For the first game on my backlog, I loaded up 1962's Spacewar! on a PDP-1 emulator provided for free in-browser by the Internet Archive, and played a sizable handful of rounds with my girlfriend on my Lenovo ThinkPad T480 while we sat on its couch watching The Matrix with its roommate and her girlfriend. While it's certainly not the earliest video game to receive a listing on the Internet Games Database which Backloggd pulls its library from, it's the first one that caught my eye; most pre-Spacewar! games are flat recreations of existing tabletop games like Tic-Tac-Toe and checkers, or primitive physics-simulating portrayals of real-world sports like tennis and pool. Now, don't get me wrong, I have plenty of respect for these early experiments. The fact that you could even get a computer to simulate checkers in 1952 at all is undeniably impressive, and it's an important milestone in the development of video games as a medium, in the same way Sallie Gardner at a Gallop was an important milestone in the development of films as a medium; That said, I don't have the technical or historical expertise to meaningfully comment on these early experiments, nor do I have the time or inclination to amass such expertise. My backlog projects are something I do in my free time, I work a full-time factory job; This doesn't need to be a second one.
All that said, I selected Spacewar! as my first game to play, because it was the first one that was a computerized portrayal of a fictional scenario using simulation in a speculative way. This was the beginning of "video games" as I know them and am interested in dissecting, and, honestly? The game is great. It's immediately fun just noodling around with the controls and getting a sense for how to control your ship by applying thrust in arbitrary directions. That's your first challenge: Controlling your ship well enough to avoid crashing into the star in the center of the playfield, whose gravity well will exert a constant pull upon you. The physics are pretty robustly simulated for the time, and it takes a while to change your momentum, whether that's building speed up or counteracting it. You have exactly one button that actually changes your movement trajectory, the thrust button, which will propel you forward relative to your ship's heading, whatever direction that may be. You can adjust that heading with the left and right steering buttons, but doing so won't change your movement unless you also apply thrust, without it you'll just spin while continuing along whatever trajectory you were already moving on. The inclusion of a constant gravity well which acts upon both players and can lead to a fail state was honestly brilliant; it immediately ensures that getting really good at a boring strategy like sitting in place and getting really good at leading shots to take out your opponent can't work. If you don't move, you will die, so you'd better learn to effectively pilot your ship. The physics simulation doesn't stop here, either; the bullets inherit inertia from the ship that fired them, and they're affected by the gravity well too. Build up a little speed and fire perpendicular to your flight trajectory, and your bullet will sail off at something like a 45 degree angle, keeping pace with your ship as it moves away. Build up a bunch of speed, turn around, and fire backwards, directly along your flight path, and the bullet will come out at close to a standstill; you've more or less dropped a mine behind you. Altogether, there's a ridiculous amount of depth here for a game with four buttons total. Well, four deterministic buttons anyway. There's also a hyperspace button, which just causes you to disappear from where you are and then reappear at a random location with some momentum in a random direction. This can deposit you directly on the star in the center of the play field, and it also might just cause you to self destruct regardless of where you end up, so it's best left for emergencies; The meat of the game just comes from managing your inertia, lining up shots, shooting your opponent's shots out of the air, and trying to force them into a bad position. Hyperspace is just a final wrinkle on that formula, and it's a pretty fun one. On pressing the button, if your warp drive works (which it might not), your ship will slowly fade out of visible existence, and won't reappear for several elongated seconds, during which your opponent is free to scramble for what they imagine may be an advantageous position when you return. The anticipation builds, until your ship reappears, either already careening chaotically in a random direction, or, as may be the case, as an already-in-progress explosion, having disastrously self-destructed in hyperspace. The addition of just a tiny bit of outright randomness truly places the cherry on top of this game's physics simulation, giving it that last little nudge into true timelessness. As a whole, Spacewar! is a delightfully minimalist arcade dogfighter when viewed from a 2025 perspective, and delightfully complex and multifaceted when viewed in context of its release in 1962. It's easy to see why for a decade after its release, this game was the scourge of timeshare mainframe computer administrators interested in minimizing the time their expensive hardware spent running frivolous nonsense as opposed to the serious research programs they were intended for.
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