represented the first true persistent online worlds. These text-based RPGs ran on university servers and were accessible via Telnet. The technical requirements were minimal—just enough bandwidth to send text back and forth—but the social complexity was massive.
Games like LambdaMOO and DikuMUD created the template for modern MMORPGs, complete with guilds, player housing, and economies. But they still worked perfectly fine over dial-up because they were pure text. A typical MUD session might use less than 10KB of data per hour, which is basically nothing by today's standards, but at the time, it was revolutionary for creating shared virtual worlds.
Quake changes the game
In 1996, id Software dropped Quake ®, and real-time multiplayer over the internet became technically possible. Was it a great player experience? Definitely not by modern standards. But at the time, it was mind-blowing and really set the stage for what future gaming could be.
You only needed around 2.5KB/s of bandwidth to play Quake online, but latency was every gamer’s Achilles heel. Most dial-up connections delivered 200-300ms ping times, making precise aiming nearly impossible. Players developed entirely new strategies around lag compensation. Instead of just predicting enemy movement, you actually had to predict where your shot would register on the server, given your ping.
The community response was incredible. Players would drive hours to find ISPs with better routing to game servers. Geography was everything in early online gaming, and being physically closer to a server could be the difference between winning and losing.
The download dilemma
Remember planning your life around game downloads? A 50MB (yes, megabyte) game demo would take 2–3 hours on a good day, assuming nobody picked up the phone and interrupted your download. Larger games were literally impossible. When Half-Life ® (1998) launched at 400MB, most players bought it in stores because downloading just wasn’t an option.
These constraints created a unique gaming culture, shaping both how we got games and what kinds of games could succeed online. Demo CDs were included in everything from cereal boxes to magazines. Players would gather massive collections of small games that could realistically be downloaded. And studios were constantly looking for the right balance between quality and file size.
The Broadband Breakthrough: Speed unlocks possibilities (2000s-2010s)
Broadband—starting with cable and DSL connections in the 1–10 Mbps range—didn't just make existing games better. It made entirely new categories of games possible.
The Steam revolution
When Valve launched Steam ® in 2003, it was initially just a way to update Counter-Strike ® and deliver Half-Life 2 ®. But broadband adoption was hitting critical mass, and the idea of downloading entire games actually became realistic.
The technical breakthrough was background downloading with resume capability. Steam could download a 4GB game over several days, pausing when you needed bandwidth for other things and resuming where it left off. This seems mundane now, but it was quite literally game-changing in an era where a dropped connection meant completely starting over.
Counter-Strike itself became the poster child for broadband gaming. The game only needed around 5KB/s of bandwidth and sub-50ms latency for competitive play. For the first time, online gaming could feel as responsive as local LAN play—if you had the connection for it.
MMORPGs go mainstream
World of Warcraft ®'s 2004 launch leveraged a perfect storm of broadband adoption and game design. WoW was engineered to work over slow connections, even 56k dial-up, but it truly shined on faster broadband connections that could handle the constant stream of player position updates, chat messages, and world events.
Blizzard's server architecture made it all possible. They managed to create a persistent world that could host thousands of simultaneous players while keeping bandwidth requirements low. A typical WoW session used around 10–40KB/s of bandwidth, so well within broadband capabilities but still iffy on dial-up for extended play.
Xbox Live: Console online gaming grows up
Microsoft's Xbox Live ® (2002) brought broadband gaming to living rooms with one critical goal: make online gaming as simple as inserting a disc. The catch? To use the service, you had to have broadband internet—a bold move when tons of people were still on dial-up.
The technical specifications were strict. You typically needed at least 1Mbps download and 256 Kbps upload speeds for most games, and latency was still the bane of every gamer’s existence. But those constraints weren’t unreasonable considering the massive leap forward. Xbox Live introduced standardized voice chat, friend lists, and matchmaking that worked consistently across all games.
Halo 2 ® (2004) proved that console online gaming could work. The game's netcode was optimized for the exact bandwidth and latency characteristics of typical broadband connections. Maps were small enough to keep player counts manageable (16 players max), and the tick rate was tuned to work well with the 100-200ms ping times that were common on early broadband.
The YouTube gaming connection
As broadband speeds increased throughout the 2000s, something unexpected happened: people started watching other people play games. YouTube™'s launch in 2005 coincided with broadband speeds finally reaching the point where streaming video became viable.
