Computer games - The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution - page 175

and most famous of these computer games. It was created in 1962 by Steve
Russell ( B.9.1 ) and Martin Graetz, with other young computer programmers at
MIT. The game ran on a PDP-1 minicomputer that had been donated to MIT by
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) for the students to develop interesting
applications - although DEC probably did not expect them to create a video
game application. The game was inspired by the “space opera” science fiction
of E. E. “Doc” Smith. It is a two-player game, with each player having control of
a spaceship and attempting to destroy the other using photon torpedoes. The
gravity field of the sun, in the center of the screen, pulls on both ships, and
players need to avoid falling into it. In an emergency, a player can enter hyper-
space and return to a random location on the screen. Spacewar! was later used
by engineers at DEC as a test program on every new PDP machine before ship-
ping it. The DEC sales force also distributed Spacewar! with newly installed DEC
computers, and many interesting variants of the program were developed.
From these early beginnings, the development of games on university
computers grew rapidly, mainly through students writing experimental game
software in their spare time. The Star Trek TV series, first shown in 1966, cre-
ated a loyal fan base and inspired several computer game versions. One of the
most popular of these “find and fight Klingons” Star Trek games was written by
an eighteen-year-old schoolboy named Mike Mayfield. He had access to a Sigma
7 computer at the University of California, Irvine, and he wrote the game in
BASIC during the summer of 1971. The game delighted almost everyone who
saw it, and it was ported (transferred from one system to another) and modified
to run on many different computers. Mayfield produced a version in HP BASIC
that Hewlett-Packard put into the public domain and made available on tape.
DEC also distributed their version of the code, which became the basis for ver-
sions of Star Trek that ran on personal computers like the Apple II ( Fig. 9.3 ), the
Commodore, and the BBC Micro.
Don Daglow ( B.9.2 ), a student at Pomona College in California, developed
the first interactive baseball game on a PDP-10 in 1971. A few years later, he
wrote Dungeon, one of the first role-playing computer games. Role-playing
games focus on character development and problem solving rather than action.
Daglow's game was based on the board version of Dungeons and Dragons. The
game used text; line-of-sight graphics , in which the player had to have a clear view
of an object to act on it; and maps of the dungeons to show in which direction
the player should explore. Daglow also continued to develop his baseball game,
and a version was released for the Apple II in 1981. It was also the basis for

(a)

(b)

Fig. 9.2. (a) Dan Edwards (left) and Peter
Samson, two of the original student
developers at MIT, playing Spacewar! on
the PDP-1 display in 1962. (b) Spacewar!
screenshot.

B.9.1. Steve “Slug” Russell was one of the first computer game developers. In 1961 he wrote
the first version of the Spacewar! program as a student at MIT. In 1968 he was working for the
Computer Center Corporation - informally known as C-Cubed - in Seattle as their hardware chief.
It was there that Paul Allen and Bill Gates developed their deep knowledge of the PDP-10 that
served them so well when they came to write the BASIC interpreter for the Altair. It was Russell
who first introduced Allen to PDP assembler code.