Spacewar! Here is a screen shot of the game running on a PDP-1 emulator with the original source code.
This
is the hardware that Spacewar! ran on.
What
astounds me is that this first ever computer game has so many features of
so-called modern games. To put it into a historical context: this game was
conceived in 1961 – 17 years after the end of WWII, before manned spaceflight,
a year before the mouse was invented and the same year that Ivan Sutherland
invented “Sketchpad” the first interactive graphics program and about the
same time as the first stirrings of the ARPAnet.
Besides
Nolan Bushnell another early addict was Alan Kay, who is credited with inventing
the WIMP interface at Xerox Parc. He said: “The game of Spacewar
blossoms spontaneously wherever there is a graphics display connected to a
computer."
I
believe this is a picture of some of the creators, who were Stephen Russell,
Peter Samson, Dan Edwards, and Martin Graetz, actually playing the game.
The
story of its creation is familiar to all of us. They wanted to produce a
demo that would show off their new hardware, in this case the new vector
graphic display. Martin Graetz wrote about it in an article for
Creative Computing in 1981. He said:
A
good demonstration program ought to satisfy three criteria:
·
It should demonstrate as many of the computer's resources as possible, and tax
those resources to the limit;
·
Within a consistent framework, it should be interesting, which means every run
should be different;
·
It should involve the onlooker in a pleasurable and active way -- in short, it
should be a game.
This
seems to be a pretty good starting point for any game today.
They
weren’t just inventing the video game, they were inventing the controls too.
At first it was played with the toggle switches on the actual mainframe.
Graetz again: “At the very least, a jittery player could miss the torpedo
switch and hit the start lever, obliterating the universe in one big
anti-bang.” Later they raided the university model train society and got
some analogue controllers that they could use instead.
Another
nice story that resonates with modern designers is ‘feature creep’:
Another student had invented the “Expensive Planatarium” which used actual
planetary data above Boston. They incorporated this into the game to
provide the background of the screen and by flashing each point of light, the
stars can be made to glow at the correct level of brightness.
The
game itself runs to 9kb of memory and 40 pages of listings.
This
may have been the first and last time computer games were genuinely hip: this is
the picture taken by the now-famous Annie Liebowitz for Rolling Stone magazine
in December 1972 of the winner of the ‘Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics.’
1.
It was intensely interactive in real time with the computer.
2.
It encouraged new programming by the user.
3.
It bonded human and machine through a responsive broadband interface of live
graphics display.
4.
It served primarily as a communication device between humans.
5.
It was a game.
6.
It functioned best on, stand-alone equipment (and diarupted multiple-user
equipment).
7.
It served human interest, not machine. (Spacewar is trivial to a computer.)
8.
It was delightful
*
Click here to play the original Spacewar! running in a Java PDP-1 emulator in your browser window!