Wednesday, 30 April 2014

Play “Space War!,” One of the Earliest Video Games, on Your Computer (1962)




spacewar


Archive.org continues adding to its Historical Software collection. Last year, they made available Donkey Kong, Pac Man, Frogger & other video games from the Golden Age, not to mention some classic software programs like WordStar and Visi-Calc. Now, they present “Space War!”, a game that came out of MIT back in 1962.


This two-player space-battle game – originally played off the cathode-ray tube of a Digital Equipment PDP-1 — was considered a major advancement in computer gaming. Today, only one working PDP-1 is known to exist, in the Computer History Museum in northern California. But through the miracle of a JSMESS emulator, you can play “Space War!” right in your web browser. (A fairly powerful computer and recent browser–ideally Firefox–is recommended.) If you end up playing this grandaddy of computer games, let us know how it goes. You can get more info on Space War! here.


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Free Fun: Play Donkey Kong, Pac Man, Frogger & Other Golden Age Video Games In Your Web Browser



Play “Space War!,” One of the Earliest Video Games, on Your Computer (1962) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don’t miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.


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