In 1962, the first shooter burst into existence.
Spacewar! was created at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) by a team of four (led by Steve Russell, one of the great patriarchs of video games) from the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC), one of the earliest hot spots of hacker culture.
Here's how Steward Brand of Rolling Stone described the game in 1972:
Rudimentary Spacewar consists of two humans, two sets of control buttons or joysticks, one TV-like display and one computer. Two spaceships are displayed in motion on the screen, controllable for thrust, yaw, pitch and the firing of torpedoes. Whenever a spaceship and torpedo meet, they disappear in an attractive explosion.
The 1UP.com staff summed the game's significance up in this way:
A far cry from Pong's primitive take on ping-pong, Spacewar was complex and detailed, and had much more in common with Asteroids and even Descent than with Pong. Granted, it was a monochromatic space adventure with stark graphics and no sound -- a mere shadow of the detailed 3D worlds of contemporary first-person shooters -- but it introduced concepts which guide the game developers and fans alike even 40 years later. For such an early foray into interactive gaming, it was an amazing feat.
The game featured an accurate star map in the background, a "realistic physics model governed by gravity and inertia," wrote the 1UP team, and responsive units which made the player's tactical decisions and quick reflexes truly important.
The game was a considerable technical achievement.
Also impressive were its cultural firsts. Spacewar was an active collaboration, continuously being updated and improved by anyone with the will and know how to do so. It was the world's first open source game.
Eventually, it was included as a diagnostic in every PDP-1 computer, a relatively prolific machine about the size of a car. Spacewar, which pioneered deathmatch gameplay (a term not coined until the 90s with Doom) as well as free-for-alls (FFA) and team play as the game expanded, was found in front of the smiling faces of hundreds and thousands of players, mainly students, computer scientists, technicians and gamers of similarly specialized occupations.
In labs across the country, such as Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1972, Spacewar competitions were organized. The Spacewar Olympics, a mixed competition (including five player FFAs, 2v2s and 1v1s) was chronicled in Rolling Stone. There were no particularly grand prizes here, only pride and pizza, besting your rival and beer. Oh, and a year's subscription to Rolling Stone in its heyday. Not bad.
These gamers, mostly brilliant computer heads unknowingly leading the way toward modernity, were doing something as old as games themselves: bonding over competition, not to mention profound innovation.
Continued the Rolling Stone article:
The hackers are the technicians of this science - 'It's a term of derision and also the ultimate compliment.' They are the ones who translate human demands into code that the machines can understand and act on. They are legion. Fanatics with a potent new toy. A mobile new-found elite, with its own apparat, language and character, its own legends and humor. Those magnificent men with their flying machines, scouting a leading edge of technology which has an odd softness to it; outlaw country, where rules are not decree or routine so much as the starker demands of what's possible.
Although computers remained the domain of government, academics and industry for most of Spacewar's natural lifespan, the game became exceedingly popular wherever it went. Spacewar spread to other academic research centers within weeks. Other schools began to put their own twists on the game such as scorekeeping, anchored invisibility, team games and much more. Meanwhile, MIT kept updating their baby as well.
The game appeared in a college coffee shop for .25 cents per play under the name Galaxy Game and then elsewhere as Computer Space. It was the first coin-operated video game thus beginning the story which would lead to the arcade explosion in the coming decades. These games were well received by those familiar with computers but were deemed too complicated for the general public. It showed up on the internet precursor ARPANET. The first makeshift joysticks were constructed for this game at MIT according to The Dot Eaters, a video game historical website.
Spacewar is one of, if not the single most important video game of all time. It was not the first video game but it was the first which began to resemble its progeny in significant ways. The gameplay, visuals, innovative conceptualization, a multiplayer experience with depth and replayability, open culture and every bit in between marks this as a milestone in video games, esports, technology and science. Big picture or small, Spacewar is monumentally significant.
As soon as the opportunity to compete was there, gamers played deep into the night. The game was intermittently banned at various university research centers and major companies such as IBM before inevitably being allowed reentry. Things were dull without it. Complaints from workers pushed management to allow play. Official work was not being done while the game was played but minds were at work nonetheless.