Spacewar!

Spacewar! is perhaps the earliest widespread video game. It was written at MIT for their then-new DEC PDP-1 at RLE, using the Type 30 Visual CRT Display vector graphics display on the machine.

It initially conceived by Stephen R. (Slug) Russell, J. Martin Graetz and Wayne Wiitanen, and written by a varying combination, over time, of Graetz and Russell along with Dan Edwards, Alan Kotok, Robert A. Saunders, Peter Samson and Steven Piner.

Ports to other computers

A version was later made available for the IMLAC PDS-1; object code for several revisions of the IMLAC version seems to exist.

Stephen Russell ported the game to the Stanford PDP-6, and it was later updated to run on the SAIL PDP-10 and III displays. Back at MIT, there was a parallel development to port the game to the AI lab PDP-6 and 10.

Various versions were available for the PDP-8, PDP-9, PDP-11, and PDP-12.

See also

• Space Travel

Further reading

• J. M. Graetz, The Origin of Spacewar, Creative Computing, Volume 7, Number 8, August, 1981
• Joseph F. Goodavage, Space War, Saga, November 1972
• Stewart Brand, Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums, Rolling Stone, 7 December 1972 - famous article
• Matthew Lasar, Spacewar!, the first 2D top-down shooter, turns 50, Ars Technica, Oct 25, 2011
• Ryan P. Smith, How the First Popular Video Game Kicked Off Generations of Virtual Adventure, Smithsonian Magazine, December 13, 2018

External links

• Spacewar! - PDP-1/Spacewar! project at the CHM
  • spacewar 4.4 - source
  • PDP-1 Computer and Space War - brochure showing Spacewar! being used by DEC for marketing the PDP-1
• Spacewar! - a wealth of material
  • Inside Spacewar! - "A Software Archeological Approach to the First Video Game"
    • Intermission: Digging up the Minskytron Hyperspace
• Spacewar
• Mini Space War 1.0 C3
  • Imlac Software Library