Spacewar! spreads across MIT's PDP-1 labs
Students hack together a two-ship duel and it becomes the machine's favorite demo
Quick facts
- Creators
- Steve Russell, Martin Graetz, Wayne Wiitanen; improved by Peter Samson and Dan Edwards
- Machine
- DEC PDP-1
- Institution
- MIT
- Players
- 2
What happened
Steve Russell, Martin Graetz, and Wayne Wiitanen conceived Spacewar! at MIT in 1961, drawing on the pulp science-fiction Lensman novels, and Russell wrote the first working version for the new DEC PDP-1 minicomputer. Peter Samson, Dan Edwards, and Graetz made major improvements in spring 1962. Two players each command a spaceship, firing torpedoes at each other while an accurately simulated central star's gravity bends their flight paths. The game needed over 100,000 calculations per second to track ship motion, gravity, and player input, and it soon acquired custom controllers, including a repurposed surplus jet-fighter joystick.
Why it matters
Because the PDP-1 was rare and expensive, Spacewar! could not be sold, but DEC used it for years afterward to show potential customers what the machine could do, spreading the program to other research labs by word of mouth and shared tape. It is the clearest link between 1960s computer science culture and the arcade and PC game industries that followed a decade later.
How we know
The Computer History Museum, which holds a restored PDP-1 and runs the machine to play Spacewar! for the public, documents the game's authorship, technical performance figures, and its use in DEC sales demonstrations from its own exhibit records.
Sources
- Computer History Museum (PDP-1 Restoration Project). Spacewar! · Reputable sourcecomputerhistory.org · The domain "computerhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Computer History Museum (PDP-1 Restoration Project). Steve "Slug" Russell · Reputable sourcecomputerhistory.org · The domain "computerhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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