Roblox had a phenomenal engine when it came out and its terrain destruction is still unmatched.
In 2006, I could download the Roblox app and bam, I would play thousands of 3D multiplayer games for free that loaded near instantly. With fully destructible buildings and dynamic terrain. Somehow I didn't get viruses from remote code execution.
That was groundbreaking at the time. In that era, I'd have to download Steam, buy individual games like Counterstrike, and the wackiest thing would be the "surf" gamemode. Most games I'd buy on CDs. I certainly couldn't knock down entire buildings with grenades.
If you contrast with Second Life/Habbo Hotel, you could walk around and talk to people I guess?
The community that spring up around it eventually carried it into total dominance of gaming for American children, but the basic parts of the engine like "click button, load into game, blow stuff up" were a decade ahead of the curve.
Also Blockland cost money, Roblox was free.
> I'd have to download Steam, buy individual games like Counterstrike, and the wackiest thing would be the "surf" gamemode.
It's interesting that you chose Counter-Strike as an example, as that is a Half Life mod itself, and by 2006 there was a large ecosystem [1] of Half Life modifications using Metamod and AMX Mod (X). The last one in a weird C-like language called Small or Pawn, which was my first programming language that I made serious programs with.
Especially the War3FT mod where users gained server-bound XP in combination with a reserved slots plugins which allowed top-XP users to join a full server really created a tight community of players on my tiny DSL home-hosted server.
[1] https://www.amxmodx.org/compiler.php?mod=1&cat=0&plugin=&aut...
In many ways it remains ahead of the curve. Kids that grow up making games in Roblox rarely survive the jump to a dedicated engine because Roblox is just so much easier to develop for in nearly every aspect. One big thing I've heard is that instantly getting working, robust online multiplayer by default baked into the engine is a major plus.
I would call multiplayer out of the box the defining feature for sure.
It's challenging to get networking right, and the effort required doesn't get all that much smaller just because your game is smaller.
Most engines do come with a networking framework or layer these days but Roblox gets to assume a bunch of things an engine can't, and as such provide a complete solution out of the box.
They originally accomplished this with an interesting approach to netcode you couldn't do today.
Everything was replicated in the client and server. So you could open Cheat Engine, modify your total $$$ on the client, and it would propagate to the server and everyone else playing.
They only fixed this in 2014 with FilteringEnabled/RemoteFunctions but that was opt-in until 2018 and fully rolled out in 2021 (breaking most classic Roblox games). This also made games much harder to develop.
how big was Roblox in 2006?
> In that era, I'd have to download Steam, buy individual games like Counterstrike, and the wackiest thing would be the "surf" gamemode.
You could also play any Source mod. Also WC3 maps were insane at the time.
Roblox was tiny in 2006. I joined in 2008. It was still leading the market.
To give an example, Roblox added user-created cosmetic t-shirts as a way to monetize the platform. Developers immediately scripted their games to recognize special "VIP t-shirts" that would provide in-game benefits. And quickly created idle games called "tycoons" where you could wait 2 hours to accumulate money to buy a fortress, or buy the t-shirt to skip all that.
I don't think there were any modding systems with mtx support.