Hacking Their Way Into History

MIT's involvement in the development of video games dates back to 1958, when Professor Jack Dennis '53, SM '54, ScD '58, began letting students play around with a recently donated Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-1 (for "programmed data processor")--an early commercial computer designed to interact with its user instead of merely reading punch cards. By 1961, ­Martin Graetz '58, Wayne Wiitanen '57, and MIT employee and Tech Model Railroad Club member Steve Russell had hacked their way into history by developing the initial concept for Spacewar, in which two players, each in control of a spaceship, battled it out in a starfield. Although William Higinbotham, a nuclear physicist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, had created the primitive Tennis for Two game in 1958, Spacewar was much more sophisticated; most experts consider it the first interactive video game.

Tinkering away in Building 26 and at the Hingham Institute Space Warfare Study Group (Russell's home), Russell, Dan Edwards '59, SM '66, EE '67, Peter Samson '62, and others improved the game over the next year. Eventually, a surplus jet-fighter joystick was added for the full piloting experience--likely the first use of a joystick in a video game. The final version of Spacewar accurately modeled the positions of stars, the motions of the ships, and the effects of gravity, using close to 100,000 calculations per second to do so. "And that's the first computer game to come out of MIT!" says Philip Tan '01, SM '03, the U.S. executive director of the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT game lab. "It's insane." A marvel of geeky coolness, the game became popular among the few scientists and engineers with access to the 50 or so PDP-1s that were ever made. But it would be years before video games--and the computers needed to run them--became a consumer industry. The hackers who created Spacewar were just in it for fun, and never made money from their creation.

Playing With Technology

"Another routine day of drudgery aboard the Stellar Patrol Ship Feinstein. This morning's assignment for a certain lowly Ensign Seventh Class: scrubbing the filthy metal deck at the port end of Level Nine. With your Patrol-issue self-contained multi-purpose all-weather scrub-brush, you shine the floor with a diligence born of the knowledge that at any moment, the dreaded Ensign First Class Blather, the bane of your shipboard existence, could appear."

"Ensign Blather, his uniform immaculate, enters and notices you are away from your post. 'Twenty demerits, Ensign Seventh Class!' bellows Blather. 'Forty if you're not back on Deck Nine in five seconds!' He curls his face into a hideous mask of disquiet at your unbelievable negligence."