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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.