Replay: The History of Video Games Read Free Page B

Almost as soon as anybody started exploring the idea they walked away, convinced it was a waste of time. Computer Chess had proved a fruitful line of inquiry for artificial intelligence research – indeed many of the principles pioneered by Shannon and others would later be used by video game designers to create challenging computer-controlled opponents for game players – but remained steadfastly about research rather than entertainment.
    But as the 1960s dawned, the idea that computers should only be used for serious applications was about to be challenged head on by a group of computing students who rejected the po-faced formality of their professors and saw programming as fun and creative rather than staid and serious.
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    The Tech Model Railroad Club lived up ts name. Based in Building 20 of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the students in the club were united by an interest in building elaborate model railroads using complex combinations of relays and switches. Many of the club members also shared a love of computing and trashy sci-fi books such as Buck Rogers and, in particular, the work of E.E. Smith. Smith wrote unashamedly trashy novellas telling stories of romance, war and adventure in outer space that were packed with melodramatic dialogue and clichéd plot twists. His Lensman and Skylark series of books, written in the 1920s and 1930s, helped define the space opera genre of science fiction and fans such as Tech Model Railroad Club member Steve Russell lapped up his trashy tales.
    The club members’ attitude to computing was in stark contrast to that of their professors and the computer scientists of the previous two decades. They saw merit in creating anything that seemed like a fun idea regardless of its practical value. Club member Robert Wagner’s Expensive Desk Calculator was typical. Written on MIT’s $3 million TX-0 computer, it did what a desktop calculator of the day did only on a machine worth thousands more. Wagner’s professors were unimpressed by what they saw as a contemptible misuse of advanced computer technology and gave him a zero grade as a punishment. Such disapproval, however, did little to quash the playful programming spirit of the club’s members and in late 1961, their unorthodox attitude really got a chance to shine when the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) gave MIT its latest computer, the PDP-1.
    The $120,000 PDP-1 may have been the size of a large car, but with its keyboard and screen it was in many ways the forerunner of the modern desktop computer. The imminent arrival of the cutting-edge machine caught the imagination of the Tech Model Railroad Club. “Long before the PDP-1 was up and running Wayne Witaenem, Steve Russell and I had formed a sort of ad-hoc committee on what to do with it,” club member Martin Graetz told Edge magazine in 2003. After some debate the students hit on the idea of making a game. “Wayne said: ‘Look, you need action and you need some kind of skill level. It should be a game where you have to control things moving around on the screen like, oh, spaceships’,” recalled Graetz.
    And with that comment Spacewar! , a two-player spaceship duel set in outer space, was born. Russell took on the job of programming the game, but his progress was slow. He would repeatedly make excuses about why the game was still not finished when questioned by other club members. Eventually Russell’s excuses ran out when he told club member Alan Kotok that he could not start work on the game until he had some routines that could carry out sine-cosine calculations. [3] Kotok went straight to the Digital Equipment Corporation, got the routines and handed them to Russell. “Alan Kotok came to me and said: ‘Alright, here are the sine-cosine routines. Now what’s your excuse?’,” said Russell.
    Out of excuses, Russell finally got to work and completed the first version of Spacewar! in late 1961, complete with a curvy rocket ship inspired by the