Use the fork, Luke.

It surprises me that during the late 50's when the first space shots had captured the public imagination and the cold war and all it's technological sabre rattling held the generals gaze, that somewhere, someone didn't put the pieces together and come up with a space video game. It seems obvious that the public would go for it. There was such a game, much heralded in programming circles, but rarely seen outside of the engineering department at MIT, called Spacewar! (don't forget the exclamation point)

Conceived by Steve Russell, Martin Graetz and Wayne Wiitanen to run on the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-1, which came out in 1960. It boasted a whopping 9 K of memory and became notorious as the first computer to elicit the hacker mentality in computer science students. Back in 1960 hackers were the crazy into computer people, rare animals indeed in a world of less than a thousand computers. The idea of constant debugging and upgrading to improve performance can be blamed on them.

The three formed the Hingham Institute (named after the street their house was on) to study how to take advantage and exploit the limits of the PDP-1. The result of their toils was Spacewar! They wanted to "demonstrate as many of the computer's resources as possible, and tax those resources to the limit", "it should be interesting, which means every run should be different" and "it should involve the onlooker in a pleasurable and active way -- in short, it should be a game."

The game was simple; as the best games usually are. Two competing spaceships maneuver and shoot at each other, dodging and weaving to avoid being hit against a background of moving stars. Early versions had random dots, while later ones had actual correct star charts moving along. Originally control was via the computer's input controls, but that was a real snarl for 2 players to get at and one player was always farther from the screen, a decided disadvantage. Since joysticks were not available then they designed a simple Bakelite control box and had the institutes model railway club bodge them together.

The program was ready in April 1962 for MIT's annual Science Open House in May. At the end of the academic year the MIT hackers moved on to professional careers around the country. For a fun first hand account of the birth of this game I dug up this article written for long gone (1985) Creative Computing Magazine. http://www.wheels.org/spacewar/creative/SpacewarOrigin.html