Spacewar!

The significance of Spacewar! cannot possibly be brought down. It was the first ever video game. Ever. (Except possibly that of Higginbotham in 1957, which was rather at most a demonstrative program and was not written with fun in mind.)

Involving two ships on a motionless background (later, an accurately projected star field) that could shoot torpedoes at each other, it was a raw fighting space simulation with simple scoring.

Included were many features later used in Asteroids and its clones: the Hyperspace Panic button for example. Also, at the center of the screen (a Cathode Ray display, looking prettier than anything until Space Invaders) was a Death Star that pulled in ships. All objects in the game had precise gravity fields. Ships also had a limited supply of fuel.

To deal with the problems of broken switches and mis-hitting on the cramped control panel of the PDP-1, joypads were also produced, simply wood and solder, and switches.

Created by young students at MIT, it took advantage of the PDP-1's data storage facilities and processing speed. It led the way for games to follow, establishing such maxims as 'fun before realism' and also showed the computer's potential at realizing young men's goals of killing things.

The code was distributed freely along with PDP-1s across the USA's top universities, and this was how Nolan Bushnell, a student working in arcades over the summers, came across it. He would later found Atari, bringing Computer Space and Pong to the world... and 30,000 games would follow.


# 2006

hardware: PDP-1 platform, PDP-11 platform,

display: Monotone

Source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar!

Becoro # 2023-06-21 18:51:26

2 players simultaneously. Also implimented on the PDP-11.

(Zerothis) - # 2006

has influenced
Star Control (MS-DOS)
PySpaceWar (Linux)

has this clone
KSpaceDuel (Linux)
Galaxy Game (Arcade)
Spacewar (PLATO)