Spacewar

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This article is about the PDP-1 game. To read about the arcade game, see Space Wars.

{{Infobox CVG |title = Spacewar |image = Image:Spacewar1.png |developer = Steve Russell et al. |distributor = |designer = |engine = |version = |released = 1962 |genre = Multi-directional shooter |modes = Two players, simultaneously (only) |ratings = |platforms = PDP-1 |media = |requirements = |input = }} Spacewar is widely considered to be the first video game. Created by Stephen "Slug" Russell, it was a multiplayer space-combat simulation inspired by Doc Smith's Lensman series of science fiction novels. Spacewar was designed at the Higham Institute, and development was assigned to Russell. Development eventually started on a PDP-1 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1962. After Alan Kotok borrowed some sine and cosine routines from DEC for Russell, Russell began to work, and by February, had produced his first version. It took approximately 200 hours of work to create the initial version.

1 Gameplay
2 Options and features
3 Spacewar today
4 Other games inspired by Spacewar
5 References
6 External links

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Gameplay

The basic gameplay of Spacewar involves two armed spaceships attempting to shoot one another while maneuvering in the gravity well of a star. Each player controls a ship, and must attempt to simultaneously shoot at the other ship and avoid colliding with the star. Player controls included clockwise and counterclockwise rotation, thrust, fire, and hyperspace.

The ships fired missiles which were unaffected by gravity. Each ship had a limited number of missiles and a limited supply of fuel. The hyperspace feature could be used as a last-ditch means to evade enemy missiles, but the reentry from hyperspace would occur at a random location and there was an increasing probability of the ship exploding with each use.

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Options and features

Early versions of the game contained a randomly generated background starfield. However, the inaccuracy and lack of verisimilitude annoyed Peter Samson, so he wrote a program based on real star charts that scrolled slowly- at any one time, 45% of the night sky was visible, every star down to the fifth magnitude. The program was called "Expensive Planetarium" (referring to the price of the PDP-1), and was quickly incorporated into the main code.

There were several optional features controlled by sense switches (the main control for the game, although the first joysticks were invented for use with Spacewar) on the console:

no sun (and thus no gravity)
enable angular momentum
disable background starfield
the "Winds of Space"- a warping factor on trajectories that required the pilot to make careful adjustments every time they moved

Spacewar was a fairly good overall diagnostic of the PDP-1 computer and Type 30 Precision CRT Display, so DEC apparently used it for factory testing and shipped PDP-1 computers to customers with the Spacewar program already loaded into the core memory; this enabled field testing as when the PDP was fully set up, the field representative could simultaneously relax and do a final test of the PDP.

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Spacewar today

As of November 2005, there is only known to be one working PDP-1 in existence, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. The computer and display were completely restored after two years of work, and Spacewar is operational. The restoration team has plans to make a playable exhibit of Spacewar, allowing visitors to actually play it on the PDP-1.

A second PDP-1 belonging to the Computer History Museum is currently on tour as part of the Game On exhibition, which is appearing at The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, California through January 2006. However, this PDP-1 is not operational.

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Other games inspired by Spacewar

Image:KSpaceDuel1.1.png

Over the years, many computer games have been inspired by Spacewar; some are known by the same name. Some are straightforward clones, but most have introduced additional variations to the game play, such as:

various rates of acceleration
various levels of gravity (even negative)
missiles affected by gravity
fuel (energy) regeneration over time
shields

Arcade versions of Spacewar were released as the Galaxy Game (1971), Computer Space by Nutting Associates (1971), and Space Wars by Cinematronics (1977), the latter being the most commercially successful.

Home versions have appeared for most computer and console systems, with some - such as the Star Control series - becoming quite elaborate, introducing a wide variety of gameplay frameworks around the basic one-on-one combat system at their core.

http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blcomputer_videogames.htm - First graphical computer game is Tic-Tac-Toe. But this is not also the very first game.

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