These days, gaming is a billion dollar industry, but it all started as an experiment in 1962 by a programmer from MIT named Steve Russell.

Back in 1962, Steve gathered a group of MIT programmers* and spent about 200 hours creating a game called Spacewar! for an early computer called the DEC PDP-1. The object of Spacewar! was to avoid a black hole while trying to shoot your opponents.

"If I hadn't done it, someone would've done something equally exciting if not better in the next six months. I just happened to get there first."

Steve Russell may have gotten his name in the geek history books but unfortunately he never was never able to profit from Spacewar!. Back in 1962, computers were considered "serious tools" and were only used by governments, universities and corporations - not exactly your average gaming consumers.

It's nice to read about the first computer game, but wouldn't you really rather actually play it? Finding an original copy of Spacewar! and a DEC PDP-1 computer would be impossible. But thanks to three MIT students, Barry Silverman, Brian Silverman, and Vadim Gerasimov, Spacewar! lives on. Martin Graetz, one of Steve Russell's original team members, gave these MIT students a 40 page print out of the original source code. They then re-typed it, and ran the code through several emulators and conversions to get it into a Java applet that will run in the average web browser. Thank you Barry, Brian and Vadim!

You can play Spacewar! on this MIT web page and experience a piece of computer and gaming history for yourself.

Before you run over and check it out, here are the controls for Spacewar!:

Player 1: left = a, right = s, thrust = d, fire = f
Player 2: left = k, right = l, thrust = ;, fire = '

Enjoy!

Also check out Alice Hill's blog post about Spacewar!

*The Spacewar! Programming Team: Stephen Russell, Peter Samson, Dan Edwards, Martin Graetz, Alan Kotok, Steve Piner, and Robert Saunders.