Before World of Warcraft, before Super Mario Brothers or Pac-Man, even before Pong, there was Spacewar!
Not everyone knows it, but MIT holds a unique place in the history of video games. It was here that the first video game
Before World of Warcraft, before Super Mario Brothers or Pac-Man, even before Pong, there was Spacewar!
Not everyone knows it, but MIT holds a unique place in the history of video games. It was here that the first video game intended for computer use – Spacewar! – was invented.
One of the creators of the game, J. Martin Graetz, tells the story of Spacewar!’s development in “The Origin of Spacewar.” The game was conceived by Graetz and his friends Wayne Wiitanen and Stephen R. (Slug) Russell, who referred to themselves as the “Hingham Institute,” named after their apartment on Hingham Street in Cambridge.
In 1961 Graetz was working for Jack B. Dennis, MIT faculty member (and now Professor Emeritus) in the Department of Electrical Engineering, where Graetz first encountered the TX-O, a computer that took up an entire room. At the time only a few visual programs showed what a computer could really do: Bouncing Ball (literally a dot that would fall to the bottom of the screen, and bounce); Mouse in the Maze, where the user created a maze for an image of a mouse to go through until it located the cheese; HAX, which si