Before Pong, There Was Computer Space | Hacker News Reader

Before Pong, There Was Computer Space

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

68 pointsbenbreen16 comments

I remember playing this game a couple of times at the MIT Student Center when it first appeared. I recall that it cost 25 cents, which at the time I felt was too much for me to spend on a less than engaging game.

I also got to play Spacewar!, the 1962 progenitor of Computer Space. It was running on an computer with an oscilloscope-like display residing in a lab I was using somewhere on campus. In that game there was a central "sun" that exerted a gravitational pull.

Games from the mid 1970s were, to me, notably better. I liked Lunar Lander which ran on the CDC 6600 operator terminal[1]. This was a dual screen system employing two good sized circular screens! They were vector graphics screens (like oscilloscopes). The mainframe operators let me into the machine room only a few times after hours and let me play the game on what was certainly the most expensive solo video game system I've ever used.

Another early game that I found fascinating was 0Airfight, it ran on the University of Illinois PLATO system[2], a very early time-sharing system that had a few thousand terminals. This was a 3D dogfight (with very primitive graphics) and the first networked player vs player game I ever played.

Finally, I played an arcade game in an airport around 1978 that was the first version of snakes[3] that I had ever seen. This inspired me to implement it myself using Pascal on a TI 990 micro controller; it was the first game I ever programmed. I was working at Texas Instruments, and I got to go to Munich to demo it at an Electronica trade show[4]; I met with engineers from Mercedes Benz, but I don't think they adopted our Pascal tool-chain for their automotive electronics.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_6000_series#The_6700

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_%28computer_system%29

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_(video_game_genre)

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronica_(trade_fair)

By the way, KDE has kind of an reimplementation of Space War with gravity, KSpaceDuel

https://apps.kde.org/kspaceduel/

It's a great game! It has been updated to work with latest KDE and Qt, but it's otherwise unchanged from the KDE 2.x times (as far I can remember)

The first commercial video gane you say?

https://youtu.be/uHQ4WCU1WQc

It depends on what you mean by "commercial video game". In this context it means a coin-op video game. What Ralph Baer created was something different (and arguably more future-thinking) -- the first home video game console.

I happen to be reading “racing the beam” and it analyzes computer space’s non-success like this article, almost word for word. Reading the article I was like “oh I know where this is going” and I wasn’t wrong. I guess the research the author describes did include reading “racing the beam” :)

BTW, if you want to experience the game, I did a simulation of Computer Space for the PDP-1 a few years ago, which can be played online. (Since you can't do reverse video on the PDP-1, there are alternative solutions in a few places.)

https://www.masswerk.at/icss/

For the original Spacewar! running in emulation, see https://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/

I agree, Computer Space just wasn't fun. It did not capture the core gameplay of Spacewar! And it wasn't just gravity. It could have been just fine without gravity if it had been polished, better controls.

This is an aside, but I absolutely loath how the word "strategy" gets used and abused these days.

> This made it possible for players to use strategy – for example, allowing players to whip their ships around the star.

That's not a strategy, that's a tactic.

The podcast They Create Worlds covers Computer Space in depth; highly recommend.

whats kind of funny is that the first games where graphical. text adventures where later even.

I think a good text game is actually incredibly complex compared to the simplest types of graphical games.

Yes, in the early 1980s text adventures by Infocom were high-end computing compared to every other type of game.

These adventure games were developed on a Unix minicomputer and executed in a custom VM that could fit both the engine and game onto 48-64k RAM available on the microcomputers that customers had.

Graphical games don't require that the author can spell.

I'm guessing you meant "were" not "where".

This is really owed to the display technology. With prices of memory for a bit plain frame buffer in the astronomic regions, early computer displays were x/y displays, often just plotting single dots. So any visuals were generated on-the-fly. (Text was generally put out on another media, namely paper.) While Computer Space had a raster display, it generated its graphics also on-the-fly by means of circuitry. In both cases, displaying text was complicated and added another layer of complexity (and was also more time critical).

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