January 16th, 2006
Spacewar! the First Video Game Recreated and Available Online
By Alice Hill
RealTechNews
When most people think of “retro gaming” they usually conjur up images of Pac Man and Breakout or maybe Asteroids. But to go truly retro - you have to go back to the grandaddy of them all - Spacewar! (The game uses an exclamation point as part of its name.) Spacewar! was invented on a mainframe computer, the DEC PDP-1 to be exact. If that doesn’t ring a bell, let’s just say Bill Gates was a gangly teen and he loved playing Spacewar!. But alas - the game dissolved into space when the platform became obsolete. Or did it?
Finding an original copy of Spacewar! and a DEC PDP-1 computer would be impossible. But thanks to three MIT students, Barry Silverman, Brian Silverman, and Vadim Gerasimov, Spacewar! lives on. Martin Graetz, one of Steve Russell’s original team members, gave these MIT students a 40 page print out of the original source code. They then re-typed it, and ran the code through several emulators and conversions to get it into a Java applet that will run in the average web browser. Thank you Barry, Brian and Vadim! You can play Spacewar! on this MIT web page and experience a piece of computer and gaming history for yourself. Source: MethodShop - Thanks Jon!
More info on Spacewar!
Play Spacewar! Here
jerry says:
I have Spacewar!, I used to play it on my 386 I believe, or maybe an older machine. A nice simple DOS game, though the one I have is much nicer than the one above. So it didn’t die, in fact it got much better.
January 16th, 2006 at 2:07 pm
steve says:
The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, has a PDP-1 and are working on restoring it to playable condition! I’m sure they would appreciate any and all funding to aid in their efforts.
January 16th, 2006 at 8:18 pm
Alice says:
That’s great to know Steve. Do you have any info we can post?
January 16th, 2006 at 11:30 pm
Vern says:
A free Computer Space simulator has also been developed - http://move.to/moose
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