I Was One of the First Video Game Streamers

In March of 2005, just for the fun of it, I set up something that I believe could be considered one of the earliest examples of home video game streaming. It was primitive to be sure. In fact, it wasn’t even video. But it was LIVE, from my home and it lasted off and on for 4 days. I even had a chat that I participated in, which was my only real communication with anyone watching.

This is the story of how I became one of the first video game “streamers” (quotes intentional).

A Very Different Time

In 2005, game streaming did not yet exist as we know it now. Much of the internet was still in the process of moving to high-speed connections from dial-up, and even DSL wasn’t much to get excited about. Windows XP was still the mainstream OS du jour, Twitch.TV didn’t yet exist, neither did OBS and most game consoles were barely aware of the internet.

In March of that year, I did something that was a primitive version of today’s game streams. It wasn’t exactly a video stream, but it was live and it got a very positive response. But first just a little background.

I was recently divorced, ending what was a difficult relationship of 5 years. The previous Fall, I had also lost my job and was evicted from my apartment in the same week. I was working as a line cook at a casual dining restaurant chain and back living with my mom and sister, sleeping in the same bed I had grown up with in my old room. It may sound like the worst time of my life, but it really wasn’t. For me it was a time of rest, healing, reflection and contemplation. It was an opportunity for me to hit the Reset button and re-launch my life with a lot of bugs fixed. During this time I reconnected with old friends and indulged in some of my old hobbies, especially video games.

A New Obsession

My good friend Jeff had just gotten Gran Turismo 4 on the PS2 and I usually spent some time at his place every day driving races, earning credits and opening up more of the game. Eventually I got a PS2 of my own (I fixed two of them for a friend, and he gave me one as payment) and my own copy of GT4 (yay for being able to afford things after years of not). GT4 became my favorite game. It was nearly an obsession. GT4 had a huge car list, loads of tracks and a wide variety of events, including three 24-hour endurance races. Yes, actual 24 hour races that you had to run without saving. It had two at Circuit de la Sarthe (the course that hosts the 24 hours of LeMans) and one at the Nurburgring Nordschleife.

GT4 also had what was called B-Spec Mode that allowed you to “train” an AI driver who could take on some of those long endurance races for you, so you wouldn’t have to. I was not about to make any use of this whatsoever. I planned to A-Spec the entire game, including those 24 hour races. To me, using B-spec was taking the easy way out and there was no way I would use it, even on the three 24 hour courses.

The Nurburgring Nordschleife

The Nurburgring Nordschliefe (or “The Green Hell” or simply “The Ring”) is a long, grueling course 13 miles in length. It has a long, storied history and is among the most challenging courses in the world. It has significant elevation changes, dangerous high speed sections, slower technical sections, sudden drops, long corners and kinks that tempt you to go flat out at your own risk. The track has claimed the lives of a number of drivers, and nearly killed others, such as Niki Lauda, who barely survived and went on to win another Formula 1 championsihp.

And I loved it. I have driven more simulated laps on this course than any other, of that I am convinced. Any time I got a new car, the first thing I did was take it around The Ring at least once.

Beginning the 24 Hours of Nurburgring

On March 21, 2005 at approximately 7pm EST, I started the 24 Hours of Nurburgring. I decided to use the 1969 Ford GT40, one of my favorite cars in the game. I knew it was likely overpowered, but my plan wasn’t to have a close race. I just wanted to run it and win it. I also knew the GT40 would be a bit of a handful to control, so my secondary goal was to continue beating my best laps.

After about 4 hours of driving, I decided it would be fun to take some screenshots using my video capture card, just for posterity. The first few I took were done manually, as I had my sister execute the command while I was driving. But then I figured I could just automate the process and take as many as I wanted, so I wrote a small script that took a screenshot every minute. But that led me to realize that it would be very easy to make these screenshots visible on a publicly viewable web page. So I installed and quickly configured a web server, set up a port forward on my router and suddenly, anyone in the world could see my progress in the form of screenshots every 5 seconds.

My internet connection was a slower DSL connection, so I had to use low image resolution and didn’t dare take the screenshots any more frequently. I posted a link to the page on the Gran Turismo 4 Message Board on GameFAQS and anyone interested could then watch me.

So in a way, it was video. It was just at a VERY low frame rate and resolution.

This is what the page looked like:

The Stream Goes Live

The response was better than I imagined. People were legitimately captivated by this, even though the race itself was completely uneventful, as I had gotten a huge lead early on and never looked back. Something about it had people waiting for me to get home from work or wake up from a short night’s sleep and drive some more. Maybe it was the risk that if I lost power, I would lose all my progress, or just the novelty of seeing someone conquer a 24 hour race simulation in near real time. Believe me, having a power loss was definitely on my mind. Nonetheless, I had hundreds of viewers from all over the world, and the link had even been posted on other Gran Turismo message boards. People were captivated not only by the fact that I was running the full 24 hours myself, but that I had set up a way for people to watch it live.

For nearly four days, interrupted by sleep and work, I drove 24 hours in GT4 and went on to finish and win the race. During the final hours, our home internet connection was rendered unusable due to the amount of traffic to this little website serving up a small JPEG every 5 seconds. I had gotten thousands of hits per day and hundreds of unique visitors from around the world.

One user even wrote a series of interview questions for me to answer after I had finished the race. One of the questions even states:

“You probably have accomplished a first in history of gaming by putting this race on the internet.” — DaggerK, GameFAQs poster

What follows here is a gallery of images saved from the “stream”, and then the entire thread on GameFAQs that I happened to scrape later on to save.

The GameFAQs Thread

The only public posting I made about this was in a thread on the Gran Turismo 4 message board on GameFAQs. Although the link was shared on a few international Gran Turismo message boards in Germany.

This is that thread.