Do you want to know about the world's first digital video game? - Gamers Bible

World's first digital video game Named Spacewar. Read about it. 

Spacewar! is a space combat video game. The game features two spaceships, "the needle" and "the wedge", engaged in a dogfight while maneuvering in the gravity well of a star. Both ships are controlled by human players. Each ship has limited fuel for maneuvering and a limited number of torpedoes, and the ships follow Newtonian physics, remaining in motion even when the player is not accelerating. Flying near the star to provide a gravity assist was a common tactic. Ships are destroyed when hit with a torpedo or colliding with the star. At any time, the player can engage a hyperspace feature to move to a new, random location on the screen, though each use has an increasing chance of destroying the ship instead. The game was initially controlled with switches on the PDP-1, though Alan Kotok and Bob Saunders built an early gamepad to reduce the difficulty and awkwardness of controlling the game.

STEVE RUSSELL - INVENTOR OF SPACEWAR

It was in 1962 when a young computer programmer from MIT named Steve Russell, fueled with inspiration from the writings of E. E. "Doc" Smith, led the team that created the first popular computer game.

Starwar was almost the first computer game ever written. However, there were at least two far-lesser-known predecessors: OXO (1952) and Tennis for Two (1958).

It took the team about 200 man-hours to write the first version of Spacewar. Russell wrote Spacewar on a PDP-1, an early DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) interactive mini computer which used a cathode-ray tube type display and keyboard input. The computer was donated to MIT from DEC, who hoped MIT's think tank would be able to do something remarkable with their product. A computer game called Spacewar was the last thing DEC expected but they later provided the game as a diagnostic program for their customers. Russell never profited from Spacewars.

"We had a thousand hours of playtime to get it right," said Samson "It was open source because we didn't have any choice. You couldn't copyright software in those days."

For more Information Visit :

http://spacewar.oversigma.com/
http://spacewar.zorg.org/origins-of-spacewar.php