The year was 1962 and until then video games were hardly known, except for tic tac toe and a version of the classic ping-pong. It was at that time that Steve Russell, an American programmer and scientist, thought of creating his own.
I wanted something interactive and never seen before, that could perform actions, such as shooting, and that would also serve more than one person. It was at that time that he created Spacewar.
space war 1962
That was its name, and as you can guess, it mixed space and war, since it consisted of two spaceships that tried to destroy each other by shooting, something never seen before and that allowed two people to face each other without being caught by a star-shaped gravitational force. All this thanks to two controllers attached to the computerwithout the need for keyboards or mice, something curious for the time.
In addition, they had limited ammunition and fuel, as well as added difficulties such as a black hole that moved them to the corners of the screen.
They were very complex functions for the time, where they were not used to having “difficulties”, since the only game that was known was a version of the current ping-pong that we all associate as the first in history.
The most curious thing is that its programmer only it took 200 hours to create it, that although it may seem like an outrage, without means or references, it seems to me a very fine job and well done at that time. It could be said that it took a little more than what a normal person works full-time in a month.
the first version came out in February 1962 and included a starry background that was automatically generated in each game in a random and different way.
One point against this video game was that to be able to test it you had to have a computer called PDP-1which was extremely expensive, to the point that the game was already pre-installed in later versions within the PC itself.
Later, together with his colleagues Dan Edwards, Peter Samson, they were improving and adding new functions to make it more entertaining.
We leave you here a video of how it worked, in case you dare to try it.
And although he was a pioneer in the introduction of complex calculations that led to subsequent video games and what we know today, neither he nor his colleagues profited from this title, and what’s more, its download option is available on Steam for free. However, you cannot find it in the search engine, to run it you will have to open the command line (Windows Key + R), type “steam://run/480” and hit Enter.
As of today, there are no known PDP-1 computers to function properly, there is only one unit located at the Mountain View (California) Computer History Museum. Of course, it has the video game installed and it is fully functional. A pity that something that has so much history has not been preserved by more people. The good thing is that we can enjoy that video game on all our computers thanks to that group of young people who started the rules of gamers forever.
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