The world’s first video game is coming to an analog pocket near you. Analogue today announced that it is bringing Spacewar!, a game originally designed for the PDP-1 minicomputer that predates Pong by a full decade, to the Pocket as part of its broader strategy to bring pioneering video games into the modern era .
The original space war! it was created in 1962 by a panel of engineers led by Steve Russell at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Using a PDP-1 minicomputer and a 1024 x 1024-pixel CRT screen, Russell and his colleagues programmed a game in which two spacecraft send you into the gravitational well of a star. Two controllers were created for the game with switches to maneuver and buttons designed to be silent when pressed so your opponent couldn’t hear when you were firing missiles.
To bring Spacewar! in Analogue Pocket, Spacemen3, a third-party developer, used the source code of the PDP-1 computer and Spacewar! same, both 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, with a 1024 x 1024 vector display with a unique way of generating the image,” Analogue CEO Chris Taber said in an email to The Verge. “It was a bit tricky to accommodate.”
The Verge’s Alex Cranz got a chance to play Spacewar!
Space War! it looks a little different than the analog pocket. The lines are crisp and clean without any of 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 up to a star and then using its gravity to whip it and take out another ship. Decades later, you still feel like you’re fighting a war in space.
Space War! it’s emblematic of Analogue’s larger mission to preserve and play not only video games from the recent past as with its retro console offerings, but from the distant past as well. Games that were never commercially released like Spacewar! they represent part of the lost video game history that Analogue is trying to resurrect.
“The goal of openFPGA is to open up Analogue hardware to developers to help preserve the history of video games… We kicked off the program by highlighting the beginning of video games with a re-enactment of the PDP- 1!” Taber said.
Space War! is rolling out to Pocket alongside a new software update that adds save states and more.