Ep. 31: Spacewar!: Dual to the Death

Our podcasting duo takes us back to the dawning of real-time computer games: Spacewar! Alex Smith joins us for round two, being our second second-time guest, to pairaphrase the history of this 2-player game of binary ships thrusting around a gravity-well star, who (reluctantly) wrote it, who modded it, who played it, and who created the first couple of video game controllers ever made. If necessity is the mother of invention, can we agree ‘fun’ is at least a cool aunt? The second generation of computer engineers doubled down on these machines simply being fun toys and spawned an entire industry which now generates more than twice the revenue of both the music and film/TV industries combined!

Play Spacewar!: Masswerk.at

See more from Alex Smith:

Blog: videogamehistorian.wordpress.com

Video Game Pioneers Archive: https://invention.si.edu/node/20723/p/489-videogame-pioneers-archive

Project Transcripts: https://sova.si.edu/details/NMAH.AC.1498?s=0&n=10&t=C&q=&i=0

Book: https://www.routledge.com/They-Create-Worlds-The-Story-of-the-People-and-Companies-That-Shaped-the/Smith/p/book/9781138389908

Podcast: http://podcast.theycreateworlds.com/

The Video Game History Hour music is Blippy Trance by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/