From Whence Spacewar! Came: MIT and Crazy Trains

From humble settings did the creators of Spacewar! come. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961, street address 18 Vassar St., Cambridge MA., sits a ramshackle structure shaped like a drunk’s rendition of the letter ‘E’… or a mad tuning fork. Named Building 20, it was initially built during WWII as a temporary structure on the campus to hold the Radiation Laboratory, a group at MIT that had developed airborne  RADAR sets for U.S. warplanes….and had counted William Higinbotham as one of its scientists, a man who later developed in 1958 what could be considered the original video game, Tennis for Two.

Building 20 at MIT, home of the Tech Model Railroad Club and hangout for the creators of Spacewar!

Inside Building 20 in 1961 dwells a group of hardcore nerd “hackers” who belong to the Tech Model Railroad Club, an organization first established in 1947. On the 2nd floor of Building 20, in room 20E-214 they run a 24ft. x 25ft. model train set-up, forever tinkering with the nest of wires and the 1000 relays installed under the table. For an offshoot of this group, known jokingly as the Hingham Institute (referencing a dilapidated apartment building located on Hingham St. in Cambridge that some of the members live in), activities also include obsessively discussing the space-opera novels of E.E. “Doc” Smith, considered the grandfather of the literary SF genre. They dream up wild fantasies of special-effects-ridden movie sequences based around the writer’s Skylark and Lensman novels, containing descriptions of vast interstellar spaceship battles. Thus is the environment set for Spacewar!

The infinite corridor of Building 20, MIT 1998

Part of the Tech Model Railroad setup at MIT, 1966

Alan Kotok, contributor to Spacewar!, in foreground along with Bill Bennett, work on relay system at TMRC, 1966

E.E. Smith in front of a poster for Destination Moon, at midnight showing of the film at the 1950 World Science Fiction Convention in Portland, Ore.

Gray Lensman, one of the many E.E. Smith stories to adorn Astounding Magazine, 1939

Spacewar! computer PDP-1 at the Computer History Museum

PDP-1 punch-tape holder containing programs, including Spacewar! (first slot on left)

Type 30 CRT display and typewriter for the PDP-1, at the Computer History Museum

Steve Russell, lead creator of Spacewar!, undated photo

Developing Spacewar: The Theory of Computer Toys

Having kudged the complicated relay system for their hopped-up train routes from discarded telephone system components, it’s a natural migration for these hackers from the wires and switches of their train set to the wires and switches of early mainframe computers. Eventually word comes down that MIT’s aging transistorized TX-0 computer, located in Building 26 on the second floor Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), is getting a slick new companion: a donation from Digital Equipment Corporation of their new, relatively svelte PDP-1; PDP standing for Programmed Data Processor. Not only is this new “mini”-computer sexily compact, it also revolutionizes the computer industry by allowing a single programmer in front of its control panel to have complete access to the processor, as opposed to the prevalent idea of time-sharing computer power. Previous CRT monitor display demonstration programs (like Tennis For Two at Brookhaven Labs, they are developed for public open house purposes) for the TX-0 had consisted of the aptly-named Bouncing Ball, Mouse in the Maze (users built mazes for electronic mice to run around in), and the venerable game Tic-Tac-Toe. A TMRC brainstorming session is called to create a truly taxing demo program for the enhanced capabilities for the PDP-1. All present are around 25 years old: Wayne Witanen and J. Martin Graetz, along with a 23 year-old math major from Dartmouth named Steve Russell, an AI specialist known as ‘Slug’ by his buddies due to his tendency to procrastinate. The group of hackers who would develop this amazing demonstration of computer gaming are products of both the department at MIT handling the fabled TX-O mainframe computer, one the first of such beasts to eschew vacuum tubes and be fully transistorized, and the equally odd-ball crew at the Artificial Intelligence Lab. During bull-sessions about the demo program at the Hingham Institute, they develop the basic underpinnings of what will become Spacewar! – the Theory of Computer Toys: 1) It should demonstrate the computer’s resources and tax those resources to the utmost. 2) It should be interesting, therefore different every time it is run. 3) It should actively involve the user, as in it should be a game. Recalling E.E. Smith’s epic space battles, In summer of 1961, the group forms the idea of pitting two spaceships with limited fuel supplies against each other in a missile duel. The program becomes Spacewar!, with Russell as main programmer. Little does he know that his program would eventually result in the loss of computer productivity estimated into the millions of dollars.

Spacewar! running on a PDP-1 monitor

Screenshot of the Spacewar! game in action

Spacewar! running on a PDP-1 emulator

Artist rendition of the Spacewar! control boxes

Waging Spacewar!

Hoping to spur Russell’s development of the game, other programmers throw him aid, including a sine-cosine routine procured from Digital Equipment’s users library by Alan Kotok. Getting underway with Spacewar!, Russell creates two ships, called the wedge and the needle according to their shapes, that are rendered in rough outline graphics. They are controlled by switches on the front panel of the PDP-1: a left-right toggle switch to rotate the ships clockwise and counterclockwise, and another toggle switch to set direction movement forward or back; and a switch to apply thrust to your ship. Each vessel commands a store of 31 torpedoes they can hurl at their opponent during a match, emanating from the nose of their ship. Russell adds in some random unreliability with the operation and trajectory of players’ shots, but this proves to be so unpopular with players that he quickly drops this “feature”.

