Arcade Games Officially Over The Hill

evilandi writes: "Spacewar, the world's first arcade game, is 40 years old this summer. Read this article at the BBC and play Spacewar using a Java emulator- remember, this was a two-player only game, designed in 1961 when programmers had friends who were in the same room! Spacewar, which was similar to Asteroids, later shipped as standard software for the PDP-1." Well, maybe the first electronic arcade game ;) -- or can anyone cite counterexamples?

Comments

Re:The real questions...

[maggard]

Is the original Spacewar code out there? Yes.

When I was Manager at The Computer Museum we had the code in the backroom on papertape. Since then I've seen it floating around for the PDP-1 emulators. It was in machine code so there was no source/compile/binary path.

As The Computer Museum (neé The Digital Computer Museum (Digital as in DEC)) had a full working PDP-1 out on permanent display for special occasions (or for Big Donors which is the same thing) we'd fire it all up & let folks play on the original hardware.

Speaking as not-a-big-gamer it was fun, challenging, impressively responsive. Invariably it was a crowd pleaser to both young and old alike. Considering that "glass teletypes" were a novelty when Spacewar debuted the vector-graphics & fluid motion were undoubtably a revalation to most folks.

Trivia:

• "Spacewar" is widely considered the first computer arcade game. Defining "first" is always a tricky business as there's always someone coming out of the woodwork with a one-off they built presumably years before or with something else in mind but it could be interpreted as, etc.
• We often stored a spare bag of vomit-cleanup in the large interior of the (unplugged) PDP-1. Nothing to do with the PDP-1 it was just the most convenient place in that gallery. However occ. when showing off the PDP-1 to guests (who'd often worked on it) they were startled to see it when we'd open the case.
• The PDP-1 monitor was a hexagonal case with a circular display. The hexagon-enclosing-a-circle later became the logo for DECUS, the Digital Equipment Corporation User Group.

E-Toys

[AlpineR]

Quoth the history essay:

Steve Piner wrote a text display and editing program called Expensive Typewriter (For a while, "expensive" was a favorite adjective for naming various PDP-1 routines that imitated the functions of more mundane devices. Among them was Peter Samson's E. Planetarium, as we shall see.)

So that's what the 'E' in all those e-businesses stands for. I would've done better in the NASDAQ if someone had told me sooner.

AlpineR

Re:Not the first

[HoldmyCauls]

I found a story about this here:

http://www.pong-story.com/thefirst.htm

for the lazy: it says that the oscilloscope pong game (called "Tennis programming") was developed by Willy Higinbotham (no typos there), a chainsmoker (unfiltered, no less!) in 1958, beating SpaceWar by nearly three years.

Lots of good tech info on the page, though.

Re:What about PONG .

[cavemanf16]

Pong Was the first, making it's debut in 1958 according to this article. I also saw the little History Channel's Lost and Found episode over the weekend, and while the guy that invented Pong, as a previous poster mentioned, didn't intend to do anything more than amuse the public, it does stand as the first publicly playable electronic game. Of course, no one charged money to play it, which may mean it doesn't count as the first 'arcade' game per se.

Re:What about PONG .

[freeweed]

PONG was the first commercially sucessful arcade game. Spacewar, for all its charm, never really made it past the eyes of a few hundred geeks. PONG came out a decade after, and after a day or 2 in operation, the owner called in for repairs thinking it was broken - turns out the coin slot was jammed full of quarters :) If this doesn't indicate just how new arcade games were at the time, I don't know what will!

Incidentally, Spacewar is typically considered the first VIDEO game. As I'm sure lots of other people will point out, pinball had electronic components in it for a long time before 1961. And just for more useless trivia, the first HOME video game was the Oddyssey, built by Magnavox in 1972. So old, it didn't even have a microprocessor... just yards and yards of transistors and the like... those were the days all right!