Video game site, 1up.com, is running a series on The Most Important Games Ever Made:
Every week through the end of the year, classic.1UP.com will be presenting a look at a different video gaming landmark — the fifty most important games to be created within the forty years that the medium has existed.
Video games go back almost to the beginning of computers paired with CRTs:
Ask the average person on the street for the name of the world’s first video game and chances are they’ll tell you it was Pong. It’s certainly a reasonable assumption: Pong’s simple black-and-white visuals and back-and-forth table tennis gameplay are like the electronic equivalent of cave paintings — how much more primitive could you get? It stands to reason that such a basic creation must have been the first game ever. Right?As any student of the medium’s history can tell you, though, the answer isn’t Pong.
The first true video game was (arguably) Spacewar, which goes back to 1962:
Largely created in the space of six months by a single student programmer during an era in which computer access was a rare and expensive commodity, Spacewar pitted two players head-to-head with a pair of classic sci-fi rocketships armed with tiny missiles. Controls were limited to thrust, rotate right and rotate left, with a dangerously unpredictable hyperspace panic button reserved for emergency situations. All action transpired on a single screen, the center of which was occupied by a deadly sun that exerted a powerful gravitation pull on the combatants. Clever players were able to make use of the sun’s attraction to give themselves an edge by slingshotting through its gravity field — a solid understanding of Newtonian physics was definitely a boon when playing Spacewar.Imagine that the film industry had skipped straight from still photos to The Jazz Singer, or that Thomas Edison’s first recording had been a Buddy Holly record — that’s how impressive Spacewar was as the debut of a brand new medium. By the time the game was complete in early 1962, it featured an accurate star map of the galaxy, a realistic physics model governed by gravity and inertia, and spaceships which could be rotated through 360 degrees. It even included a hyperspace button, years before Star Trek made “warp speed” a household phrase.