Video games are turning 60 today. In fact, on February 14, 1962, a group of young researchers who were between MIT in Boston and Harvard, released the first rudimentary version of a computer game that became legendary: Spacewar !. Those were the years of the cold war and the space race and the theme of the game was strongly inspired by current events and by some science fiction stories that were the most popular: basically it was a battle between two spaceships complicated by the presence of a star with the relative force of gravity.
It was not technically the first video game ever, there had been other minor experiments always in the university environment. But Spacewar! it was the first to have a spread outside the place where it was created, and to be continually improved by a community of young developers who prided themselves on being called hackers. Their names recently made a comeback when, in 2018, they received an award recognizing their role as entertainment pioneers. I list them in order of importance: Steve Russell, Martin Graetz, Wayne Wiitanen, Bob Saunders, Steve Pin.
It was the arrival of a new computer at MIT in September 1961 that triggered this. At the time, video games were considered a way to test the potential of the first computers. This was called PDP-1, it had been made by Digital Equipment Corporation, and they had put it in a kind of storage room on the second floor of MIT building 26, where the electrical engineering department was, not far from the famous T-XO, fondly said Tixo, a computer made at MIT that has been in service for a few years now. A small community of passionate young people had formed around Tixo who wrote and experimented with the first programs. The creators of Spacewar! it was Steve Russell, Martin Graetz and Wayne Wiitanen who called themselves “Hingham Institute” from the name of the street where two of them lived. When the new computer arrived, “with that screen that could do anything”, it was immediate to get to work on Spacewar !.
The first version was released on February 14, 1962 but the game was actually finished in April just in time to present it at the MIT annual event in May accompanied by a scientific report entitled: “Spacewar! The potential of the PDP-1 in real time ”. From there Spacewar! it came to Stanford University and several other academic institutions where it continued to be improved upon for a decade by anyone who wanted to.
In the 70s Spacewar !, with the advent of the very first personal computers, was retired but in 2007 it was included in the list of the 10 most important video games of all time.