How Spacewar Started a Revolution in Video Games

On 4 April 1962, a bunch of MIT hobbyists launched the groundbreaking video game Spacewar! It appears on the DEC PDP-1, kicking off the video game revolution. Let’s take a look at how everything begins!

A Space Battle Revolution

While a few primitive visual computer games appeared in the 1950s, it was in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the year 1962 that the game which probably characterized “video games” as people know them presently action-oriented fictional simulations on a flexible electronic display— came to existence. Spacewar! a dual-player real-time depiction of a space dogfight, was built by a crew of Harvard workers and MIT undergraduates led by Steve Russell in April 1962. Spacewar, unlike prior computer games, immersed the player in a furious virtual gaming world that far outstripped previous computer simulations of chess, billiards, baseball, tic-tac-toe, or other mundane pastimes in terms of frequency. No, this was a brand-new concept: an action-packed fantasy video game. It was then that the video game was born.

How to Play

You play as a spacecraft (the “wedge” and “needle” form) traveling through a starfield in Spacewar. The objective is to fire missiles from the front of your spacecraft at your enemy’s ship. There are mechanics at work in this digital cosmos as you play: Your spacecraft thrust and glides with momentum and inertia, while a gravitational star sits in the center of the screen, pulling both ships inwards. (Both ships will explode if they come close to the star.) As you fling your spacecraft across the screen, trying to dodge the precise missile launch at your enemy, the outcome is an acrobatic dance of thrust, momentum, and gravity.

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The hobbyists used their institution’s $140,000 DEC PDP-1 pc (about $1.3 million now, inflation-adjusted). It contained a cutting-edge DEC Type 30 CRT monitor, which was a critical piece of the puzzle that enabled Spacewar’s dynamic digital nature. Players originally controlled the game via switches on the PDP-1 device’s console. Afterward, Alan Kotok and Robert A. Saunders designed two connected control boxes with a bespoke switch configuration that could be held in every player’s lap.

Spacewar Influence

DEC began using Spacewar as a demo program for the PDP-1’s potential not long after it was released. It was pre-programmed into the computer’s main memory when it arrived. While the PDP-1 was not uniformly dispersed due to its high cost, other programmers started to port Spacewar to other CRT-based computers. The game quickly became popular at institutions across America. Nolan Bushnell was the fan of the game first played Spacewar on a PDP-10 system at Stanford.

Bushnell and his buddy Ted Dabney began creating Computer Space, a video game inspired by Spacewar, in 1970 for the Nutting Associates. This game was the first professional video game item.  And the very first arcade video game, even though it was one-player and didn’t officially involve a computer. Atari, which published the enormously successful game Pong in November 1972, catalyzed the video game industry around the globe.

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