- Advancements in computing technology soon made a new kind of computer possible. After the Whirlwind, MIT received the TX-0, an updated version of the machine with a similar oscilloscope display.
One faculty member involved with the project, Jack Dennis, also happened to be a former member of the university's Tech Model Railroad Club. When Dennis introduced its students to the TX-0, they quickly began tinkering with the machine, and soon the TX-0 became a hotbed for experimentation.
It began with Expensive Desk Calculator, when an undergraduate student was annoyed that he had to walk over to the other side of campus to use the calculators he needed for class. Writing a calculator program into the TX-0 proved to be a novel solution.
Robert Wagner
Expensive Typewriter and Expensive Tape Recorder soon followed, making some of the first word processing and digital audio recording software.Steve Piner, L. Peter Deutsch, David Gross, Alan Kotok - Before long, the PDP-1 made its way to MIT right next door to the TX-0. Although it was based on the same technology, it was the first of a completely new type of computer: a minicomputer (still a very relative term).
Like the TX-0 and the Whirlwind before it, the PDP-1 had a display screen capable of real-time graphical display.
Three students- Slug Russell, Shag Graetz, and Wayne Wiitanen- felt that nobody else using the machine seemed to be really taking advantage of these display capabilities. Russell was actually aware of the Whirlwind Bouncing Ball, and wanted to make something that used the PDP's screen for something real-time.
Russell and Graetz were huge fans of science fiction of the era. Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, tokusatsu movies, and most of all E. E. Smith with his Lensman and Skylark novels.
Making a game was not necessarily an obvious option. The Bouncing Ball had been, first and foremost, a physics simulation. So, the group settled on a space flight simulator, something that could model motion in zero gravity and train its users to pilot a spacecraft. - By the next year, the Hingham Institute Space Warfare Study Group, as they were called, had created a version of Spacewar. By adding another spaceship and giving them both photon missiles, the space flight simulator turned into a two-player shooting game where each player did their best to blow the other up.
The rest of MIT’s student base began playing Spacewar! fairly quickly. Anyone with access to the computer could make modifications to the game easily, and so, the game soon became a patchwork of contributions from others.
The Tech Model Railroad Club added much of the game's additions. The gameplay was spiced up with the addition of a huge star in the center of the screen which sucked both players into its gravitational pull. The game gained a background with the integration of Expensive Planetarium, displaying a smattering of twinkling stars.
Rather than having to lean over and uncomfortably use a line of switches on the machine’s interface to control the game, an external device made of parts scrounged up from the Railroad Club became the first game controller.Slug Russell, Shag Graetz, Wayne Wiitanen, Alan Kotok, Dan Edwards, Peter Samson, Bob SaundersPlay Spacewar! in your browser.
As the PDP line of minicomputers began to propagate around universities and research centers, it brought Spacewar! with it. The game quickly became ubiquitous on every machine that could run it. Once a few of the students behind the game’s development went on to work at the company that produced the PDP minicomputers, later models started coming with Spacewar! built in.
It was the "hacker culture" of experimentation associated with the game that helped it spread, as various versions of its source code were readily accessible. But perhaps more importantly, it was probably the first computer game to actually be fun. Students were playing the game enough that it began to be a problem for those trying to actually use PDP computers to get work done. - Once it made its way to the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, it was popular enough that the university had to implement a “Spacewar mode” so the computer could run the game while others used it for productive things. The students at Stanford loved the game enough to create a variant which supported up to five players concurrently playing the game.
One student was Bill Pitts, who was not associated with the laboratory at all, but rather, found the game while breaking into random buildings through tunnels underneath Stanford's campus and stumbling into the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by accident. Pitts often played the game with another students, Hugh Tuck, and the two bounced around the idea that, if someone could come up with a coin-operated version of the game that the public could play, it would probably be quite successful.
However, the hardware of a PDP minicomputer, was far too cutting-edge to make such an endeavor viable, and so the idea remained just an idea. - Spacewar, especially its five-player version, was a mainstay at Stanford for years.
It was here that the Intergalactic Spacewar! Olympics were held, the first organized video game tournament, which produced the first organized video game tournament winner, Bruce Baumgart.
- Spacewar! was perhaps the first video game that people actually wanted to play, and it was also the first to be created purely for the purpose of being enjoyed, but Slug Russell has never deemed it fit to call it the "first video game." He has instead called it a “very influential computer game,” which is certainly true in itself.
Even among other computer games of the era, it was remarkably ahead of its time. Although minicomputers were cutting-edge, most did not have the luxury of a graphical display. Everyone else had to interact with their programs entirely through text, typically using teleprinters which communicated information on small sheets of paper. - Star Trek started as an attempt to bring a game like Spacewar! to minicomputers without a graphical display.
A good portion of the real-time, visual gameplay was lost in translation bringing the game to a text-only, turn-based format, but it gave Star Trek a unique and equally interesting gameplay loop, which made it just as popular in its own right.Mike Mayfield - Many early text games like these arose from considering computers' potential as an educational tool. One of these resulted from a joint research project between IBM and the Board of Cooperative Educational Services of Westchester County, New York. Mabel Addis, a fourth-grade schoolteacher, wrote the game, with programming from William McKay, as part of a unit teaching about ancient Sumeria.
The Sumerian Game put students in the role of the ruler of the Sumerian city of Lagash, making decisions about quantities of grain to allocate throughout the harvest season, over the course of three rounds.
