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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.
...for small values of 1962...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Don't you mean 1962? I mean, if there's no violence before 40 years ago (1962), then it also holds that there's none before 50 years ago, but I still think you goofed there.
Arrr, it be the infamous pirate, No Beard Pete!
I thought that was the first video game, created at Brookhaven Labs
Unfortunately, there was no violence before 1952, because we all know that violence is caused by video games.
As opposed to fortunately?
Drink your coffee, Taco.
Good lord knows how many man hours have been spent in dimly lit rooms since video games hit the scene. WHat the hell did people usd to do? Work?
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.
This is cool, I am the first generation out from this and remeber reading the articles and seeing the picture in wonder.
:)
My father wrote a computer Golf game, we belive the first, in 1965, he had a couple of national news stories on it and I have a tape of the last show (nice shirt dad, and hair, and suit...lol).
It was fairly sophisticated taking into account wind and other varibles, could be played on any termina, (paper out back then) I actually spent many hours 'online' clicking though the old paper tape to load and run it on a timeshare (what a waste of then limited resources
I still have the cards, paper tape, and somewhere I think the latter magnetic tape it was transferred to eventually, What should I do with all this stuff, pretty boring in itself. Should I donate it somewhere , where ?
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
...does anyone have a version that will run on a modern machine? I'd love to while away a day setting the one ship into a permanent orbit around the planet and zapping it with the other. :)
Woot w00t w007.
this may seem blasphemous (sp?) to say here...don't get me wrong...i'm 22 and i personally love my PS2 & my PC...but when i was a kid growing up, i never had a console, and i think i was better off for it...sure i eventually had a game boy for a period of time, and i had the old apple IIc, but they weren't a nintendo, genesis, etc...and i think i turned out better off because of it...instead of being constantly inside trying to figure out how to get to world 8-1 of mario brothers, i was outside playing sports, riding my bike, building tree forts...kids today spend to much time playing video games, and not enough time experiencing interactions with real people...at a summer camp that i went to, they used to have enough kids interested in baseball, basketball, soccer, that they could field leagues with 10+ teams...now they're lucky if they get a half dozen kids interested in playing those sports....instead, everyone wants to spend their beautiful summer day inside playing on computers or something of that nature (i.e. Magic card games...)...kids need to be more active, and i know that when i eventually have kids, i am planning on strongly regulated the amount of time that they spend laying video games...it makes me upset to see the state of today's kids...it's leading to the "wussification" of our youth...when i head stories such as this one that talk about banning dodge ball, i think it's upsurd...
so, in conclusion, to those of you with kids, and those of you who plan to have them...don't let your them spend 24/7 trying to beat that the latest version of final fantasy...have them go outside...have them use their imagination...have them interact with others...
oh well...that was just my rant....
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
Googling for Spacewars turns up several results that say the game is from 1961, not '62. Is The Times Wrong?
How to celebrate it more than to actually mass-play Spacewars?
"A DEC PDP1 emulator running the original version of Spacewar! is online Here"
Willy: It's impossible for me to fire a pistol. If you'll check me medical records, you'll see I have a cripplin' arthritis in me index fingerrrs. Look at 'em! [holds them up] I got it from "Space Invaders" in 1977. Wiggum: Aw, yeah. That was a pretty addictive video game. Willy: [surprised] Video game?
And I thought I was old-school cause the first game I ever played was Combat for the Atari 2600...stuff like this really puts your position as a gamer in perspective. Wow.
Let me ask you this...
Has the RPG really evolved beyond Ultima? Has the shooter really evolved beyond Galaxian? Has the puzzle really evolved beyond Tetris, or the simulation beyond SimCity?
Games may have changed in their outward appearance, but at their heart, they're all essentially the same.
-Evan
It's very interesting to consider how quickly the popularity of video games grew,
Wasn't it Pong, developed around 1973 that really launched the popularity of video games? The first 20 years seemed to be an expansion of a glacial sort.
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.
according to this article, the creator of spacewar also wrote pong in 1970.....there's got to be a million copies/versions of pong out there for every platform avalible. including shockwave.
;-)
i'm not sure if you'd even need shockwave to emulate this, but is there some sort of a shockwave/consolve version of this game "spacewar"? the article speaks of an arcade version, is there a MAME rom of this? this seems interesting enough to relive. i'd count spacewar as "abandonware"
moox. for a new generation.
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
All very low rez, but very cool. The head to head face to face competition with your opponent was particularly addictive. someone should do a higher rez version of this.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
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
50 + 1 - 1 = 49
--
The Cap is nigh. Time to get a fresh new account.
Just to play devil's advocate for a minute....
I, too, grew up in what seems to be the last generation before video games became such a "staple item" of childhood.
I never did enjoy competitive sports though, and constantly fought pressure from both peers and teachers to play them. Until the end of high-school (and even in college, to an extent), I constantly witnessed favoritism towards those who were good at sports, and saw schools much more concerned with the quality of their sports teams than about the quality of their education.
