The title is pretty much the question. How did use of this expression start?
I only see this on the Net. I’ve never head it in conversation, but I might not be hanging around the right crowd. It’s not even clear to me in exactly what circumstances “owned!” should be properly used.
I don’t know the origin but I do hear it while playing sports. Hockey in particular and mostly by the younger crowd. 15-16 years old. When they get around some body they will say, “I owned your a**”
Until just now I had only encountered it (or a version of it - ‘pwned’) in one place. Another message board. I thought it was unique to them.
I heard essentially the same thing in my youth, mainly while playing basketball.
What I have not heard is use of the word “owned!” by itself, as I see it on the Interet. There seems to be a missing link somewhere.
My understanding is that you “own” someone when you compromise the security of their computing systems such that you now control “their” computer. This would be my understand based on computer-oriented Internet Relay Chat (IRC) spaces I frequented between '95 and '00.
Before I ever got on the net (early 90’s), it was definately common to say “owned” in a sports environment.
If you play any online games you see owned, or pwned all the time. It’s definately not just a chat room/message board thing.
It can also mean, in a chat room, if someone messes with you and you have an awesome comeback, that the person who messed with you in the first place was ‘owned.’ (this usually requires that they are left without anything to say.)
And in case you’re curious, pwned is just like writing teh for the, and l9er for l8er…
they’re common mess ups on the keyboard among people playing a game and typing fast so as not to get killed, and then they just stick as the ‘cool’ thing to write. Wow, that’s a big run on sentance.
Anyway, while I’m no authority, I’d say the missing link is sports people who started playing online games and using their own (pwn?) slang terms.
I think it’s derived from the word “own.” 
I’ve been using it ever since I was 13 (I’m 19 now). I usually use it when I’m involved in something competitive; that way, if I beat someone at something, I can tell them that I am basically their master. So if I’m their master, I own them. So when I beat someone at something, I can tell them that they are owned by me. This somehow translated (probably through terrible grammar use) over to “you were owned” as opposed to “you are owned.”
It can also be used to let someone know they have just been insulted, sort of like when someone yells “burned.”
Oh, I almost forgot… the usage of owned is basically that you dominated the other person so badly, that you owned them. So in a basketball game, if every time you came upon a defender you left him in the dust and scored, you owned him. And in a multi player game, if every time you came upon the same person (or team) you killed them (or all of them) and came out with barely a scratch, you definately owned them all.
Thanks for all the replies so far. I tried my best to search through the plugins, but I couldn’t find anything. That playlist editor doesn’t seem like what I’m looking for. I guess I’ll have to stick to crappy shuffle. 
Yep, this is the sense I understand. In my time, though, “owned!” would never be used by itself like that. It would’ve been “I own(ed) you!” or something similar.
Online gaming and online chats are definitely the missing links. I engage in neither, so that’s how I missed it. Xvxdarkknightxvx’s citation of his age also makes me think this is a generation-gap thing. If I were 19 again, I probably wouldn’t have had to ask about this.
Thanks for the info, all!
It’s pure speculation on my part, but perhaps the usage evolved from the concept of the gift store sign - “you break it, you own it.”. The broad meaning of the sign is you must accept the bad with the good, but the idea might have expanded to include “total control” of the situation.
While it might be used in sports and other competitive activities, I think the “origin of owned as an Internet put-down” definitely comes from hackers.
I’ve seen hackers (or more specifically, “crackers”, in the sense of someone breaking into a computer) use this since at least the mid-90’s.
Often seen in a phrase similar to this:
I always understood it to mean you’re in control of the situation, whatever it is. Kinda like when your kids start getting uppity and want to exert their civil rights and you say, "forget it kid, I own you.