We've seen multiplayer games since computer games emerged—decades ago. We are used to calling friends and family to play games with us, sometimes in a co-operative mode with common goals and other times for a competitive experience. The point is that playing with someone else is usually lots of fun!
There was a time when the Internet barely existed, or simply put, people's connections were too slow to actually have a good online experience. By then, it was very usual for games to have a local multiplayer mode. This allowed a big trend for split screen and other types of local multiplayer gameplay. Local Area Network (LAN) multiplayer was also implemented as a way to make the experience more cooperative to players, and as a result, you could actually cooperate or fight with your friends over a cable or wireless network. Unfortunately, as time passed and the Internet became more powerful, the local multiplayer modes became less and less used, and actual online multiplayer...