1950s–1960s

1950s–1960s

Spacewar! is credited as the first widely available and influential computer game.

The majority of early computer games ran on university mainframe computers in the United States and were developed by individuals as a hobby. The limited accessibility of early computer hardware meant that these games were small in number and forgotten by posterity.^{[citation needed]}
In 1959–1961, a collection of interactive graphical programs were created on the TX-0 machine at MIT:

• Mouse in the Maze: allowed players to place maze walls, bits of cheese, and, in some versions, martinis using a light pen. One could then release the mouse and watch it traverse the maze to find the goodies.^[8]
• HAX: By adjusting two switches on the console, various graphical displays and sounds could be made.
• Tic-Tac-Toe: Using the light pen, the user could play a simple game of tic-tac-toe against the computer.

In 1961, a group of students at MIT, including Steve Russell, programmed a game titled Spacewar! on the DEC PDP-1, a new computer at the time.^[9] The game pitted two human players against each other, each controlling a spacecraft capable of firing missiles, while a star in the center of the screen created a large hazard for the crafts. The game was eventually distributed with new DEC computers and traded throughout the then-primitive Internet. Spacewar! is credited as the first influential computer game.
In 1966, Ralph Baer engaged co-worker Bill Harrison in the project, where they both worked at military electronics contractor Sanders Associates in Nashua, NH. They created a simple video game named Chase, the first to display on a standard television set. With the assistance of Baer, Bill Harrison created the light gun. Baer and Harrison were joined by Bill Rusch in 1967, an MIT graduate (MSEE) who was subsequently awarded several patents for the TV gaming apparatus (US Patents 3,659,284, 3,778,058, etc.). Development continued, and in 1968 a prototype was completed that could run several different games such as table tennis and target shooting. After months of secretive labouring between official projects, the team was able to bring an example with true promise to Sanders' R & D department. By 1969, Sanders was showing off the world’s first home video game console to manufacturers.^[4]
In 1969, AT&T computer programmer Ken Thompson wrote a video game called Space Travel for the Multics operating system. This game simulated various bodies of the solar system and their movements and the player could attempt to land a spacecraft on them. AT&T pulled out of the MULTICS project, and Thompson ported the game to Fortran code running on the GECOS operating system of the General Electric GE 635 mainframe computer. Runs on this system cost about $75 per hour, and Thompson looked for a smaller, less expensive computer to use. He found an underused PDP-7, and he and Dennis Ritchie started porting the game to PDP-7 assembly language. In the process of learning to develop software for the machine, the development process of the Unix operating system began, and Space Travel has been called the first UNIX application.^[10]