"The first "Intergalactic spacewar olympics" will be held here, Wednesday 19 October, 2000 hours. First prize will be a year's subscription to "Rolling Stone". The gala event will be reported by Stone Sports reporter Stewart Brand & photographed by Annie Liebowitz. Free Beer!"

Our story comes to us via an article in the December 7, 1972 edition of Rolling Stone Magazine. That year, the campus of Stanford University hosted what they called the "Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics". This contest would pit the university's best Spacewar players against each other for fantastic prizes. What the entrants didn't know was that they were about to be pioneers in a strange new sport, competitive gaming.

Spacewar was one of the very first computer games ever created. It ran on the stylish and powerful PDP-1 computer and involved two opposing ships trying to shoot each other while avoiding the gravitational pull of a star. Early computer games like Spacewar were created and played almost exclusively by computer engineers at major universities like MIT and Stanford.

In 1972, Rolling Stone Magazine held a Spacewar competition at Stanford to get material for an article that they were putting together about computers. A couple dozen players arrived at the computer lab for a few rousing rounds of space combat. The prize in this contest would be a free subscription to Rolling Stone, but most of the participants probably showed up for the free beer. (It should be noted that the first ever pitch for a gaming competition was "Free Beer!". That remains the easiest way to promote your own local video game contest.)

The competition was fierce. Players maneuvered their ships, with colorful names like Roundback, Birdie, and Funny Fins, throughout the dangerous star field. One by one, aspiring starfighters were eliminated from the contest. Rolling Stone eagerly reported every exciting play and all of the trash talking.

I'm sorry. Clickclickclick
Being purtners means never having to say you're
sorry. Clickclickclick

Get him! Get the mother
Clickclick-clickclickclick

Sacrifice. Clickclick click

(Just a sample of the vicious trash talking. The clicking is the sound of the intense button pressing. Back in the day button pressing was still exciting enough to transcribe.)

In the end, only a few valiant warriors would be crowned champions. The team of "Tovar" and Robert E. Maas won the team competition, Tovar won the singles competition, and Bruce Baumgart won the free-for-all tournament. These three men are the very first recorded champions of competitive video games and are true legends of gaming. It has been a long 35 years since they first stepped into the arena of computer combat and emerged victorious, but their spirit lives on in every gaming gladiator who dreams of glory and victory.

"Spacewar, if anyone cared to notice, was a flawless crystal ball of things to come in computer science and computer use:

1. It was intensely interactive in real time with the computer.
2. It encouraged new programming by the user.
3. It bonded human and machine through a responsive broadband interface of live graphics display.
4. It served primarily as a communication device between humans.
5. It was a game.
6. It functioned best on, stand-alone equipment (and diarupted multiple-user equipment).
7. It served human interest, not machine. (Spacewar is trivial to a computer.)
8. It was delightful.

In those days of batch processing and passive consumerism (data was something you sent to the manufacturer, like color film), Spacewar was heresy, uninvited and unwelcome. The hackers made Spacewar, not the planners. When computers become available to everybody, the hackers take over. We are all Computer Bums, all more empowered as individuals and as co-operators. That might enhance things ... like the richness and rigor of spontaneous creation and of human interaction ... of sentient interaction. "

We don't know what Mr. Baumgart went on to do with his life, but we're sure that whatever it was it didn't measure up to being the first World Champion.

The Rolling Stone article can be seen here and is definitely worth a read. It very presciently predicted that interactive computer programs and games would make technology more appealing to average people. It also referenced a budding network of government computers remotely connected over data lines. The ARPA-Net would evolve into today's Internet, which allows users to do things that were unthinkable at the time, like read 35 year old articles from Rolling Stone.

"One popular new feature on the Net is AI's Associated Press service. From anywhere on the Net you can log in and get the news that's coming live over the wire or ask for all the items on a particular subject that have come in during the last 24 hours. Plus a fortune cookie. Project that to household terminals, and so much for newspapers (in present form).

Since huge quantities of information can be computer-digitalized and transmitted, music researchers could, for example, swap records over the Net with "essentially perfect fidelity." So much for record stores (in present form)."
(A dark vision of the future.)