Spacewar!

Spacewar! is a space combat video game developed in 1962 by Steve Russell, with contributions from Martin Graetz, Wayne Wiitanen, Bob Saunders, Steve Piner, and others. It was created for the newly installed DEC PDP-1 minicomputer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The game was later expanded by other students and university employees, including Dan Edwards and Peter Samson, and spread to many of the few dozen PDP-1 installations, making it the first video game played at multiple computer sites.

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 with limited ammunition and fuel. Ships remain in motion even when the player stops accelerating. Flying near the star for a gravity assist is a common tactic. Ships are destroyed by torpedoes, the star, or colliding with each other. A hyperspace feature allows a ship to jump to a random location, though in some versions each use carries an increasing chance of destroying the ship. Initially controlled by console switches, Bob Saunders soon built an early gamepad to make play easier.

The game was extremely popular in the small programming community of the 1960s. Its public domain code was widely ported to other computer systems, especially as monitors became more common. It directly inspired the first commercial arcade games, Galaxy Game and Computer Space (both 1971), and later titles such as Asteroids (1979). In 2007, Spacewar! was named to a list of the ten most important video games in history, forming the start of the game canon at the Library of Congress. In 2018, it was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame.