The PDP-1 as a games machine
The PDP-1 is where the video game begins, not as an industry, but as an idea: that a computer with a screen and a few switches could be a thing you play. That idea has essentially one founding instance, Spacewar!, but it grew in a wider culture of playful programs, the display hacks and demos the MIT hackers wrote to make the machine do something beautiful or surprising. This page sets the game in that company: the one true game at the top, and the visual play around it from which it is not entirely separable.
The first widely played video game
Spacewar! was written for the PDP-1 at MIT in 1961–62 by Steve Russell, Martin Graetz, Wayne Wiitanen and the circle around the Tech Model Railroad Club, with the star field by Peter Samson, gravity by Dan Edwards, and the famous detached control boxes by Alan Kotok and Bob Saunders. Two ships duel around a central star, firing torpedoes and slingshotting through its gravity, with hyperspace as a last resort. It was not the very first thing resembling a computer game, but it was the first to spread, carried on paper tape to most of the few dozen PDP-1 installations and re-implemented on machine after machine for a decade. It is the whole subject of this project.
It has its own deep dive, its design, its play, its code and its long afterlife: Spacewar!: an overview › · play the 1962 original ›
Not games, exactly, but play
Before and beside Spacewar!, the same people wrote programs whose only purpose was to make the Type 30 do something wonderful. These are not games, there is nothing to win, but they are unmistakably play, and they are the direct ancestors of the demoscene.
- The Minskytron (Marvin Minsky, 1962): a display hack whose circle-drawing algorithm produced hypnotic, evolving patterns on the screen. It came before the game and lent it something concrete, the rotating-display trick reused for the hyperspace effect. It has its own page here.
- Snowflake and Munching Squares: two more celebrated PDP-1 visual programs, generating animated patterns from a few lines of arithmetic. Both are part of the canonical PDP-1 software still run on restored machines and the FPGA recreations.
The line between these and the game is real but thin. Spacewar! began, in part, as the most ambitious display hack of all, a demonstration of what the new machine could do, and only became a game because someone added an opponent, a goal and a set of controls. To read the game is partly to read the demo culture it grew out of.
Why the list is short
The PDP-1's fame as a games machine rests almost entirely on a single title. The abundance came later and elsewhere, as Spacewar! was carried onto other hardware and the commercial arcade and home-computer industries grew from it. That long migration, from the PDP-1 to Galaxy Game, Computer Space and the rest, is told on the ports and descendants page.
References
- Norbert Landsteiner, Inside Spacewar!, masswerk.at, on the game and the Minskytron.
- Computer History Museum, PDP-1 Restoration Project, for the canonical PDP-1 programs (Spacewar!, Minskytron, Snowflake, Munching Squares).
- The project's own Spacewar! overview, Minskytron, and ports pages.