[HN Gopher] Video Games Turn 60: How Spacewar Launched a Revolution
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       Video Games Turn 60: How Spacewar Launched a Revolution
        
       Author : danso
       Score  : 58 points
       Date   : 2022-04-04 15:59 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.howtogeek.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.howtogeek.com)
        
       | BolexNOLA wrote:
       | Highly recommend _Console Wars_ for anyone interested in this. It
       | does a great overview of the first video games and the hardware
       | challenges behind them. It 's a little dense but it's good.
        
       | Malic wrote:
       | I gotta make a call-out for the book "Hackers" by Steven Levy.
       | The book had a nice section covering those days back at MIT when
       | Spacewar was developed.
       | 
       | https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/hackers/9781449390259/
        
       | smm11 wrote:
       | I was maybe six years old, and was at an overnighter in a
       | military base auditorium space - this was a Cub Scout thing or
       | something.
       | 
       | At one point, we could tour the nearby areas, where work was
       | going on (in the depths of the Cold War). In one room, someone
       | was pecking at a large terminal and mentioned how he was
       | "talking" to someone on the West Coast. Why he wasn't on the
       | phone, I couldn't imagine. Others a room over showed us Spacewar,
       | and this melted my mind. Pong was one thing, this something
       | altogether different. It came out in quarter-driven cabinet form,
       | sort of, a year or two later, and I recall the scene. As I do
       | now.
        
         | phkahler wrote:
         | >> It came out in quarter-driven cabinet form, sort of, a year
         | or two later, and I recall the scene.
         | 
         | The quarter-driven version was from Cinematronics and was
         | designed by Larry Rosenthal. Their vector-graphics were common
         | in arcades in the late 70's. I've been meaning to put together
         | a presentation on reverse engineering the hardware and writing
         | an emulator for some time now. It's a fun exercise that many
         | people could do given the schematics and some prom readouts.
         | The CPU is a work of genius.
        
       | bitwize wrote:
       | The basic gameplay of Spacewar, central gravity well and all,
       | persisted into the very excellent Star Control series, which were
       | 90s releases. You can get Star Control II as open source, under
       | the name The Ur-Quan Masters: http://sc2.sourceforge.net/
        
         | the_af wrote:
         | I love The Ur-Quan Masters. A labor of love. Never been able to
         | finish it, and I never will, but I've started playing countless
         | times.
        
       | fritzy wrote:
       | I did a web remake of the old DOS re-imagining of SpaceWar a few
       | years back as an exercise. https://spacewar.pro
       | https://github.com/fritzy/spacewar.pro
       | 
       | It's kind of fun watching the AI fight each other if nothing
       | else.
        
       | pvg wrote:
       | The other day:
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30886497
        
       | esotericsean wrote:
       | This got me following a rabbit hole to research about the first
       | video games. Looks like the very first might have been one called
       | Tennis for Two from 1958. So video games are even older than 60!
        
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       (page generated 2022-04-04 23:01 UTC)