First Video Game? Try Spacewar!, Which Beat Pong By A Decade

By | November 29, 2016

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Spacewar! being played on a PDP-1, and a recreation of its graphics. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Everybody knows that Pong was the first video game, right? Spacewar! seems to have had it beat, though -- by about a decade. Pong, which resembles ping-pong, came out in 1972 and was the first successful arcade game. But in 1962, Spacewar! presaged digital gaming entirely by being the first computer or video game installed in multiple locations.

Spacewar! was developed by Steve Russell at MIT, with the help of Bob Saunders and Steve Piner. Crazily, the reason it was made in the first place was to showcase academic computer power and programmatic brilliance, rather than for just good ol’ plain fun.

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Spacewar graphics. Source: giphy.com

Steve Russell seemed to try to bridge the gap between fun and cool demonstration, having this to say about the game:

Somebody had built some little pattern-generating programs which made interesting patterns like a kaleidoscope. Not a very good demonstration. Here was this display that could do all sorts of good things! So we started talking about it, figuring what would be interesting displays. We decided that probably you could make a two-dimensional maneuvering sort of thing, and decided that naturally the obvious thing to do was spaceships.