Wikipedia:Today's featured article/October 19, 2023

Spacewar! is a space combat video game developed in 1962 by Steve Russell in collaboration with Martin Graetz, Wayne Wiitanen, Bob Saunders, Steve Piner, and others. The first video game known to be played at multiple computer installations, it was popular in the small American programming community in the 1960s. Players wage a dogfight between two spaceships with limited weaponry and fuel in the gravity well of a star. Spacewar! was written for the newly installed Digital Equipment PDP-1, a minicomputer, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the public domain code was widely ported. Saunders built an early gamepad controller for the game. It directly inspired many electronic games, such as the first commercial arcade video games, Galaxy Game and Computer Space (both 1971), and later games such as Asteroids (1979). In 2007, Spacewar! was named to a list of the ten most important video games of all time, which formed the start of the game canon at the Library of Congress.