The world’s first video game is coming to an Analogue Pocket near you. Today, Analogue announced that it will release Spacewar!, a game originally designed for the PDP-1 minicomputer that predates Pong by a full decade, on Pocket as part of its broader strategy to bring pioneering video games into the modern age.
The original space war! It was created in 1962 by a group of engineers led by Steve Russell at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Using a PDP-1 minicomputer and a 1024 x 1024-pixel CRT display, Russell and his colleagues programmed a game in which two spacecraft face off in the gravitational well of a star. Two controllers were created for the game with switches to maneuver and buttons that were designed to be silent when pressed so your opponent can’t hear when you fire missiles.
To bring Spacewar! to the Analogue Pocket, Spacemen3, a third-party developer, used the source code for the PDP-1 computer and Spacewar! itself, which are in the public domain, along with the OpenFPGA software. Emulating 60-year-old software presented some interesting challenges.
“The PDP-1 had some unique features, featuring a 1024×1024 vector display with a unique way of rendering the image,” Analogue CEO Chris Taber said in an email to The Verge. “It was a bit tricky to accommodate this.”
Alex Cranz from The Verge got a chance to play Spacewar!
Space war! it looks a little different on analog pocket. Lines are crisp and clean, without the ethereal glow that the original green CRT provided. The AI for your opponent is non-existent, but there’s still something really fun about speeding towards a star and then using its gravity to go around it and take out another ship. Decades later, you still feel like you’re fighting a war in space.
Space war! is emblematic of Analogue’s broader mission to preserve and reproduce not only video games from the recent past as with its retro console offerings, but also from the distant past. Games that were never commercially released like Spacewar! they represent part of the lost history of video games that Analogue is trying to resurrect.
“The purpose of openFPGA is to open up Analogue hardware to developers to help preserve gaming history…We’ve kicked off the show that highlights the beginning of gaming with a Spacewar recreation of the PDP-1!” Taber said.
Space war! is rolling out to Pocket alongside a new software update that adds save states and more.
