In 1962 a small group of students at MIT got their hands on a brand-new computer called the PDP-1. It was the size of a couple of fridges and cost around $120,000 - which is more than a million in today’s money. They needed something fun to test it. So they wrote a game called Spacewar!
Two players each controlled a little spaceship on a round screen. You could turn, thrust, fire torpedoes and try to dodge the gravity well of a star in the middle. It even had real constellations as a background. Players hammered the keys for hours.
The students never sold Spacewar! Instead they handed copies to anyone with a PDP-1 - universities, labs, even other countries. Within a few years it was the most-played game in computing. Nearly every video game since, from Pac-Man to Fortnite, is a descendant of two pixel spaceships punching it out around a star.
