Analogue Ports The World's First Video Game To Pocket, 1962’s Spacewar
The world’s first ever video game, Spacewar, has just been ported to Pocket. The developer behind the console, Analogue, made the announcement yesterday, noting its commitment to preserving pioneering video games by making them playable in the modern era. Spacewar was originally designed for the PDP-1 minicomputer way back in 1962, a full decade before Pong. The minicomputer itself was created several years earlier in 1959.
Spacewar was created by a cabal of software engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, most notably Steve Russell. They made use of a PDP-1 minicomputer and a CRT monitor to craft a video game pitting two spaceships against each other inside the gravitational well of a star. The team even made a pair of purpose built controllers for the game featuring switches for maneuvering and buttons for shooting missiles.
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According to Analogue, “Spacewar was the first space shooter, a two player versus style game based in outer space featuring orbital mechanics around a gravitational star. It was programmed to be played with custom ‘control boxes,’ arguably the first game controllers for a video game.”
“Spacewar influenced video game history in countless ways, one in which was the group of MIT students that created it. These students developed perhaps the first philosophy to guide the creation of a video game,” Analogue said. “They held that a computer game should satisfy the following three criteria: it should demonstrate as many of the computer’s resources as possible and tax those resources to the limit, it should be interesting which means every run should be different, and it should involve the
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