Spacewar!

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Spacewar!
Spacewar1.png
Spacewar! (Pixel version via emulator)
Original title Spacewar
Senior Developer Steve Russell
Erstveröffent-
lichung
Q1 1962
platform Mainframe , Microsoft Windows , PDP-1
genre Space flight simulation
Game mode Multiplayer
control Gamepad

Spacewar! is one of the first video and multiplayer computer games . In the game, two spaceships , each controlled by a human player or the computer, orbit a sun. Their gravitational field attracts both the spaceships and the projectiles that are fired from them. The winner of the game is whoever hits the enemy ship first. Alternatively, one player wins if the other's spaceship falls into the sun.

KSpaceDuel (modern version for the KDE user interface )

history

Screen of a PDP-1 running Spacewar

In 1961, a prototype was programmed on a PDP-1 by Steve Russell at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) , which took him six months. The prototype was a two-player game from the start. It was very simple, only spaceships could be steered. In the spring of 1962, the game was completed with the help of Russell's friends from the Tech Model Railroad Club . These included a background and the influence of gravity on the spaceships. The game was inspired by the Lensmen books by Edward E. "Doc" Smith , a science fiction novel series between 1931 and 1946. In spite of its archaic graphics by today's standards, it attracted students a great deal and has many to this day Imitators inspired. Meanwhile, Spacewar! Reprogrammed several times in different programming languages and on almost all operating systems.

In 1977 there was a very similar arcade game called Space Wars by Cinematronics .

Martin Graetz later put the source code of the game in the public domain . The original PDP-1 source code was then ported to an emulator written in JavaScript .

See also

literature

Web links

Commons : Spacewar!  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Edge editors: The Making Of: Spacewar! ( English ) In: Edge magazine . May 1, 2009. Archived from the original on August 22, 2012. Retrieved on August 18, 2011.
  2. readme
  3. Matthew Humphries: Play Spacewar! on the DEC PDP-1 emulated in your browser . geek.com. December 11, 2012. Retrieved July 28, 2015.