Over the summer before its arrival a group of students and university employees had been pondering ideas for programs that would demonstrate the new computer's capabilities in a compelling way. The PDP-1 was to complement the older TX-0, and like it had a punched tape reader and writer, and additionally accepted input from a panel of switches and could output to a cathode-ray tube display. In September 1961, a Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-1 minicomputer was installed in the " kludge room" on the 2nd floor of Building 26, the location of the MIT Electrical Engineering Department. The games included Tic-Tac-Toe, which used a light pen to play a simple game of noughts and crosses against the computer, and Mouse in the Maze, which used a light pen to set up a maze of walls for a virtual mouse to traverse. These interactive graphical games were created by a community of programmers, many of them students and university employees affiliated with the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC), led by Alan Kotok, Peter Samson, and Bob Saunders. A few programs, however, were intended both to showcase the power of the computer they ran on and as entertainment products these were generally created by undergraduate and graduate students and university employees, such as at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where staff and students were allowed on occasion to develop programs for the TX-0 experimental computer. Steve Russell, designer and main programmer of the initial version of Spacewar!, with a PDP-1 in 2007ĭuring the 1950s, various computer games were created in the context of academic computer and programming research and for demonstrations of computing power, especially after the introduction later in the decade of smaller and faster computers on which programs could be created and run in real time as opposed to being executed on a schedule. In 2007, Spacewar! was named to a list of the ten most important video games of all time, which formed the start of the game canon at the Library of Congress, and in 2018 it was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame by The Strong and the International Center for the History of Electronic Games. It directly inspired many other electronic games, such as the first commercial arcade video games, Galaxy Game and Computer Space (1971), and later games such as Asteroids (1979). It has also been recreated in more modern programming languages for PDP-1 emulators. It was extremely popular in the small programming community in the 1960s and the public domain code was widely ported to and recreated on other computer systems at the time, especially after computer systems with monitors became more widespread towards the end of the decade. Spacewar! is one of the most important and influential games in the early history of video games. The game was initially controlled with switches on the PDP-1, though Bob Saunders built an early gamepad to reduce the difficulty and awkwardness of controlling the game. At any time, the player can engage a hyperspace feature to move to a new and random location on the screen, though in some versions each use has an increasing chance of destroying the ship instead. Ships are destroyed when they collide with a torpedo, the star, or each other. Flying near the star to provide a gravity assist was a common tactic. Each ship has limited weaponry and fuel for maneuvering, and the ships remain in motion even when the player is not accelerating. Both ships are controlled by human players. The game features two spaceships, "the needle" and "the wedge", engaged in a dogfight while maneuvering in the gravity well of a star. It was also spread to many of the few dozen installations of the PDP-1 computer, making Spacewar! the first known video game to be played at multiple computer installations. After its initial creation, Spacewar! was expanded further by other students and employees of universities in the area, including Dan Edwards and Peter Samson. It was written for the newly installed DEC PDP-1 minicomputer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Spacewar! is a space combat video game developed in 1962 by Steve Russell in collaboration with Martin Graetz, Wayne Wiitanen, Bob Saunders, Steve Piner, and others.
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