Click the button to play the seminal Spacewar! on the PDP-1. Hold both LEFT CTRL and ENTER to load game. For Wedge ship use A and S to turn, D to thrust, F to fire and Z for hyperspace. For Needle ship, left and right arrow to turn, up arrow to thrust, down arrow to fire, / key for hyperspace

Working for almost six months, logging 200 man-hours, by spring of 1962 Russell has an initial version of what he titles Spacewar! completed. Russell’s compatriots add their own spice to the proceedings with later revisions of the program. For example, a very realistic star field backdrop program called Expensive Planetarium is added by Peter Samson. Dan Edwards develops the accurate gravity effects in the game, centred around a bright sun at the center of the screen, the gravity well of which would draw careless pilots in to their doom. Graetz develops the hyperspace feature, activated via another switch on the front of the PDP-1. This can be thrown forward by a panicked player to get out of a scrape and into the hands of fate by disappearing their ship, which then appears randomly elsewhere on the screen. In order to deter spacefarers from relying too much on this crutch, multiple uses of hyperspace steadily increase the odds that your ship will explode when coming out of it. With the added revisions, this “final” version of Spacewar! by the original MIT instigators weighs in at a total of 9K.

SPACEWAR! IS HEREBY BANNED.

Fed into the PDP-1 via paper tape input and viewed on the attached CRT screen, Spacewar! causes a sensation with its debut at MIT’s annual Science Open House that May, and a scoring system must be introduced to limit people’s time at the control switches used to play. History is also made by Kotok and fellow Spacewar addict Bob Sanders, who are sick of the elbow fatigue caused by holding the toggle switches on the PDP-1 to control the action. Raiding the spare-parts bin of the TMRC, they put together two wooden control boxes, wired directly into the computer. With dedicated switches and buttons to control the game in hand, these could be considered the first gaming joysticks. The fervor over the game among nerds at MIT causes the school to take the step of banning Spacewar!, outside of lunch breaks and after work hours. Sick of cleaning up the beer cans and other trash after all-night marathon sessions at the computer by students from all over the campus destroying each other’s spaceships, MIT administration eventually orders all copies of Spacewar! destroyed.

Of course, a couple of copies of Spacewar! survive the great purge and paper-tape backups quickly spread to other educational facilities in the U.S…. who then equally seek to limit or ban Spacewar! from their computer centres. On a more positive note, PDP-1 maker DEC uses the program to demonstrate the capabilities of the PDP-1 to new clients and includes it free with every installed system.

Space War, Atari’s version of Spacewar! for the Atari VCS, 1978

Space War, aka Videocart 5 for the Fairchild Channel F, 1977

Moonship Battle is the Spacewar!-type game on this cart, for the RCA Studio II, 1977

The PDP-1 “mini-computer” and Spacewar! creator Steve Russell, circa 2013

Free Range Warfare: The Impact of Spacewar

Once again, just like Tennis for Two creator William Higinbotham, Russell doesn’t seek to copyright or patent his work. Not only would seeking royalties contradict the hacker ethos revered by these early computer geniuses, but also pertinent is the fact that the system Spacewar! is running on is hardly a consumer product: it’s the size of three refrigerators and costs $120,000. On top of all that, the creators aren’t even sure if a program could be copyrighted. This open source nature of Spacewar! encourages modification: in 1969, Rick Bloome uses the PLATO computerized education platform to create a networked version of Spacewar!. In 1974, Ken Harrenstein, along with Charles Frankston and Gary Palter from MIT, among other tweaks to the program convert the wedge and needle ships into shapes closely resembling the starship Enterprise from Star Trek, and call their version Vector of Mysteries. What Paramount and NBC might think of their creation is unknown…. although this design motif will be carried forward by Larry Rosenthal when he does the same thing for one of his ships in his later Spacewar! arcade copy called, blatantly, Space Wars. Speaking of the commercial front, due to its ubiquitous nature and public domain status, the original Spacewar! will end up as the foundation of the entire video game industry and one of the most copied concepts in the medium. It inspires arcade translations such as the first commercial arcade video games, Galaxy Game and Computer Space, as well as the aforementioned vector graphics game Space Wars by Rosenthal and Cinematronics, as well as Atari’s answer to that game, Orbit, and even on to the company’s smash hit Asteroids. The Spacewar! concept also materializes early on in home video games for systems like the Channel F and the Atari VCS.

Click button to play Atari Spacewar! and Space Wars arcade knock-off Orbit

Spacewar! creator Steve Russell at the controls of a PDP-1 computer, 2002

Ken Harrenstein (L) and Gary Palter, creators of Star-Trek themed Spacewar! mod, 1974

A PDP-1 minicomputer, the same model used in the creation of Spacewar!

Galaxy Game, inspired by Spacewar! installed in 1972, still in use at Tressider Coffeehouse in 1977

Another view of the PDP-1

A sparkling red Computer Space cabinet, a game inspired by Spacewar!

Spacewar! slingshots around intellectual IP rights to the Atari VCS in 1978, as Space War

Steve Russell (R) and J,M. Graetz, posing with Spacewar! at its 25th anniversary party, Computer History Museum in Boston, 1988

Just your basic instruction set for the DEC PDP-1, 1962

Steve Russell, creator of Spacewar and destroyer of millions in computer productivity, circa 2011

L-R: Alan Kotok, Steve Russell and J.M. Graetz play Spacewar at the Boston Computer Museum, undated photo