50 Years Ago, Spacewar! Was Born!
I recently realized that Spacewar! was first released in 1962, fifty years ago. In looking at the game’s Wikipedia entry, the first operational version of the game was released in February, while the version we’ve come to know and love was released in April. Therefore, I’d say now is good enough a time as any to say happy 50th birthday to space gaming, and to look back at how far we’ve come since the very beginning…
They start at the right place...
Usually this sort of thing would go into the Spacey Snippets, but it’s so cool I thought it deserved a post of its own. The folks at The Escapist have crafted their own space sim timeline entitled, “From X-Wing to X3: Space Combat Sim Timeline“, which is pretty cool. It starts at SpaceWar!, as it should, and covers many sims up to the upcoming Sol: Exodus, skipping a bunch along the way, but they hit most of the heavy hitters of the genre. Check it out when you have a moment.
Captain on the bridge!
When I was four (in 1977), I was changing channels on my TV and came across the most beautiful thing I had ever seen up to that point…the U.S.S. Enterprise. That was the first time I had felt lust for a spaceship (or anything else, for that matter), and I became exceedingly hooked on Star Trek for the next decade or so, being pretty much a hard core Trekkie until my mid-teens. The movie version of the Enterprise supplanted my love for the original (it’s still my favorite version), but there was nothing like seeing that ship for the first time and know that, then and there, I’d always love spaceships, the Enterprise in particular.
Little did I know that six years before that (two years before I was born even, if you’re keeping up with the math), an enterprising (hah!) young programmer named Mike Mayfield was building a game based on the beloved TV show, nearly a decade after the first computerized space game, SpaceWar! What resulted was a game that, while simplistic in its presentation, had a surprising amount of depth and detail. Today we’ll be looking at the second game on my list, 1971’s Star Trek.
Spacewar! being played on an original PDP-1 computer.
About fifty years ago, three guys — Martin Graetz, Steve Russell, and Wayne Witaenem — of the fictitious “Hingham Institute Space Warfare Study Group” conceived of a computer program that would be a better demonstration of the PDP-1 than the typical kaleidoscope program that was currently being used. Russell had recently finished the Lensmen series by E.E. Smith, and wanted to capture that feeling of being chased around the galaxy by one’s enemy. At that point, the concept for Spacewar! was born, and several months later, in February 1962, the game was finally completed and released.
In doing research on all of the space games made for computers, I embarrassingly forgot about the first game, and the granddaddy of them all…Spacewar! (Yes, the exclamation point is in the title of the game.) Released in freaking 1962 (nine years before I was released), Spacewar! gave two players the chance to slug it out and destroy one another using only a few keys (rotation, thrust, firing weapon) in which to destroy their opponent. It’s crude now, but I can’t imagine how it was received forty-nine years ago.
In thinking of how far space games have come since then, I can only pick my jaw up off the floor. From rudimentary controls and graphics of Spacewar! to the amazing graphics and detailed controls of Freespace 2 and X3: Terran Conflict, for example, space games have been a microcosm for the evolution of computer games in general. As part of this journey of covering ALL of the space games released for computers, I’m excited to see this evolution first hand all over again.
Spacewar! will be the next game I review, so stay tuned. :)
