The first game I ever played online was R6. Kids these days don't know the joy of finding a cable host so you could do 2v2 with tolerable lag, nor what it was like to fill someone up with a mag and for them to fall over dead 10 seconds later. I think part of the joy of that was the imagination of how cool it would be if it all worked right vs the actual experience, but yeah, I'll never forget it. I dunno why but I'll never forget one time playing with this guy isoplus. I don't know we even communicated, nor if we played more than a single game together, but isoplus, wherever you are, be well.

You ever play Tribes?

UO. Wow. It's really another experience that can't be recreated. So incredibly magical. EverQuest and Asheron's Call were similarly formative experiences. I never could have thought at the time that massively multiplayer games would seem boring and even lame (what, I've gotta play with people?) now.

My parents would make sure I wasn't sneaking on EQ late at night by picking up the phone next to their bed to make sure I wasn't on the phone line.

In case you're interested, I've recently ported Ultima Online to mobile via Unity+ClassicUO: https://github.com/voxelboy/mobileuo. I'll be publishing a blog post about it soon.

Oh the original Rainbow Six on PC was really really hard

I also miss old-school slashdot, lobste.rs and HN are the closest communities I've found to it. I also played Rogue Spear - on a crappy rural dialup connection no less. I wasn't well liked by other players because my lag was significantly worse than everyone else. My favourite level was the airport.