It was 1962 and until then video games were barely known except for tic tac toe and a version of classic ping pong. It was at this 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, like shooting, and that also served more than one person. It was at this 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 trying to destroy each other by shooting at each other, something never seen before and which allowed two people to face each other without being caught by a star-shaped gravitational force. All this thanks to two controllers connected to the computerwithout the need for keyboards or mice, a curious thing for the time.
Additionally, they had limited ammo and fuel, as well as additional difficulties such as a black hole that moved them to the corners of the screen.
These were very complex functions for the time, where they were not used to having “difficulties”, since the only known game was a version of the current ping pong that we all associate as the first of the story.
The most curious thing is that its programmer it took 200 hours to create it, that even if it may seem an outrage, without means or references, it seems to me a very beautiful job and well done at this time. You could say it took a little more than a normal person works full time in a month.
the first version released in February 1962 and included an auto-generated starry background in each game randomly and differently.
A 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 on the PC itself.
Later, together with his colleagues Dan Edwards, Peter Samson, they improved and added new functions to make it more entertaining.
Here we leave you 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 later video games and what we know today, neither he nor his colleagues profited from this title, and what is 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 press Enter.
To date, there are no PDP-1 computers known to work properly, there is only one unit located at the Mountain View (California) Computer History Museum. Of course, the video game is installed and it is fully functional. Too bad something with so much history hasn’t been preserved by more people. The good thing is that we can enjoy this video game on all our computers thanks to this group of young people who started the gamers rules forever.
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