Video Games Turn 60: How Spacewar Launched a Revolution | Hacker News Reader

Video Games Turn 60: How Spacewar Launched a Revolution

howtogeek.com

72 pointsdanso12 comments

I gotta make a call-out for the book "Hackers" by Steven Levy. The book had a nice section covering those days back at MIT when Spacewar was developed.

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/hackers/9781449390259/

This got me following a rabbit hole to research about the first video games. Looks like the very first might have been one called Tennis for Two from 1958. So video games are even older than 60!

I feel like Spacewar was the first video game. There are certainly other things that are similar are on computers, and entertaining... but they don't cross the threshold. However Spacewar has everything that a video game stands for.

I did a web remake of the old DOS re-imagining of SpaceWar a few years back as an exercise. https://spacewar.pro https://github.com/fritzy/spacewar.pro

It's kind of fun watching the AI fight each other if nothing else.

I was maybe six years old, and was at an overnighter in a military base auditorium space - this was a Cub Scout thing or something.

At one point, we could tour the nearby areas, where work was going on (in the depths of the Cold War). In one room, someone was pecking at a large terminal and mentioned how he was "talking" to someone on the West Coast. Why he wasn't on the phone, I couldn't imagine. Others a room over showed us Spacewar, and this melted my mind. Pong was one thing, this something altogether different. It came out in quarter-driven cabinet form, sort of, a year or two later, and I recall the scene. As I do now.

>> It came out in quarter-driven cabinet form, sort of, a year or two later, and I recall the scene.

The quarter-driven version was from Cinematronics and was designed by Larry Rosenthal. Their vector-graphics were common in arcades in the late 70's. I've been meaning to put together a presentation on reverse engineering the hardware and writing an emulator for some time now. It's a fun exercise that many people could do given the schematics and some prom readouts. The CPU is a work of genius.

The basic gameplay of Spacewar, central gravity well and all, persisted into the very excellent Star Control series, which were 90s releases. You can get Star Control II as open source, under the name The Ur-Quan Masters: http://sc2.sourceforge.net/

I love The Ur-Quan Masters. A labor of love. Never been able to finish it, and I never will, but I've started playing countless times.

Highly recommend Console Wars for anyone interested in this. It does a great overview of the first video games and the hardware challenges behind them. It's a little dense but it's good.

Ahoy Nuclear Fruit, https://youtu.be/15dxuAbTC0A

Just going to leave that here

The other day:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30886497

It is technologically incredible how far video games have come in that time.

Shame about how much corporatization has happened there too though.

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