Dan Edwards and Peter Samson playing Spacewar! a combat video game on the PDP-1 minicomputer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1962). Spacewar! was programmed by Stephen Russell, Martin Graetz, and Peter Samson and was originally played using so-called “control boxes”, the first game controllers for any digital video game. In case these were not available, the game could be started from a special address to be operated by switches on the control console of the PDP-1. These control boxes had a lever for left and right turn, another lever for thrust and hyperspace, and a button to fire the photon torpedoes. For the background, Peter Samson, wrote a program based on real star charts that scrolled slowly through the night sky, including every star in a band between 22°.5 N and 22°.5 S down to the 5th magnitude, displayed at their relative brightness. The program was called “Expensive Planetarium”
High-fidelity online javascript recreation of this historical game:
