One of the earliest video games,
Spacewar! was developed on the
PDP-1 computer at MIT in 1962, fifteen years before
The Golden Age of Video Games. It was also an important early prototype of computer graphics techniques that later became standard in the industry.
The game was created between 1961 and 1962 by a bunch of nerdy model railroad/computer enthusiasts that were students at MIT, led by Steve "Slug" Russell, who is often given sole credit for the game as he was the one that came up with most of the idea.
The game pitted two players, each commanding
cosmetically different spaceships armed with torpedoes against each other around the gravity well of a planet. The ships and their torpedoes obeyed correct Newtonian physics (in
two dimensions), and players navigated their ships by rotating them and applying thrust.
One hit would destroy each ship.
The game quickly spread and by the beginning of 1963, any company or school who had the money to buy the PDP-1 (only 55 were ever manufactured, in the
1960s that was an almost ridiculously large run) had a copy of
Spacewar! on it. In fact, by the end of the run of the computer, its manufacturer DEC had a copy pre-loaded on every new PDP-1. It was a good diagnostic of the computer and its display during factory testing, and even back then they saw the value of an entertainment program.
Ten years later, two electrical engineer/computer science student/entrepreneur by the names of Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney adapted a clone of the game and developed it into the world's first coin-operated arcade video game, called
Computer Space. The game was a commercial flop, but the company they founded,
Atari, became one of the main driving forces behind
The Golden Age of Video Games. One of Atari's early successes,
Asteroids, borrowed
Spacewar!'s ships and mechanics, and adapted the game for one player by setting the battle in
an asteroid field. In 1978, Atari ported
Spacewar! itself to the
2600 game console. Another company, Cinematronics, adapted the game in 1977 as
Space Wars, the first
Vector Game.
You can play the original
Spacewar! on the web:
http://spacewar.oversigma.com
or you go to
the San Francisco Computer History Museum and see a demonstration of the only PDP-1 still working (coincidentally that PDP-1 was the 55th and final one manufactured). If you're lucky, you might be able to play
Spacewar! on that PDP-1 itself.
Spacewar! provides examples of:
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