Spacewar!

What happened

At MIT in 1961–62, Steve Russell and fellow students wrote Spacewar!, a game for the new DEC PDP-1 computer in which two players duel with spaceships around a star, obeying real gravity and physics. It spread from lab to lab and was used to show off what the machine could do.

Why it matters

Spacewar! is one of the first influential digital video games, created a decade before the industry existed and a direct ancestor of everything that followed.

Sources

• Computer History Museum. Spacewar! · Reputable source