It helps that there were so few games before it, but The Sumerian Game is entitled to quite a few firsts: the first educational computer game, the first original strategy computer game, the first game with a narrative, and the first computer game with a female designer. Nevertheless, after two groups of around 30 students play the game, its source code was not kept around. Its only lasting records are descriptions of its mechanics. The exact text seems to be lost to time.Mabel Addis, William McKay - But its legacy was carried on by Doug Dyment, an employee of DEC. At the University of Alberta, in 1968, Dyment gave a presentation on the potential role of computers in education. He was approached after the talk by a woman who had seen The Sumerian Game, curious if he’d heard of it before. When he hadn’t, she gave him a description of how the game worked. It was based on this description that Dyment created The Sumer Game, a single-round version of the game for the PDP-8, that became widespread in the early programming community.
Doug Dyment
- But more mainframe computer games were also created by the students. Civil War was created by high school students Larry Cram, Luther Goodie, and Doug Hibbard, a strategy war game simulating a series of battles in the American Civil War, with the player as the South.
Larry Cram, Luther Goodie, Doug Hibbard
- On the same computer network, Rocket was a text-based simulation of the Apollo Lunar Module’s landing on the moon, created by high school student Jim Storer shortly after the real landing.
When his computer teacher saw the game, he submitted it to the DEC users' newsletter, where it was distributed as Apollo.
Jim Storer
- Oregon Trail began its life in a similar way. Instead of the ruler of Lagash, the game let Don Rawitsch’s eighth-grade history class play as Manifest Destiny-era settlers traveling in covered wagons across the western United States.
Students in the class were interested enough in the game that they stayed after school and lined up outside the door to play the game.Don RawitschPlay the popular later version of Oregon Trail in your browser.
- Baseball was a particularly advanced adaptation of the sport from Don Daglow, a playwriting undergraduate at Pomona college with access to a PDP computer from his dorm room.
Daglow was also responsible for an upgraded version of Star Trek, adding dialogue between characters on the Enterprise, which became nearly as popular as the original.Don Daglow - Hide and Seek, an adaptation of the playground game, came from Bud Valenti’s class, as a part of the Pittsburgh school district’s initiative to teach high school students foundational coding and computer skills with the district’s PDP-10. It led to a small subgenre of mainframe games based on hunting down a hidden target, much of which came from Bob Albrecht.
- Mugwump, Hurkle, and Snark are three very similar games credited to Albrecht in which the player hunts for the title creature in a 10x10 grid.
These games were published in the People's Computer Company Journal, giving them a much wider level of exposure.
Bob Albrecht
- The quantity of these games annoyed one reader of the journal, Gregory Yob, who took issue that all the games took place on a 10x10 grid.
This drove him to create Hunt The Wumpus, one of the most popular text games, its title creature becoming iconic in early programming communities.
Instead of a grid, the player traveled through a series of caves, conveyed through a textual description of the player’s circumstances, using clues in the text to catch the creature called the Wumpus.
Yob chose a squashed dodecahedron shape as an alternative to the grid pattern for the arrangement of the cave rooms, because of course it was his favorite platonic solid.
Gregory Yob
- Somewhere in here, the various moon-landing simulation games ended up being converted to one of the few graphical real-time computer games. Moonlander was commissioned from Jack Burness to show off the capabilities of a new graphics terminal for the PDP-10. Written in just ten days, the loose adaptation had the first implementation of a zooming camera, as well as what could be considered the first cutscene, including the first depiction of a human. Plus, a hidden McDonald's the player can find has been called the first video game Easter Egg.
The game made its way to many PDP computers, even eventually ending up, fittingly, at NASA, where visitors had a chance to play the game.Jack Burness - Possibly the most advanced text game of this era was Star Trader, developed by Dave Kaufman.
The goal was to accumulate as much money as possible by trading goods and resources, obtained by exploring the simulated galaxy through the game’s map interface.
Dave Kaufman
- One of the most important computer games created during this era is also one of its least well-preserved. Known under the various names Chase, Escape, or Robots, these games had the player attempting to escape a set of randomly-placed enemies on a grid-based map. Enemies would advance one square each turn towards the player, with the objective to lead the enemies into their own demise by colliding with hazards.
Unclear, possibly Mac Oglesby
- While text games were distributed in programming journals and newsletters, the most-played mainframe games by far were the ones reproduced in 101 BASIC Computer Games.
It was the culmination of the efforts of David Ahl, who edited DEC’s educational newsletter, giving him the chance to accept submissions of games in the BASIC language from the newsletter’s readers.
Part of what makes the compilation so impressive is that he actually managed to find 101 of these games. Two of them came from him: ported versions of The Sumer Game and Apollo, called Hamurabi and Lunar. Others were based on various other games commonly passed around. Hurkle and Mugwump made their way into the book, as did Civil War. Super Star Trek made it in as an expanded version of Star Trek. Many of the others are simply conversions of board games and sports.
Since 101 BASIC Computer Games was a book, readers would have to copy down the source code to each game into their own machine manually, a feat only made possible by the fact the game were so small that their code could fit on a page or two. But the book eventually became so widely circulated that there were more copies in existence than minicomputers to play the games on.
Its influence on early computer games and the early computer community in general cannot be overstated. - Hunt The Wumpus, Star Trader, and Chase were brought to the masses a few years after, in the books What To Do After You Hit Return and 101 More BASIC Computer Games.
It was thanks to the culture of collaboration these early computer games sprang from that books like these were able to exist. The authors copied these games from other people, but they added to them too, as did any number of other people. Games were shared freely, not gatekept; with so many contributors, they were not owned by any one person, but were a product of the community as a whole.
But while this rich community of computer gaming grew, a completely separate tradition was just starting to develop.