Video Games

by: Eric A.

Steve “Slug” Russell invented the first real video game in 1961 while he was a student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Other people had apparently made crude versions of Tic-tac-toe or Tennis, but these were not very fun nor were they widely seen by anybody and are little more than footnotes in the history of computers. While Steve was working towards his BA in Computer Science, he bemoaned the lack of games on the PDP-1 computers he and his fellow students were working on. Inspired by some of the demonstrations of the PDP-1 graphical capabilities, he envisioned a game where player controlled spaceships soared through the sky and blasted each other to oblivion, just like in the science fiction books he was such a fan of. His fellow students thought this was a great idea and encouraged him to pursue it. After months of this encouragement, he finally got started on the project. (This inertia is part of what lead to his being given the nickname “Slug”). After months of occasional work and much procrastination, he finally created a working game, which he named “SpaceWar!”. In this game, two spaceships, guided by human player using switches on the computer to control direction, velocity and firing, could whiz around the screen shooting at each other.  One could say that in addition to being the first videogame and inventing the “shoot-em-up genre”, it was one of the first pieces of real time interactive software.

Steve never patented the game nor sold it, but gave it away freely. It spread from university to university, to wherever there was a PDP-1 computer. It would go on to inspire many programmers, including Nolan Bushnell, whose game “Computer Space” was based on SpaceWar! and was the first coin-operated video game that could be played in arcades and bars.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. 1984. Steven Levey

The Ultimate History of Video Games. 2001. Steven L. Kent