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Around MIT's TX-0, an early transistorized computer with a display and a light pen, small programs appeared for the pleasure of writing them, including one in which a hand-drawn maze was searched by a simulated mouse.
The programs themselves were slight. What formed around them was not: a group of people who treated an interactive computer as a place to make things, expected a screen to respond to them, and passed both attitudes along. Accounts of early game development trace back to this environment rather than to any single program written in it.
Written for a new PDP-1 at MIT, Spacewar! set two rocket ships dueling in the gravity well of a star. Copies traveled to other installations on paper tape until it became a standard demonstration program.
The first computer game to spread widely, and the first shaped by many hands rather than a single author. It also established that real-time competition between two people, built on simple physics with no scoring beyond survival, was compelling enough that expensive machines would be borrowed to run it.
