How 1961’s Spacewar Computer Game Put the World on Notice
The first video game was created in 1962. It wasn’t until the 1990s that video games became more popular, but they have been around since the beginning. In 1962, MIT students developed Spacewar! This game is seen as an early predecessor to personal computer games and it’s one of the earliest digital games ever made.
The game was created on a mainframe computer. The students programmed the machine to do its work, but it was up to them when and where to stop or start this program. This made Spacewar! one of the earliest examples of what is now known as embedded computing – computers that are “embedded” in other devices with specific tasks to perform.
TWO-PLAYER ACTION
The game is a two-player competitive shooter that involves firing torpedoes and missiles at each other’s spaceships while defending their own ship from rockets fired by the opponent. The aim of the game was not only to shoot down your opponent but also destroy his “home planet” before he did so with yours!
While Spacewar! was not a commercial success, other early digital games were more so. One of them is Tetris from 1984, which was designed to run on an IBM PCjr with a monochrome monitor (which cost around $1000 at the time).
PONG – THE BREAKOUT IN COMPUTER GAMING
It was Atari’s Pong (1972) that became the first video game to achieve widespread popularity. Pong is a two-dimensional sports game. It features an electronic ball that moves across the screen with no player input, and players have to hit it back by moving their paddle up or down on a “paddle” which simulated tennis.
Pong proved to be one of Atari’s most successful games ever made – so much so that Nintendo took the idea for one of their most popular games, Wii Sports (2006), from it.
The video game industry has grown to become a multi-billion dollar business – and that was all started with Spacewar! in 1962.
TETRIS BUILDS ON EARLY GAME SUCCESS
Tetris was originally created by a Russian mathematician called Alexey Pajitnov, who had been working at the Computer Center of the Academy of Sciences. He began to work on new ideas in 1984 when he saw that Nintendo’s Game & Watch series had become wildly successful and then developed Tetris with co-workers Dmitry Pavlovsky and Vadim Gerasimov.
The game was an instant success when it launched in Russia, but its international commercial release wasn’t until 1987, whereupon it became the world’s most popular video game for a period of time.
Today there are many different types of games out there – some that can be played on PC or mobile, and others that can be played on consoles.
*Notes:
The creators of Spacewar! never made any money from the game because it was coded in a language called Basic, which meant there were no copyright restrictions to prevent other companies or programmers from copying their idea.
