Spacewar! (MIT 1962)

Slingshot around to the history of Spacewar!, at The Dot Eaters:
http://www.thedoteaters.com/stage1.ph...

We fill the black hole of information on Space Wars,
an arcade version by Cinematronics:
http://www.thedoteaters.com/p2_stage1...

http://www.thedoteaters.com Video Game History 101


Designed on a PDP-1 at MIT by Steve Russell, this is the first fully interactive video game.

• Category

  Entertainment

[William McDonald]

We actually had a version of this in an arcade I worked in back in my college days

[William Hunter]

It was most likely Space Wars. I've linked to the page about the game at my history site, up there in the description.

[SilvARK er]

How was pong more popular than this game :o

[William Hunter]

Since the original venues for video games were bars, Atari founder Nolan Bushnell said that a game needed to be simple enough that you could play with one hand and hold your beer in the other.

[Sailordude2012]

I used to play this on my Navy ship in the mid 1980's using the combat systems displays. LOT of hours wasted while the ship was in port, lol.

[William Hunter]

Hopefully when the ball was missed and went flying off the screen the system didn't fire off a SAM. ;)

[MissMiserly]

Cracked.

[William Hunter]

I take you to mean what if they had commercialized it back then. It's a interesting idea, but I don't think it would have made much difference to the eventual outcome. I think the public's conception of computers at the time, plus the then extant technology, would have conspired to prevent any kind of early burst of development. I mean, Bushnell tried to commercialize it in 1971, and was met by abject indifference from the public.

[Andreas Aronsson]

Funny how this looks better than some of the Atari games I've seen AVGN play... >_> vector graphics woo!

[artman40]

I bet back in the day, soccer moms complained about the amount of violence this game had.

[nefasest]

aka "Battle of the Interstellar Dildoes"

[youeatmetube]

Is this really the original. I've played one created from B Seiler in 1985, 1986. Have I been playing a ripp off game for so long ?

[Nemesis100000000]

Now, they need to make a DLC for this game

[zepps88]

because pong was invented in a time when games were marketable

[Витя Каучюков]

WTFFFFFFF!!!!!!!!!!!!