In 1961, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology upgraded it's mainframe computer to a brand new DEC PDP-1. The PDP-1 was a technological powerhouse, boasting a massive 9KB of memory and a clock speed of 200KHZ. The PDP-1 inspired a whole generation of prehistoric computer geeks and basically created hacker culture.

Once the PDP-1 was installed at MIT, a group of computer and sci-fi enthusiasts set out to test the new machine's capabilities by creating an advanced demo program. It was decided that the group would make an ambitious spaceship dogfighting simulation called Spacewar!

The bulk of the coding for Spacewar! was done by an AI specialist named Steve Russell. Russell was helped by other MIT students and staff like Alan Kotok, Dan Edwards, and Martin Graetz. Peter Samson, another MIT student, was unhappy with Spacewar's randomly generated starfield background and wrote a program based on astronomical star charts called Expensive Planetarium (a play on the high price of the PDP-1).

The game itself was a one on one space battle between two ships. One, a shorter triangular craft was called the "wedge", and the second, a slimmer and longer ship, was called the "needle". The two ships would maneuver around the playfield using a thrust button that controlled acceleration and a dial to control movement. The ships both had a limited amount of missiles in which to blast each other, and a limited amount of fuel, meaning they had to act quickly. To make matters worse, a gravity well at the center of the playfield constantly pulled the players towards the middle. The two ships even had a "hyperspace" button, which would instantly move them to a random point on the screen.

The finished product debuted in 1962 at MIT's Science Open House, and was immediately a huge hit. Lines to play the game were so long that strict time limits were placed on playtime. Spacewar! soon found it's way onto the primitive Internet-precursor networks of the era and spread across the world. DEC, the company that created the PDP-1, was so impressed with the program that they included it on all future PDP-1 machines as a tech demo.

Russell and the Spacewar! team did not patent their work or attempt to sell it to the highest bidder. Instead, they encouraged other amateur programmers to improve and expand on their game. Improved versions of Spacewar!, as well as special control setups and displays, and network based multiplayer games, popped up on many different mainframe computers, especially at universities.. Spacewar! was an important catalyst in the emerging hacker and modding culture that would be so important during the rise of the Personal Computer in the 1970's and 80's.

Perhaps the most important person to be inspired by Spacewar! was a young University of Utah student named Nolan Bushnell. Bushnell's passion for computer games would later lead him to create an arcade version of Spacewar!, called Computer Space. Although Computer Space was a commercial failure, it was just the first step in a long career that culminated in the rise of Atari.

If Spacewar! had not been created, a different game, perhaps even with the same theme, would have no doubt been made soon after. However, Spacewar! set into motion a chain of events that created the video game industry as we know it today. Without Spacewar!, Nolan Bushnell might not have taken the career path that he did, and there might have never been an Atari. For that reason, we believe that Spacewar! is the most important game in the history of the industry.