History of Spacewar!: The First Major Computer Game

 By:Gaylen Malone    

     One of the earliest digital computer games was created by Stever Russell, Wayne Wiitanen and Martin Graetz in 1961. [1] The game was titled Spacewar! It is a two-game in which each player controls a space ship avatar. The goal in the game is for one player to destroy the other.

            The only computer games prior to Spacewar! were created between the years of 1957 and 1961. MIT created TX-0 (Transistorized Experiment Computer Zero). The TX-0 has a collection of interactive graphical programs that included Mouse in the Maze, HAX and Tic-Tac-Toe.[2] Spacewar! was created for the PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processor-1). Spacewar! turned out to be a good program to test the computer with so all the PDP-1 computers orders were shipped out with Spacewar! already in the core memory of the computer [3]. The widespread popularity of Spacewar! is largely accredited to the fact that computer shipped out preloaded with the game already on the computer.  

            In 1961, DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) donated a PDP-1 to the MIT "kludge room" in hopes that the students and professors at MIT could brainstorm together to think and create something wonderful and impressive to showcase the capabilities of the PDP-1. [2] "Somebody had built some little pattern-generating programs which made interesting patterns like a kaleidoscope. Not a very good demonstration. Here was this display that could do all sorts of good things! So we started talking about it, figuring what would be interesting displays. We decided that probably you could make a two-dimensional maneuvering sort of thing, and decided that naturally the obvious thing to do was spaceships."[4] The team of MIT students finished programming the computer game after nearly 200 hours of work. [1] The gameplay of Spacewar! involves two spaceships that shoot missiles that are unaffected by gravity. These two space ships are called "the needle" and "the wedge". The two space ships attempt shoot each other while trying not to fall into the star in the center of the screen. The star in the center of the screen is affected by gravity and is effectively a black hole that sucks up space ships that get too close to it. The limits of the ships are the limited number of missiles and the limited supple of fuel.

     The game has five controls, clockwise, counterclockwise rotation, thrust, fire and hyperspace. Hyperspace is a feather that lets a player avoid missiles by reintroducing them into the game space in a random location. [5] The risk of using the hyperspace button is that your ships risks the possibility of exploding. The probability increases with each use of hyperspace.

As of today, there is only on working PDP-1, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. It took a team two full years of work to restore the computer and display, but now Spacewar! is fully operational. [6]

[1]Markoff, John (June 3, 2006). "Alan Kotok, 64, a Pioneer In Computer Video Games". The New York Times Company Staff. Retrieved November 1, 2012.

[2]  "The origin of Spacewar", Creative Computing magazine, August 1981, J. M. Graetz, archived by wheels.org. Retrieved November 1, 2012.

[3]Computer History Museum. "Computer History Museum PDP-1 Restoration Project — Introduction". Retrieved November 1, 2012.

 [4]Brand, Stewart (December 7, 1972). "Spacewar: Fantastic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums". Rolling Stone (Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc.) (123): 50–58.

[5] The origin of Spacewar", Creative Computing magazine, August 1981, J. M. Graetz, archived by wheels.org. Retrieved November 1, 2012.

[6] "The Mouse That Roared: A PDP-1 Celebration Event". Retrieved November 1, 2012.