Early gaming videos were just basic screen recordings, but they created a new form of gaming culture. Let's Play videos, speedruns, and tutorial content flourished because creators could finally upload videos larger than a few megabytes. A 10-minute gaming video might be 50-100MB, which was still impossible on dial-up but manageable on broadband.
The Always-Online Era: When games became services (2010s-present)
The 2010s brought internet performance to a point that developers could fundamentally rethink what games could be. “Single-player" games could now have online components, and new genres emerged that were literally impossible without high-speed internet.
The battle royale bandwidth challenge
PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds ® exploded in 2017, featuring 100 players in a single match, with a constantly shrinking play area that demanded split-second reactions.
The bandwidth requirements were significant but manageable on modern connections, around 50-100KB/s during active gameplay. But the real technical achievement was in netcode optimization. With 100 players, the server had to process thousands of position updates, weapon fires, and environmental interactions every second while keeping latency under 50ms for competitive play.
Fortnite ® refined this formula further, adding building mechanics that demanded even more precise synchronization. Epic Games' server infrastructure became as important as their game design, with dedicated servers placed strategically to ensure low-latency connections for the majority of players.
Live service games and the patch culture
Games like Destiny ® (2014) and Overwatch ® (2016) popularized the "games as a service" model, where the initial purchase was just the beginning. These games required constant internet connections, not just for multiplayer, but for regular content updates, balance patches, and seasonal events too.
The technical implications were massive. A typical Destiny update might be 1-5GB, and players expected to be able to download and install it seamlessly. This took internet speeds that were impossible just a decade earlier and, more importantly, reliable connections that could handle large downloads without interruption.
Streaming and content creation explode
Twitch ®'s rise (acquired by Amazon in 2014) created a parallel internet infrastructure demand: upstream bandwidth for streamers. To broadcast 1080p gameplay, you needed 3-5 Mbps of upload speed, something that many cable and DSL internet plans couldn't provide.
This created a new divide in gaming communities. Professional streamers and esports athletes needed symmetrical connections with high upload speeds, not just fast downloads. In short, if you wanted to game professionally, you needed fiber internet.
Cloud gaming's first attempts
OnLive ® (2010-2015) and early Google Stadia™ trials were the first serious attempts at cloud gaming, which meant running games on remote servers and streaming just the video to players. The technical requirements were brutal at the time: 10-20+ Mbps for 1080p gaming with, at minimum, sub-150ms total latency (including network transport, server processing, and video encoding/decoding).
Most importantly, these services needed consistent bandwidth. A brief slowdown might just buffer a YouTube video, but it would make a game completely unplayable. The infrastructure simply wasn't ready, but these early failures taught the industry some valuable lessons about what it would take to make cloud gaming a reality.
The Fiber Future: Where gaming is heading
Now, things are getting really exciting. Fiber is connecting people across the country to previously unheard of multi-gig, symmetrical speeds with minimal latency (the signal does travel at nearly the speed of light, after all). Meanwhile, AI is changing everything we know about . . . well, everything. So, let’s look at what this means for gaming.
Cloud gaming finally arrives
With fiber connections delivering 100+ Mbps with sub-20ms latency, cloud gaming is finally becoming viable. Xbox Game Pass Ultimate™ cloud gaming, NVIDIA GeForce Now™, and the new generation of cloud gaming services can deliver console-quality experiences to any device with a screen.
This technical breakthrough is the result of massive leaps forward in both internet speed and consistency. Fiber connections provide stable, low-latency performance that cloud gaming must have. When you're streaming a AAA game at 4K resolution, you need around 35 Mbps of sustained bandwidth with minimal packet loss. Cable internet might deliver those speeds on paper, but fiber delivers them consistently—in real life.
But what's revolutionary is that cloud gaming eliminates the hardware upgrade cycle. When the next generation of games launches, demanding cutting-edge GPUs, fiber internet users can access them instantly without buying new hardware. Your connection becomes your console or machine.
Real-time ray tracing in the cloud
NVIDIA ®'s latest cloud gaming experiments include real-time ray tracing rendered on remote RTX™ 4080 GPUs and streamed to your device. This takes massive bandwidth (40+ Mbps for 4K with ray tracing), as well as incredibly sophisticated compression algorithms that maintain visual fidelity while minimizing latency.
