Spacewar!

Spacewar! is a space combat video game developed in 1962 by Steve Russell in collaboration with Martin Graetz, Wayne Wiitanen, Bob Saunders, Steve Piner, and others. It was written for the newly installed DEC PDP-1 minicomputer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was later expanded by other students and employees of universities in the area, including by Dan Edwards and Peter Samson. It also spread to many of the few dozen installations of PDP-1s, making it the first video game to be played at multiple computer installations. The game features two spaceships, "the needle" and "the wedge", engaged in a dogfight while maneuvering in the gravity well of a star. Both ships are controlled by human players. Each ship has limited ammunition and fuel for maneuvering, and the ships remain in motion even when the player is not accelerating. Flying near the star to provide a gravity assist is a common tactic. Ships are destroyed when they collide with a torpedo, the star, or each other. At any time, the player can engage a hyperspace feature to jump to a new and random location on the screen, though in some versions each use has an increasing chance of destroying the ship instead. The game was initially controlled with console switches on the PDP-1, though Bob Saunders soon built an early gamepad to make it easier to play. Spacewar! is one of the most important and influential games in the early history of video games. It was extremely popular in the small programming community in the 1960s and the public domain code was widely ported to and recreated on other computer systems at the time, especially after computer systems with monitors became more widespread towards the end of the decade. It has also been recreated in more modern programming languages for PDP-1 emulators. It directly inspired many other video games, such as the first commercial arcade video games, Galaxy Game and Computer Space (both from 1971), and later games such as Asteroids (1979).

Source: Wikipedia CC BY-SA 4.0 — Spacewar! · retrieved October 19, 2026

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Developer

Steve Russell

Publisher

Steve Russell

First release

January 1, 1962

Series

Not recorded

Cover

Official thumbnail

Record ID

Q782919