ALTHOUGH THERE ARE PLENTY of contenders, generally the entry
that gets awarded without controversy is 1958’s Tennis for Two.
An astonishing technical achievement, the title suggests
something like Pong, but the reality is far grander. Designed by
American physicist William Higinbotham, it was built over three
weeks using a modified oscilloscope. Whereas Pong has a simple
top-down viewpoint, Tennis for Two is viewed side-on, and has
real-time physics, with gravity and inertia shaping the game’s
dynamics. There is a simulation you can run on your PC, but don’t
bother with that. Just search for it on YouTube, and watch it being
played on an oscilloscope—it’s an exquisite piece of engineering
that makes the likes of Atari look positively vulgar.
However, these were one-off machines. The first known game
to be copied and installed on multiple machines is Spacewar!
from 1962. Written at MIT for the DEC PDP-1 computer, it has
two spaceships engaged in a torpedo dogfight while avoiding
the gravity well of a star. In order to get around the physical
awkwardness of two players on a keyboard, it had an early form
of gamepad. Other features include random starfields, the wrap-
around effect when you cross an edge of the screen (later famous
in Asteroids), and even a warp feature for random teleportation.
Note that Spacewar! i s o f te n c o nf u s e d w i t h 1969 ’s Space Travel,
particularly by Unix fans. Space Travel was an early space-flight
videogame developed for the PDP-7 that had the player flying
around a scale model of the solar system. The development
process of the game and the technical constraints imposed upon
Ken Thompson led to the push to create a better system, which
resulted in Unics, or Unix*, as it’s known today
Spacewar! became so influential that it spawned two arcade
machines in 1971: Galaxy Game and Computer Space. These were
two of the very first arcade machines, the latter being the first
commercially available videogame. A second videogame market
was developing in the form of home gaming consoles, with the
first to market being the Magnavox Odyssey.
Released in 1972, it had no CPU—just a collection of individual
boards covered in diodes attached to a main circuit board. The
packaging wowed with lots of accessories, but the reality was
less impressive when it turned out you just moved a couple of
squares behind a plastic overlay. That said, it did play a mean
game of Tennis. Computer Space creators Nolan Bushnell and
Ted Dabney started their own venture in 1972: Atari. At this time,
Bushnell had seen a Magnavox Odyssey demo machine, which
was running Tennis on a TV. History gets contentious here, but it’s
generally agreed that Atari decided to make a clone of Tennis for
the arcades, dubbed Pong.
Tennis clones (now known as Pong clones) started popping up
all over the place. However, it would only be so long before the
public lost interest. It was clear that the home console needed
a rethink, and Atari decided the single-game format needed to
be discarded in favor of swappable games—so a microprocessor
CPU would be needed.
Atari’s bullish business tactics and financial backing would
eventually see 1977’s Atari Video Computer System—with its
cheap MOS 6507 CPU—dominate the competition. It was later
renamed the Atari 2600.THE MAINFRAME IN THE ROOM
Awarding the title for “first videogame” is also tricky, and generally
depends on who you believe—but here’s a rough guide...
The Atari VCS/2600 may have ruled the late ’70s, but it was so low
in memor y, the game car tridges held ex tr a R AM.RUNNING SPACEWAR!
If you fancy a bash at Spacewar!, the easiest way is just to
play it online—we especially like the version by Norbert
Landsteiner at http://www.masswerk.at/spacewar. The screen
surrounds and image blur are especially nice touches,
and Norbert has gone into exceptional detail, making the
experience as authentic as possible.
If you’re determined to play it locally on your own
machine, you’re in luck if you own a Raspberry Pi. User
Warpshock has written a tutorial for RetroPie users at
https://bit.ly/2RtkTm6.
If you would like to run a PDP-1 emulator, your distro
should have the simh package in its repositories. You can
run the emulator by entering the following command:
$ pdp1
We tried to get Spacewar! running on our own machine
through the PDP-1 emulator, but it’s not as though it has
an interface to import ROMs, like some kind of Nintendo
emulator. It should be entirely possible to transfer
Spacewar! into your session by remotely copying it, but
after a day of chewing through manuals, we finally threw
in the towel on that particular project. Please let us know
how you get on.*H
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Norbert
Landsteiner’s
excellent online
rendition of
Spacewar!maximumpc.com JUN 2019 MAXIMUMPC 27