Spacewar 1 and the Beginnings of Video Game Aesthetics | Hacker News Reader

Spacewar 1 and the Beginnings of Video Game Aesthetics

masswerk.at

77 pointsmasswerk26 comments

This was my favorite arcade game for a while (in the very early days). See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Wars (The arcade version was a direct derivative of the original described in the article.)

I played this a lot with a buddy. One day some clown came into the arcade and saw me playing. He said he was the best in the world, and wanted to challenge me to one game (for $20). I kept trying to fend him off and decline his challenge, but my friend put up the money.

I had never played anyone so good, and it took me a little while to adapt to his tactics. After a few minutes, I beat him. My friend collected his money, and then the guy started running around the arcade (Sega Center) yelling "This guy is the best Space War player!" over and over again while pointing at me. I was pretty embarrassed for him.

This was my first and also favorite game circa 1978 and something that really started me along the path to computers. It had really great bass sounds. I recall being on a school trip to Niagara falls and slipping away into an arcade with a school friend to play this instead of going on the falls tour...

It's funny how you were embarrassed for him. He probably wasn't embarrassed. Maybe he was right!

In the end, it was Bruce Baumgart, winner of the 1972 "Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics" described in the Stewart Brand article "Spacewar — Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums"? Probably the only person bearing the title "best Spacewar player in the world" with some legitimacy… ;-)

> and then the guy started running around the arcade (Sega Center) yelling "This guy is the best Space War player!" over and over again while pointing at me. I was pretty embarrassed for him.

He sounds refreshingly honest and self aware to me. He went around loudly letting everyone know he was the best player, when proven wrong he just as loudly informed everyone of the correction. Everyone should be more like the second best Space War player in the world.

Maybe he just wanted to let the Powers That Be know who to move on to.

;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Game_of_Pool_%28The_Twilight...

Nice reference. Gonna have to binge some Twilight Zone now. I can't find the exact quote from Highlander (TV series, not the movie) where Duncan has a friend, the "best swordsman in Europe", but he says something like, "don't ever be the best... God forbid you lose your nerve but they keep coming." Found the episode at least [0].

[0] https://highlander.fandom.com/wiki/Courage

My father worked in the research labs at Eastman Kodak (where he later devised the Bayer filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_filter for digital cameras). In the early 1960's the labs held an open house for family, so as a child I got to play the original Spacewar on a PDP-1.

It always confused me as a kid how the economy functioned with "everyone" working at a desk. This certainly didn't help.

Well that’s about 4 amazing stories in one short comment! Thanks for sharing, and what a start in life!

I really like this article! Most of them don't seem to go beyond the basics of "yes, spacewar! was a thing. it had spaceships and stuff", but this is a really fun dive into how it was made, what features were available, and the history of it. It's much, much more interesting than it sounded when I clicked on it.

Well, there is a lot more of this: https://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/inside/ :-)

(Read, code analysis of every single line.)

I'm curious, how close is the Spacewarduino! that was made at MIT a few years ago?

Sadly, I’ve no insight into this, as I only know the respective blog post on the project. They certainly reverse engineered the spaceship outlines correctly (for which you have to dive a few layers into the code), so I guess, it may have been quite accurate. (That said, there’s always a temptation to cut a few corners…)

You might like https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/PDP1_MiSTer :)

Have you considered looking into PDP-6/10 spacewar? We have two versions using the 340 display (which I've even played with friends, sadly not on a real 340 of course) and one for the Knight TV.

Well, it's on the list. But I've to become a bit more competent on these systems first. Next one will be a version for the LINC (for wich I've already retyped and assembled the source code).

Maybe join us in #pdp-10 on freenode :)

Made a homage to the game for a 10-Liner Basic coding competition. Here is a Youtube vid of my son and I playing it. Obviously, much simplified (no gravity), but you do still have to manage momentum and avoid the red giant in the centre. https://youtu.be/yLvFR3G9Q70

Made a homage to the game for a 10-liner BASIC coding challenge this year. My son and I are playing in this Youtube vid: https://youtu.be/yLvFR3G9Q70 Obviously, it is a little simpler (i.e. no gravity). But you do have to contend with momentum.

Pretty sure the Spacewar clone "Space Wars" was the first vector game I ever saw. I was blown away because everything I'd seen until then were clunky raster graphics, be it at the arcade or one of the very early home gaming systems. Then came along Lunar Lander, which cemented into my mind that vector style games were sophisticated and grown-up. Think it wasn't until Dragon's Lair came out that I was again amazed on the same level, though the game play for Dragon's Lair turned out to be rather mundane.

One design decision made for Spacewar that has stuck was to make the universe wrap around like a torus. It seems obvious to us now to do this as it's the way so many early games worked but isn't how the world we observe around us generally is perceived. Without Spacewar, would Asteroids and many other games come up with wraparound space on their own? Either way, Spacewar laid down the path for this to be considered a valid way of representing space.

Where else is your ship going to go when it's 8-bit x-position overflows?

The decision was probably somewhat pre-made by Ben Gurly, the ingenious designer of the PDP-1. The displays coordinates are simply a memory word with a precision of 10 significant bits. So it’s managed quite "naturally" by under-/overflow wraparound. The art is really in withstanding the urge to introduce any boundary checks, like, "why should it bounce, space is infinite". (However, there were clones that introduced bouncing, including the Atari 2600 cartridge version.)

Another decision probably dictated by the display hardware was the speed of the spaceships. Because of the long persistence of the phosphor, you get these iconic trails for moving objects. If you make the ships go too fast, you'll see distinctive outlines "stamped" onto the display. So you automatically want to make this as smooth as possible (so that the individual plots merge into a solid trail). This is on the other hand facilitated by the fact that the display coordinates provide 8 fractional bits in a standard PDP-1 18-bit word. So you can move and turn things by really small ("subpixel") increments.

Playable reconstruction by the author of this article:

https://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/640/?v=spacewar1&ss=5:1,6:1

On a tangent: having just read a long blog post about Europa Universalis IV & co. it struck me that that genre is a line of which an early exemplar was HAMMURABI.

Beautifully written and researched piece of... contemporary computer anthropology. Thank you. That was a wild ride. Was afraid to try the game because bedtime.

Anyone ever own a vectrex? I find them fascinating and never saw one until adulthood.

Curious of your experience with them and what the best games were and why?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com