There was modem dialup between two players though. Among my circle of friends in 94/95 there was someone who wanted to play DOOM every night. The games was often coordinated during the day at school, or later by phone.
Also I agree that is not a given that "Cloud gaming" will take off. We have emerging VR were latency is absolutely critical, even more so than for FPS e-sports
Yeah I remember that. There were also some gaming-specific low-latency premium-rate dialup services (e.g. Wireplay in the UK) that hosted game servers on-net. With the right TCP/IP settings and Modem firmware, you could get very close to the minimum theoretical modem latencies with barely any jitter, and it made a big difference.
Also I agree that is not a given that "Cloud gaming" will take off. We have emerging VR were latency is absolutely critical, even more so than for FPS e-sports