Space war game wiki

It was extremely popular in the small programming community in the s and was widely ported to other computer systems at the time. It has also been recreated in more modern programming languages for PDP-1 emulators. It directly inspired many other electronic games, such as the first commercial arcade games, Galaxy Game and Computer Space , and later games such as Asteroids In , Spacewar was named to a list of the ten most important video games of all time, which formed the start of the game canon at the Library of Congress.

During the s, various computer games were created in the context of academic computer and programming research and for demonstrations of computing power, especially after the introduction later in. A few programs, however, while used to showcase the power of the computer they ran on were also intended as entertainment products; these were generally created by undergraduate and graduate students and university employees, such as at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT where they were allowed on occasion to develop programs for the TX-0 experimental computer.

The games included Tic-Tac-Toe , which used a light pen to play a simple game of noughts and crosses against the computer, and Mouse in the Maze , which used a light pen to set up a maze of walls for a virtual mouse to traverse. In the fall of , a Digital Equipment Corporation DEC PDP-1 minicomputer was installed in the "kludge room" of the MIT Electrical Engineering Department to complement the older TX-0, and even before its arrival a group of students and university employees had been brainstorming ideas for programs that would demonstrate the new computer's capabilities in a compelling way.

Not a very good demonstration. Here was this display that could do all sorts of good things! So we started talking about it, figuring what would be interesting displays. We decided that probably you could make a two-dimensional manoeuvring sort of thing, and decided that naturally the obvious thing to do was spaceships. The gameplay of Spacewar involves two monochrome spaceships called " the needle " and " the wedge ", each.

The ships fire torpedoes which are not affected by the gravitational pull of the star. The ships have a limited number of torpedoes and a limited supply of fuel, which is used when the player fires his thrusters. Torpedoes are fired one at a time by flipping a toggle switch on the computer or pressing a button on the control pad, and there is a cooldown period between launches.

The ships follow Newtonian physics, remaining in motion even when the player is not accelerating, though the ships can rotate at a constant rate without inertia. Each player controls one of the ships and must attempt to shoot down the other ship while avoiding a collision with the star.

Flying near the star can provide a gravity assist to the player at the risk of misjudging the trajectory and falling into the star. If a ship moves past one edge of the screen, it reappears on the other side in a wraparound effect. A hyperspace feature, or "panic button", can be used as a last-ditch means to evade enemy torpedoes by moving the player's ship to another location on the screen after disappearing for a few seconds, but the re-entry from hyperspace occurs at a random location, and in some versions there is an increasing probability of the ship exploding with each use.

Player controls include clockwise and counter clockwise rotation, forward thrust, firing torpedoes, and hyperspace. Initially these were controlled using the front-panel test switches on the PDP-1 minicomputer, with four switches for each player, but these proved to be awkward to use and wore out quickly under normal gameplay, as well as causing players to accidentally flip the computer's control and power switches.

The location of the switches also left one player off to one side of the CRT display due to the limited space in front of the computer, which left them at a disadvantage. To alleviate these problems, Kotok and Saunders created a detached control device, essentially an early gamepad.

The gamepad had a switch for turning left or right, another for forward thrust or hyperspace, and a torpedo launch button. The button was silent so that the opposing player would not have a warning that the player was attempting to fire a torpedo during a cooldown period.

In the fall of , while discussing ideas for a program for the PDP-1, Russell had finished reading the. Lensman series by E. That sort of action was the thing that suggested Spacewar. He had some very glowing descriptions of spaceship encounters and space fleet manoeuvres. Smith's Skylark novels and Japanese pulp fiction tokusatsu movies. For the first few months after its installation, the PDP-1 programming community at MIT focused on simpler programs to work out how to create software for the computer.

The community had heard of the Spacewar concept, however, and understood that Russell would spearhead the development of it.

When members of the community began to feel the time was right to start work on the game, Russell, nicknamed "Slug" because of his tendency to procrastinate, began providing various excuses as to why he.

One of these was the lack of a trigonometric function routine needed to calculate the trajectories of the spacecraft. Kotok drove to DEC to pick up a tape containing the code, slammed it down in front of Russell, and asked what other excuses he had. Russell, later explaining that "I looked around and I didn't find an excuse, so I had to settle down and do some figuring," started writing the code in December The game was developed to meet three precepts Russell, Graetz, and Wiitanen had developed for creating a program that functioned equally well as an entertainment experience for the players and as a demonstration for spectators: to use as much of the computer's resources as possible, to be consistently interesting and therefore have every run be different, and to be entertaining and therefore a game.

It took Russell, with assistance from the other programmers—including Bob Saunders and Steve Piner but not Wiitanen, who had been called up by the United States Army Reserve —about man-hours to write the first version of Spacewar , around six weeks to develop the basic game. Russell had a program with a movable dot by January , and an early operational game with rotatable spaceships by February.

The two spaceships were designed to evoke the curvy spaceship from Buck Rogers stories and the PGM Redstone rocket. That early version also contained a randomly generated background star field, initially added by Russell because a blank background made it difficult to tell the relative motion of the two spaceships at slow speeds. The programming community in the area, including the Hingham Institute and the TMRC, had developed what was later termed the "hacker ethic", whereby all programs were freely shared and modified by other programmers in a collaborative environment without concern for ownership or copyright, which led to a group effort to elaborate on Russell's initial Spacewar game.

Consequently, since the inaccuracy and lack of realism in the star field annoyed TMRC member Peter Samson, he wrote a program based on real star charts that scrolled slowly through the night sky, including every star in a band between The program was called "Expensive Planetarium"—referring to the high price of the PDP-1 computer compared to an analog planetarium, as part of the series of "expensive" programs like Expensive Typewriter—and was quickly incorporated into the game in March by Russell, who served as the collator of the primary version of the game.

The initial version of the game also did not include the central star gravity well or the hyperspace feature; they. The initial version of the hyperspace function was limited to three jumps, but carried no risk save possibly re-entering the game in a dangerous position; later versions removed the limit but added the increasing risk of destroying the ship instead of moving it.

Additionally, during this development period, Kotok and Saunders created the gamepads for the game. While neat, they knew that they would be able to push the computer farther and came up with three general requirements for their undertaking, those being 1. The third "rule", if executed properly, would almost automatically make whatever they planned a "game". Video Game History Wiki Explore.

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