While it doesn't hurt to tell your kids to "get outside" once in a while, when it's a nice day and they're wasting it all indoors, I also don't think it's necessarily a bad thing that you don't see "leagues of 10+ teams" like you used to.
Maybe kids are finally a little more free to choose their own interests, and to develop their minds outside of the classroom? Only a select few of those who excel at sports in school ever get to make a living from it later. By contrast, how many will find an interest in gaming (and by extension, computers) useful for a future career?
(Lots of idiotic assumptions below)
Sure, it's fine for you Americans to yell at your kids to get them to go outside... But have you ever tried making a Tree Fort in -25C? Admittedly, it's nice during summer, and if we're lucky, it's on a Saturday.
This was actually taken from Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. I've forgotten which of the morally despicable collectivists says it, but it's not too far into it, at a party.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
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
...was that it was a fantastic game before keyboards became commodity junk. On the old true-blue IBM PC or XT, you got a keyboard sturdy enough to dent a car if you swung it hard enough. Now they disintegrate from the wind resistance.
My point being, in those days each key on the keyboard could be pressed independently and the computer could discern EXACTLY which keys were down or let up. Spacewar for PC (and myriad multiplayer games that came later, using a single keyboard) demanded good quality keyboards. My buddies used to sit in the computer lab and play it for hours, until they 'upgraded' machines. They had 'new style' 101 keyboards (88 was enough for me then), and a new strategy came about: hold down as many keys as you could so your opponent couldn't thrust or shoot; when they get frustrated because they're falling toward the sun, spin around and shoot as fast as possible.
Most Spacewar games became shoving matches after that.
Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.
An interesting book I just finished reading was The Ultimate History of Video Games by Steven Kent. It goes all the way back... actually beginning with the precursors to pinball in the 19th century, and telling the story of video games and similar amusements as a narrative up to the year 2001. I thought it was well-written, and contains tons of quotes from firsthand sources.
Use Ctrl-C instead of ESC in Vim!
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
You CAN take that too far, you know. I agree, kids spending 24/7 on video games aren't building any memories, aren't learning a lot, aren't developing themselves as well as they could. But don't completely cut them out. They're just one variety of toy - and kids need toys, they need to play. Hell, adults do too. ^_^ Ask any educator, play is a very important part of education and mental (and social) development. Though the case can be made that computer games aren't teaching social development. =P
Give kids books and bikes and "Final Fantasy" and a Rubix Cube and Little League and Lego and a musical instrument and a foreign language or three and more books and movies and dodgeball and music and crayons, and turn 'em loose! The sky's the limit as long as they have sufficient opportunities to learn and grow. =)
Of course, I'm biased. My dad's a hacker, and rather than spending our time playing catch, we spent it tinkering with DOS. =P But the memories are nice, all the same, and I learned a lot. Computer games are also a way to get kids interested in computers, which in today's and the future economy will be helpful to them in their education and the job market. Just something to keep in mind.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
It doesn't seem to work on my browser. Good luck!
Free unix account: freeshell.org
...instead of being constantly inside trying to figure out how to get to world 8-1 of mario brothers, i was outside playing sports, riding my bike, building tree forts...
If kids don't know how to get to World 8-1 of Super Mario Brothers, then IMHO they need to spend more time playing video games because they are clearly out of practice. Really, all one needs to do is go to the hidden warp zone at the end of World 1-2, warp to World 4, then use the first warp zone in World 4-2 to warp directly to World 8. (Note: Do not confuse this with the warp zone at the end of World 4-2, which will only take you to World 5 and is virtually useless; you're looking for the vine hidden in the blocks near the first elevator.)
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Everything I needed to know, I learned playing video games:
Knock over everything, you never know what will hide a power-ups.
Pick up everything that isn't nailed down, its bound to be useful later. Horde
Save often.
Don't just look straight ahead, look up, down, and all around.
Use the right tool for the job
Use items together to make new items
exploit your opponents weakness
Learn from your opponent's stratagy
Don't give up
As for MAME, as arcade PONG can't be emulated, the best you can hope for is a simulation. This was included in MAME several (dozen) versions back, but removed by the project head, as he considered simulation not in tune with what MAME is about. I believe the code is still in there, and as MAME is open-sourced, you can just uncomment the relevant parts and compile it with PONG. There also are binaries floating around with this code still enabled. But as for 'officially'... sadly, it ain't there.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
That's interesting. I didn't know that about Macs. PC keyboards are completely different, though. The original ones, you could lay your arm across the thing and query which keys were down and it would tell you ALL of them. Any made in the past 10 years, though, will only return about five keys. Why? I assume a simplification in the circuitry. The bus itself can still handle all the keys at once, but they keyboards can't. I proved this to a friend once by taking two different keyboards (new and old) and swapping them into a program I wrote to display down-keys. Without closing the program even, you could see that older keyboards (particularly IBM ones) could handle it perfectly, but the newer couldn't.
Back in those days, you actually COULD have 3 people play a multiplayer game on a single keyboard. Lots of body heat, but lots of fun too.
Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.