Towards The Future: part one

It all started back in 2003. One day me and the rest of the neighborhood ( you know, back in the days when people still came over to play videogames together on the couch ) decided to go out and buy that game with the interesting-looking cover, sporting some anime-inspired artwork, and the magical word “online”. It was an RPG, and required a thing called a “nintendo broadband adapter”, or so it claimed, to play on the internet, with your gamecube. Wow, mind-blowing! At the time we still only had a 56k modem internet connection, and continuously wondered about those gaping holes on the bottom of our little purple videogame box of joy.

But then, we finally bought the game, Phantasy Star Online, it was called. It featured offline splitscreen multiplayer, still a common feature for console games back then, a singleplayer offline mode, and the ever-tempting online menu button.

At some point, we decided to buy a Broadband adapter, so that we could play mario kart in LAN mode, but when we got home, we instantly forgot all about mario kart and popped the PSO disk in, plugged in the adapter, and tried out that free one month of online play! Within a week it was impossible to get your hands on another broadband adapter; everybody in our street wanted one for PSO, and soon even neighboring towns were all-out of the little connection-peripheral.

At around the same time me and my brother finally managed to convince our dad into getting an ADSL connection, and from then on, we were absolutely hooked. We bought a second gamecube because my little brother and I didn’t want to take turns playing online, then a keyboard, which would later be complemented by an imported €80 ASCII keyboard-controller, a load of memorycards, and several copies of PSO.

So what is this ‘PSO’ you’ve been talking about?, I hear you thinking. PSO, now 10 years old, is the first-ever online multiplayer RPG game on any gaming console, and was a source of inspiration for modern games such as Monster Hunter, Lost Planet, and Guild Wars. Some say PSO, in turn, draws inspiration from Diablo.
Heavily influenced by popular japanese cartoon drawings called “manga”, the game is set in a sci-fi space exploration story, and truely shines in simplicity. It would even go as far as calling it an Online Arcade-RPG due to it’s simplicity in design and gameplay, and clearly shows a Sonic Team (the game’s developer) that is still getting the hang of creating 3D games.
PSO was first released on the Sega Dreamcast, but after the demise of the DC, PSO was ported to the Xbox and Gamecube, with an extra episode, quests, items, and received a large number of refinements.