The Cradle Of Gaming

"Imagination is the vision that allows us to realise those things that reality prevents us from doing"

It's been a long time since SpaceWar, the first computer game was designed in the early 1960s. Steven Russell, a programmer at MIT and his friends had developed this game on a PDP-1 (an early Digital Equipment Corporation's minicomputer) that was worth $120,000 and had been donated by DEC. This amazing wonder, completed by the team in about 200 hours, was highly inspired from some of Edward "Doc" Smith's works about warriors who zipped across galaxies in their spaceships. Russell, an ardent Smith fan, led the team to make this game complete with rocket-powered spaceships, missiles, gravitational effects, and even an unpredictable "hyperspace" function. Since the game worked only on the costly PDPs, this game was never commercialised. This game was later discovered by another student after around 10 years, who created a similar game called Computer Space which was used on a coin-operated system making it first case. Though it was a commercial disaster, it made way for the evolution of the video games that were to rule the future markets. Few people know that this student was none other than Nolan Bushnell who was to later develop the game maestro Atari.