Spacewar!, the first popular digital video game ever created, is now available on the Analogue Pocket thanks to the new PDP-1 Core designed with an open FPGA.
FPGA, or field-programmable gate array, is a type of integrated circuit that can be reconfigured after it is designed. openFPGA, on the other hand, is “a purpose-built, FPGA-driven hardware and ecosystem designed for 3rd party development of video game hardware.” It was also “designed to preserve video game history.”
Spacewar! it is clearly a large part of video game history and a third-party developer has “replicated” the game released on the PDP-1 in 1962 by MIT developers using the public domain open source code of openFPGA.
Using an open FPGA, a third party developer “Spacemen3” replicated the PDP-1 and Spacewar! using the original source code in the public domain. You can play it today on Pocket with openFPGA by following the guide here: https://t.co/XFS3ARmaUe pic.twitter.com/ut6N6Ovois
Video game security has always had a big mark on its side, especially with companies like Nintendo planning to close its Nintendo 3DS and Wii U eShops and make it more difficult to play older games. Hopefully, with this new update, fewer games will be lost to the history books.
Spacewar! inspired by science fiction books written by E.E. Doc Smith and was created by a group of MIT students who wanted to make a space video game. It was a space shooter and 2-player versus style game that featured “orbital mechanics around a gravity star.” It was designed to be played with custom “control boxes” which were also the first video game controllers.
The PDP-1 had a 1024×1024 CRT vector display and Spacewar! itself used it fully with “beautiful blue and green phosphors, trailing, bursting, and decaying between modern hexagons.”
The developers behind Spacewar! it also established some standards that a computer game must meet, and they are as follows;
Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, played Spacewar! and was so inspired by it that he would go on to create Computer Space, the first commercial video game and arcade game.
If you have an Analogue Pocket and want to try Spacewar!, check out the support page that will guide you through everything you need to know to watch this important piece of history.
For more on Spacewar! and the early days of video games, check out our look back at Atari’s history.
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Adam Bankhurst is a journalist for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
