Video Games – The REAL Beginning

This ain't Astro Wars

When talking about old video games most people would say that the very first was PONG. Well, guess what, most people are wrong. I don’t blame them for being wrong, as there were only three that came before it, but for the record the very first widely available video game is actually a game made ten years before, called Spacewar.

The year is 1962 and in that academic year (starting 1961) of the American University MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) the Institute had acquired a new computer costing $120,000, the DEC PDP-1. Although still of titanic proportions, this beast was relatively compact for its time and came with…. wait for it…. a small black and white monitor!

Attending that academic year was a group of students who spent most of their time hanging around computers. They spoke to each-other, as most teenagers do, in made-up jargon including one word we take for granted now, hack, meaning “an impressive feat”. One of the students in particular, Steve Russell, had a particular love of sci-fi stories and had set about to perform the greatest hack yet attempted on the Institute’s new DEC PDP-1. It took him six months but our friend Mr Russell succeeded in creating the world’s first two player duelling video game, also heralded as the world’s first real video game. He named his proud creation Spacewar and it featured two opposing spaceships, both of different designs, which he nicknamed the needle and the wedge so I’m guessing you can imagine how primitive they looked. Both ships fired torpedoes at each other and used a control system very similar to the one Asteroids would take seventeen years later – turning left and right with a forward propulsion system.

Spacewar with the world's first gaming controllers

Steve’s creation was a sensation among his peers and there were quite often marathon playing sessions going long into the night. Over time the game got more advanced as Steve’s friends pitched in to the game, creating star filled backgrounds and a sun with gravity that draws in the players’ ship. A hyperspace button was added (again used by Asteroids, but also featuring in other games). Due to the awkwardness of trying to flick the switches on the titanic computer and, at the same time, craning their necks to see the small monitor, the students also made small wooden switch boxes, effectively controllers. The first joysticks had been created only a couple of weeks after the first video game.

Although his creation had been a success amongst his peers, Steve Russell never attempted to copyright Spacewar, or profit from it. His reasoning for having made Spacewar was to prove it was possible. This was all the reward he needed.

Spacewar makes its way on to Microsoft XNA for XBox developers, allowing them to not only see where it all began, but use the original code as a platform for future development

In May 2004, a seven month restoration project of the DEC PDP-1 computer was finally realised and, over forty years since it was originally created, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California unveiled a fully working system which, in March 2005, saw Spacewar being played once more and is available to the public for scheduled hands on demonstrations.

More recently, developers on Microsoft XNA were given full access to the Spacewar code with the XNA Game Studio Express developer kit, allowing the users to utilise and manipulate the code to create their own variations of the game. And so, almost fifty years since Spacewar was first conceived, we have come full circle.

Click here to play Spacewar on a PDP-1 Emulator

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