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40th Anniversary of Video Games
CFN writes "According to this article in the New York Times (free registration...), this month marks the 40th anniversary of Spacewars, the very first video game ever created!
It's very interesting to consider how quickly the popularity of video games grew, because, essentially, Spacewars was spontaneously generated. I guess there is something about blinking lights, flashing colors, and tinny sound effects that just appeals to the soul." Unfortunately, there was no violence before 1952,
because we all know that violence is caused by video games.
Oh, and I had a great version of spacewars that I used
to play on a portable PC (Compaq with like a 5 inch green
screen and a wopping 4 mhz!) when I was short. I loved
that game.
There was a Java emulator of the PDP-1 around, where you could play a game which was exactly like the orginal spacewars except for a few lines of code. The KDE game KSpaceDuel is also an acceptable alternative.
Not a typewriter
If your want to download it, read the README carefully.
How to celebrate it more than to actually mass-play Spacewars?
"A DEC PDP1 emulator running the original version of Spacewar! is online Here"
Right here:w ww.nytimes.com/2002/02/28/technology/28SPAC.html
http://college.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://
I'm not karma-whoring, I've already hit the cap.
Spacewar! is one of the grand-daddies of modern videogames, and a much deeper deathmatch than Pong. (I was amazed at how developed its deathmatch became when I read this old Rolling Stones article.) Written by MIT Hackers who were inspired by the space opera Fiction of E.E. "Doc" Smith. Someone has an the original game running on a PDP-1 emulator. There's a decent funny introduction at classicgaming.com and a more comprehensive set of Spacewar! links as well. (Possibly the most obvious sequal to Spacewar! was the brilliant Star Control series. The first game added 12 new types of ships, each with 2 unique weapons systems, and the second created a whole universe to support it. Brilliant, brilliant stuff.)
from my blog at kisrael.com
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
The first video game, as in the first known usage of a computer and video to play a game, was actually built by Willy Higinbotham in 1958.
See the link for the whole (fascinating) story - this man gave people the IDEA and the implementation for video games - it's time that he got his due share in video game history.
http://www.pong-story.com/thefirst.htm
Actually the first video game was a tennis game created by Willy Higinbotham at Brookhaven National Laboratory. It used an oscilloscope for the graphics output. Go here for a timeline on video games.
- pydron
You're right, Oscilloscope Tennis developed by William Higinbotham was the first video game. But don't expect any of these foo's to listen to you, they're too busy trying to one-up each others' reminisces of Space Wars.
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You're very confused... A quick timeline of the _most_ significant early games;
Tennis for Two - 1958
SpaceWar! - 1961/62
Magnavox Oddessey - 1968
Computer Space (Arcade Version of SpaceWar) - 1971
Pong - 1972
Atari Home Pong - 1974
Space Invaders - 1977
Apologies if I disremember some of the dates (can't quite remember when the Oddessey & arcade Pong units came out and I can't be bothered to go and look them up)
Cheers
Chris
I believe Pong was the first successful commercialized game (1972) (created by Atari founder Nolan Bushnell after his unsuccessful Computer Space in 1971). A home TV version of Pong appeared around 1976. MIT Space War, the game cited here, ran on "The" PDP-1 a decade earlier. It was the coolest.
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld