Spacewar! The Interview

Went to the museum last night not for a movie, but to meet Peter Samson and (via poor-quality videoconferencing) Steve Russell, for a conversation about the second video game ever made, Spacewar!.

I asked Russell the question that's been burning in my mind for years: why does Spacewar! have an exclamation mark in its name? His answer: "Once I got it working, I thought it deserved an exclamation point!" I also asked Russell if he considered any other names for the game. "Nope."

No one asked the obvious final question, so I got that one in too: what games are they playing now? Both Russell and Samson are fans of solitaire card games. Russell also said he likes the Android game Tiny Village.

Some other tidbits from the conversation, which I found especially interesting and/or which I don't think are on the net already:



I knew this before, but it didn't really sink in. Spacewar! was released (through PDP user groups) in 1962. There would be no more computer games released until 1969. When the famous Rolling Stone article about Spacewar! came out, the game was ten years old, and it was still the most popular video game in the world, almost by default.

Samson said the name of the program Expensive Planetarium was a "double irony": it's an obvious reference to Expensive Typewriter, but "planetariums really do cost a lot of money."

Russell was asked his opinion on Asteroids. He said it was "a great solution to the problem of only one person in the bar who wants to put quarters in the machine."

It took too much computing power to calculate the trajectories of Spacewar! missiles under gravity, so they were deemed "photon torpedoes" which wouldn't be affected by gravity. Was this a common idea from earlier sci-fi or did Spacewar! invent the term? I should have asked.

Samson said he later worked on a computer system for a "three-letter agency." This was a system with eight screens; it sounded a lot like IBM's SAGE computer. The hardware was late so they threw in some software for free, including a port of Spacewar! which could play four games simultaneously on all eight screens, and which had random matchmaking, so you didn't know who you were playing with. According to Samson, the intended purpose of the computer system was not too far removed from playing Spacewar!.