The result is gaming visuals that would require a $1,000+ graphics card, delivered over an internet connection to a basic laptop. But only fiber connections have the speed and stability to make this work consistently.
The metaverse needs fiber
Whatever the metaverse ends up being, it will demand fiber-level connections. Persistent virtual worlds with photorealistic graphics, spatial audio, and hundreds of simultaneous users just can’t materialize without sustained bandwidth that makes today's MMORPGs look quaint.
Early VR social experiences like VRChat already show the challenges. A single VR session with multiple avatars, voice chat, and interactive environments can easily consume 10-20 Mbps. Scale that up to metaverse-level complexity with thousands of users in shared spaces, and you're looking at bandwidth requirements that only fiber can consistently deliver.
AI-powered gaming experiences
The next frontier is AI integration that happens in real-time. Imagine games where NPCs have persistent memories and relationships that evolve based on cloud-based AI processing. Or procedural worlds that generate content based on your playstyle, powered by machine learning models running in the cloud.
These experiences will need constant bidirectional communication between your game client and the AI servers. Not just for downloading content, but also for uploading behavioral data, receiving AI-generated responses, and maintaining the illusion of local gameplay while leveraging massive cloud computing power.
8K gaming and beyond
As displays push beyond 4K to 8K and higher refresh rates, the bandwidth requirements scale dramatically. Streaming an 8K game at 120fps with HDR takes bandwidth that would have seemed impossible just a few years ago. We're talking about sustained speeds of 100+ Mbps just for the video stream, not including game data, voice chat, and all the other components of modern online gaming.
The Internet of Gaming Things
In the future, we’ll likely see gaming experiences extend beyond the screen. Haptic feedback suits, environmental lighting that syncs with gameplay, and physical gaming peripherals that communicate over the internet will all need the low latency and high reliability that only fiber can provide.
Imagine playing a racing game where your entire room's lighting shifts with the track conditions, your haptic suit provides realistic G-force feedback, and your steering wheel receives real-time telemetry from the cloud servers. Each of these elements needs millisecond-precise synchronization that's only possible with fiber-level connectivity.
Future-proof your gaming with Kinetic's multi-gig fiber
Every major advance in gaming has been unlocked by advances in internet connectivity. From dial-up enabling the first online multiplayer to broadband making MMORPGs possible, faster connections have consistently opened up entirely new categories of gaming experiences.
The good news is that fiber is inherently future-proof and is set to be the standard for years to come. As internet demands grow and fiber networks expand, fiber’s already impressive performance can increase in tandem.
In fact, Kinetic already offers up to 2 Gig fiber with:
Sub-20ms latency1: Get the responsive reactions you need to compete.
Symmetrical upload speeds: Livestream your gameplay in 4K without compromising performance.
A consistent connection with 99.9%2 reliability: No more rage-inducing lag spikes during clutch moments.
Kinetic fiber delivers the speed, reliability, and low latency that serious gamers demand. But more importantly, multi-gig fiber means you're ready for whatever comes next. When the next revolutionary gaming experience launches—whether it's true cloud gaming, persistent metaverse worlds, or something we can't even imagine yet—Kinetic will be there to power it with a solid connection. Because if gaming history has taught us anything, it's that the future belongs to whoever has the fastest connection. The only question is: Are you ready to level up? Check Kinetic fiber availability in your area and discover what gaming without limits really means.
1 Average latency delivered by Kinetic gig fiber, as measured by Kinetic’s Network Operations Center (NOC)
2 99.9% Service Availability: As measured by Kinetic from March 2023 to January 2025, Kinetic service reliability is calculated by dividing Available Customer Hours by Total Customer Hours, excluding planned maintenance, emergencies (like hurricanes, winter storms, floods), and other uncontrollable events.
Kinetic Internet: Kinetic cannot guarantee specific upload/download speeds, uninterrupted service, or error free service. Speed availability, capabilities, and provisioning vary depending on several factors: network and terrain conditions; Internet, website, or network congestion; effect of wi-fi use; number of concurrent users; device limitations; and customer location. Speeds ≥25 Mbps are provisioned in a range, including a minimum and maximum speed. Kinetic will provision the fastest speed within that range but may be less than the maximum.
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