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I'm old enough to remember all of these. Under the link below, you can still find old screenshots from deathmatch games we played in clans back in 1998. On dial-up modems with pings sometimes exceeding 400ms. It was terrible, but we played anyway :) That unplugged icon would appear when there were connection issues (not lag) and sometimes just for a moment. https://archive.quake.world/clans/ol-team/walki.zip

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I'm with you on everything except "it was terrible" :) The only problem with 300+ping, at the time, was when those damn LPBs connected

In-match comms between teammates is my favorite memory. The ease of voice chat in MP games since then is underappreciated. Feeling like a dinosaur writing this but...

... before discord/mumble/ventrilo/teamspeak, the only choice to gain an edge in competitive online gaming was to be physically in the same space or team text chat binds. The binds would cover 10-15 common situations so we could communicate while playing.. In hindsight, when things got hectic, reading the team chat text spam hindered us more than helped us. But we had good intentions with those binds and boy we had a blast competing. And let's be real, that's all that really matters.

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