Space War
Spacewar! was conceived in 1961 by Martin Graetz, Stephen Russell, and Wayne Wiitanen. It was first realized on the PDP-1 in 1962 by Stephen Russell, Peter Samson, Dan Edwards, and Martin Graetz, together with Alan Kotok, Steve Piner, and Robert A Saunders.
In many aspects, Space War (sometimes also spelled Spacewar or SpaceWar, or maybe Spacewar!) can be considered the first true computer or video game. A. L. Samuel's Checkers was created for study, not entertainment (in fact Samuel hated checkers), and Tennis for Two was mainly a demonstration. In a way, though, this could be said of Space War, too, leaving the Colossal Caves Adventure and Pong as the first games meant for enjoyment and nothing else.
The computer Space War was originally written for was the PDP-1, the first computer that used a keyboard (actually, a converted electric typewriter) as input and a video screen (actually, a converted largish oscilloscope) as output.
It was the size of about three refrigerators, and it had an old-fashioned computer console with a whole bunch of switches and lights. And it had a cathode ray tube, and it had a typewriter. I thought this was a great thing, and I was itching to get my fingers on it and try it. And so a bunch of us—some people who'd worked on the debugger and some friends of mine from Harvard—we started talking about how you could really do a lot more with the computer and the display. Space was very hot at the time—it was just when satellites were getting up and we were talking about putting a man on the moon. So we said, gee, space is fun, and most people don't appreciate how to maneuver things in space. And so I wrote a demo program that had two spaceships that were controlled by the switches on the computer. They were different shapes. They could fire torpedoes at one another, and they could navigate around the screen with the sort of physics you find in space. And then Pete Samson wrote a program called Expensive Planetarium. […]
Expensive Planetarium displayed the star map sort of as you'd see it looking out the window, and I incorporated that as a background. And then Dan Edwards looked at my code for displaying outlines and figured out a way to speed it up by a factor of two or three, which gave him enough time to compute the effect of gravity on the two spaceships. And that made it a much better game, because with the stars in the background, you could estimate the motion of the ships much better than when they were just on a dead black background. And with the spaceships affected by gravity, it made it a bit of a challenge, and you got to try to do orbital mechanics—there was the star in the center of the screen, and it attracted them just as the sun would.
You had four controls: rotate counterclockwise, rotate clockwise, turn on your rocket thrust, which caused a little tail of rocket exhaust to show on the screen, and torpedo. The torpedoes were proximity-fused, so that when they got close to something they blew up. If it was another torpedo, they both blew up, and if it was another spaceship, they both blew up. So it would work as a defensive weapon, because you could blow other torpedoes out of the sky if they were coming at you. But we very quickly found that your elbows got tired, because the table was hard and not quite at a convenient height. So we and many other people hooked up controllers which were basically four buttons in a row that you could control your spaceship with.
What happened was that most of the people who had access to the PDP-1 would show their family and friends what they were doing and they would demonstrate with Spacewar, because it was more interesting than watching someone debug a program with DDT. Actually I think the thing I take the most pride in about Spacewar is that it got so many people hooked on computer programming. It caught a lot of eyes and got a lot of interesting people asking,
How do you do that?—Steve Russell, quoted after: J.C. Herz, Joystick Nation
