Spacewar! Or, the Rise of the Computer Bums

By Davis Dunavin

Published May 29, 2025 at 1:01 PM EDT

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Spacewar! running on the Computer History Museum's PDP-1.

The first widely-played video game wasn’t Pong, or Donkey Kong, or Space Invaders. It wasn’t made by Nintendo or Atari. Instead, imagine a bunch of scruffy young nerds at MIT in 1962, given free rein over the latest computer technology. The result: Spacewar!

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Davis Dunavin

Davis Dunavin loves telling stories, whether on the radio or around the campfire. He started in Missouri and ended up in Connecticut, which, he'd like to point out, is the same geographic trajectory taken by Mark Twain.

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