m a l c o l m

from Digital Life paper march 1 ,2005 The Straits Times

About 40 years ago, Spacewar, the first computer video game, was invented.
Spacewar, an arcade fighting game of two spaceships battling it out in deep space, forever changed the way we look at computers: not just as a platform for work, but for entertainment as well.

Unlike games today, it was not designed for commercial purposes, but purely as a demo for the PDP-1, an early Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) machine. DEC had donated the machine to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in hopes that they would use it to come up with something remarkable.

In 1961, Steve "Slug" Russel, a young programmer at MIT, wondered what to do with the newly donated PDP-1. Inspired by the cheesy sci-fi flicks of the 1960s, Russell decided to build the ultimate demo an interactive space game that would demostrate as much as the computer's capabilities as possible.

With the help of other MIT programmers, Russell put together Spacewar, where two players control a spaceship each and try to blow each other up with photon torpedoes. To make the game more interesting, players also had to avoid the gravitational pull of a sun in the center of the screen, which would destroy the ships if they came too near.

The game was packed with other functions that pushed the computing resources of the PDP-1: an accurate star map back drop of the Unites States' night sky, a "hyperspace" function which allowed ships to randomly teleport around the screen up to three times, and semi-realistic torpedo velocity calculations.

Although spacewar was meant to be just a demo, it was extremely fun to play. When it was completed in 1962, after about 200 man-hours to get the first version up, it was made available to the public and was promptly copied and modified. DEC later incorporated Spacewar as a demo program in the hardware memory of its machines, and by the mid-60s, Spacewar could be found on almost every research computer in the US.

Spacewar paved the way for the arcade machine games and the computer game industry. It also inspired a new wave of thinking that computers could be fun and approachable, and not cold, unfeeling machines to be feared.