Game Preservation SIG/Digital Game Canon/Spacewar!
International Game Developers Association
Spacewar! is currently the earliest game on the list, being from 1962, and is the one of the earliest known digital computer games.
Contents |
Game Outline
A 2 player game, where 2 spaceships circle around a star, shooting at each other. The players have a limited amount of fuel and rockets, and must avoid fire and the star itself.
Controls
The controls on the original PDP-1 were using 4 front-panel test switches for each player, allowing clockwise and counterclockwise rotation, thrust, fire, and hyperspace. There were optional control boxes, and later remakes of the game on different systems had their own buttons and switches.
The hyperspace feature can evade an enemy missile but makes the spaceship appear at a random location once exiting hyperspace, and each time it was used, increased the probability of the ship exploding.
Options and Features
Options in the original game which were made availble included no background star field, no star (and so no gravity pulling the players towards it), turning on angular momentum, and "Winds of Space" which warped trajectories meaning careful steering was needed.
Reason for preservation by Henry Lowood
Among the reasons listed, predominantly these are the main ones:
- First competitive and first multiplayer game.
- High technological achievement on PDP-1.
- Sign of the times (science fiction, space travel, Sputnik).
- Laboratory development - available source to edit, adding to the game as it moved around.
- Was highly influential to other early computer games.
Complete transcript of Spacewar! in the GDC2007 panel
The first game on the list you've probably guessed already from my remarks – it's Spacewar, and I'll reveal – if someone had come up to me and said “what two games should be on the game canon”, I probably would have an easier time of it because I would have gone with Spacewar and one of the early text adventures. But for me, and that is why I put action there (Indicating slides), for me the interesting part of game culture is competitive multiplayer games and I've chosen Spacewar then as the first action game and arguably, there are reasons to argue about this, the first computer game of all.
Competition is a very important aspect of digital gaming, Spacewar introduces the notion of multiplayer competition. This (Indicating slides) is the Spacewar Olympics in 1972, a famous article in Rolling Stone. I'm just going to go through this David Letterman style through these very quick points.
Again, multiplayer competition implies multiplayer. Spacewar was a multiplayer game, and it was the first multiplayer game, so I am kind of arguing that if there is an Adam and Eve to the history of digital games, Spacewar is one of those - Adam or Eve, for action competitive multiplayer games.
Another very important thing about Spacewar is the notion of the computer game, the digital game, as a demonstration of what computer technology can do. I think that is a very important aspect of the entire history of digital games whether you are talking about Spacewar or are talking about 3D graphics in the 1990's, Spacewar by the way was literally a demonstration of what the PDP-1 could do with the new CRT they received at MIT could do, and so these flashy effects were a very important part of this demonstration.
Spacewar is a sign of the times – the early 1960's, Sputnik, science fiction, that relationship of Spacewar to history I think is a very important aspect and it ties in with a larger theme which I mentioned earlier of games and culture generally.
Spacewar, this is a theme I think is very important for the early history of games, it's something that only in the last few years with serious games and so on has been beginning to come back – the idea of the University Game, the game produced in the laboratory. Adventure would be another game like that. Spacewar was the first and there are some very important characteristics that come from that including the idea that games and open software development. Spacewar was a game that people could modify as it moved from laboratory to laboratory – these (Indicating slides) are some sort of star charts from Expensive Planetarium that Peter Samson added to Spacewar.
The influence of Spacewar was another criterion – did a game influence other games? And of course Spacewar, you know the story of computer space, Nolan Bushnell, and Bushnell and Al Alcorn's Pong, and the importance of that for digital game history.
So to conclude on Spacewar just with some quotations from Steward Brant and his article on Spacewar which appeared in Rolling Stone in 1972:
"Spacewar was a flawless crystal ball of things to come in computer science and computer use. It served no grand theory, and was disreputably competitive" - one of the parts about it I like - "and yet in the days of batch processing and consumerism, is a heresy uninvited and unwelcome? The hackers made Spacewar, not the planners. We are all computer bums, all more empowered as individuals and as co-operators."
Project resources
Down the Hyper-Spatial Tube: Spacewar and the Birth of Digital Game Culture by Jeffrey Fleming Gamasutra, June 1 2007
Links
- Spacewar at Wikipedia
