Spacewar!

Spacewar! is a space combat video game created in 1962 by Steve Russell together with Martin Graetz, Wayne Wiitanen, Bob Saunders, Steve Piner and others at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, programmed for the DEC PDP-1 minicomputer over roughly 200 hours of work across six weeks. Two players control monochrome spaceships, nicknamed the needle and the wedge, dogfighting around a central star whose gravity well pulls at both ships, while managing limited fuel and ammunition and an emergency hyperspace jump. It spread informally to other universities and research labs with PDP-1 machines and is regarded as one of the most important and influential games in the early history of video games, becoming the first video game played at multiple computer installations and directly inspiring later commercial games including Computer Space, Galaxy Game and Asteroids. It was named to the Library of Congress's video game canon in 2007 and inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame in 2018.