Thursday, September 03, 2009
Spacewar and It's Inspirations
Steve Russel and his fellow hackers first thought up this game in 1961. He began coding the program as soon as he could and in February of 1962 Steve Russel produced his first version of Spacewar. It took Steve Russel 200 hours to complete the initial version of this product. Any additional features were developed by other computer scientists. It was one of the first games developed for the digital computer.
The basic game play of Spacewar consists of two armed spaceships called "the needle" and "the wedge" attempting to shoot each other while moving around in the gravity well of a star. Due to a lack of processing time in the computer, the ships fired missiles were unaffected by gravity. Each player must try to shoot each other while avoiding crashing into the star in the center of the game play.
The basic game play of Spacewar consists of two armed spaceships called "the needle" and "the wedge" attempting to shoot each other while moving around in the gravity well of a star. Due to a lack of processing time in the computer, the ships fired missiles were unaffected by gravity. Each player must try to shoot each other while avoiding crashing into the star in the center of the game play.Spacewar was the inspiration for many games to come in the future. Many of the games were known as the same or similar names as Spacewar but there was always various things being changed in the game to improve the game. Spacewar shaped the way of digital gaming around the world forever.
