Retrogaming? I'll give you retrogaming
December 18, 2020 12:37 PM Subscribe
Not a remake, not a homage, not a clone but the original 1962 Spacewar! running on a virtual PDP-1.
To get a sense of just how long ago 1962 was in the history of fictional space combat, check out the switches up at the top. The first one reads:
That's a Lensmen reference, baby!
posted by The Tensor at 2:18 PM on December 18, 2020 [5 favorites]
1: Ship Rotation (On: Inertial/Angular momentum, Off: Bergenholm/Gyros)[emphasis mine]
That's a Lensmen reference, baby!
posted by The Tensor at 2:18 PM on December 18, 2020 [5 favorites]
It's just like what I remember from playing it on the TX2 at Lincoln Labs--mostly falling into the sun. I thought it would be ok to play for 25 cents if the roomful of circuitry could be put in a small enough box (note: $0.25 could by a mcdonalds burger and fries at the time)
posted by hexatron at 3:17 PM on December 18, 2020 [7 favorites]
posted by hexatron at 3:17 PM on December 18, 2020 [7 favorites]
Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution has a full chapter dedicated to the inspiration, creation, debugging and mutations of Spacewar, which is fascinating reading.
One of the anecdotes was that in one of the original versions, the torpedoes fired by the spaceships had a certain degree of variation in their trajectory; the farther they traveled, the greater the chance of slight deviation. This was meant to represent real-world technology; differences in manufacture, ballistics, split-second calculations.
The hackers loathed the concept. Realistic as it may have been, the idea of a machine that wasn't reliable was anathema to them... and out the wobbly torps went.
posted by delfin at 3:29 PM on December 18, 2020 [4 favorites]
One of the anecdotes was that in one of the original versions, the torpedoes fired by the spaceships had a certain degree of variation in their trajectory; the farther they traveled, the greater the chance of slight deviation. This was meant to represent real-world technology; differences in manufacture, ballistics, split-second calculations.
The hackers loathed the concept. Realistic as it may have been, the idea of a machine that wasn't reliable was anathema to them... and out the wobbly torps went.
posted by delfin at 3:29 PM on December 18, 2020 [4 favorites]
There's an option in the switches for "torpedoes", but it doesn't say whether they're "wobbly" or not.
Related historical note: the networked multiplayer game Netrek had torpedo "wobble" (so called) pretty much as you describe it: a slight random permutation of the torpedo's direction every tick.
posted by The Tensor at 3:56 PM on December 18, 2020
Related historical note: the networked multiplayer game Netrek had torpedo "wobble" (so called) pretty much as you describe it: a slight random permutation of the torpedo's direction every tick.
posted by The Tensor at 3:56 PM on December 18, 2020
Meh. Looks like a cheap ripoff of asteroids.
(I kid! I kid!)
posted by milnak at 7:03 PM on December 18, 2020
(I kid! I kid!)
posted by milnak at 7:03 PM on December 18, 2020
"It's a great game, involving genuine skill in solving velocty and angular relation problems--but I'm afraid it will never be widely popular. The playing "board" costs a quarter of a megabuck!"John Campbell, in the introduction to "Spacewar" by Albert W. Kuhfeld, Analog, July 1971, pg. 67.
Man I loved vector games!
posted by Marky at 10:16 PM on December 18, 2020 [1 favorite]
Hackers is a great read, and a great follow-on read is The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder.
posted by rikschell at 5:14 AM on December 19, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by rikschell at 5:14 AM on December 19, 2020 [1 favorite]
My PhD advisor has a story about playing this game in the laboratory of Paul Horowitz as a graduate student in the 1970s. I want this story to be true, so I’ll tell it and it will leak into popular consciousness.
The story is that, during a Christmas party, some of the graduate students left the actual party to go and play Spacewar on the PDP. This was going great, but the game started to glitch: some normal event, like one of the ships exploding, crashed the computer and made the display go completely dark. After rebooting the machine a few times to keep playing, one of the grad students said, “Go get Paul, he’ll know what to do.” Soon Horowitz was also in the computer room, watching the students play the game without terribly much interest.
The computer crashed again. Horowitz froze, staring intently at the machine, not moving, for about thirty seconds.
Then his face relaxed. He said, “Ah! I know what’s wrong.” He pulled out one of the drawers of electronics on the PDP, removed (perhaps un-soldered? not my story) some component, replaced it with a component from a supply drawer in the lab, closed the PDP back up again, and said, “It should work now.” And it did.
It’s interesting to tell this story in a thread where an earlier comment describes hackers’ disdain for unreliable machines.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 3:18 PM on December 19, 2020 [1 favorite]
The story is that, during a Christmas party, some of the graduate students left the actual party to go and play Spacewar on the PDP. This was going great, but the game started to glitch: some normal event, like one of the ships exploding, crashed the computer and made the display go completely dark. After rebooting the machine a few times to keep playing, one of the grad students said, “Go get Paul, he’ll know what to do.” Soon Horowitz was also in the computer room, watching the students play the game without terribly much interest.
The computer crashed again. Horowitz froze, staring intently at the machine, not moving, for about thirty seconds.
Then his face relaxed. He said, “Ah! I know what’s wrong.” He pulled out one of the drawers of electronics on the PDP, removed (perhaps un-soldered? not my story) some component, replaced it with a component from a supply drawer in the lab, closed the PDP back up again, and said, “It should work now.” And it did.
It’s interesting to tell this story in a thread where an earlier comment describes hackers’ disdain for unreliable machines.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 3:18 PM on December 19, 2020 [1 favorite]
In normal, non-pandemic times, you can see (play?) Spacewar on a PDP-1 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.
posted by jeffamaphone at 8:17 PM on December 19, 2020
posted by jeffamaphone at 8:17 PM on December 19, 2020
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posted by evilDoug at 12:59 PM on December 18, 2020