Reintroducing the PDP-1

Spacewar!, the First Video Game

In 1962, the first known digital video game, Spacewar! debuted on a PDP-1 at MIT and started the beginning of video games.

Inspired by the Science Fiction books written by E.E. Doc Smith, a group of MIT students programmed a PDP-1 computer to make a space simulation video game.

The first shooter and the first game controllers for a video game

Spacewar! was the first space shooter - a 2 player versus style game based in outer space featuring orbital mechanics around a gravitational star. It was programmed to be played with custom 'control boxes', arguably the first game controllers for a video game.

Spacewar!'s Impact on Video Games

Spacewar! set forth fundamental characteristics that would become the standard in video games. Pushing technology and hardware to the maximum limits. Physics, simulated, realistically and playfully. Interactively. Combat based game play with shooting as a core mechanic.

Spacewar! influenced video game history in countless ways, one in which was the group of MIT students that created it. These students developed perhaps the first philosophy to guide the creation of a video game:

They held that a computer game should satisfy the following three criteria:

1. It should demonstrate as many of the computer's resources as possible, and tax those resources to the limit.
   
   
2. Within a consistent framework, it should be interesting, which means every run should be different.
   
   
3. It should involve the onlooker in a pleasurable and active way-in short, it should be a game.

Sometime later, a young Nolan Bushnell, at the University of Utah, who went on to found Atari, spent hours playing Spacewar! and through its inspiration, created Computer Space, the first commercial video game and arcade game.