Spacewar! - video games 60s style

This is a virtual DEC PDP-1 (emulated in HTML5/JavaScript) running the original code of "Spacewar!", the earliest known digital video game. If available, use gamepads or joysticks for authentic gameplay — the game was originally played using custom “control boxes”.

Spacewar! was conceived in 1961 by Martin Graetz, Stephen Russell, and Wayne Wiitanen. It was first realized on the PDP-1 in 1962 by Stephen Russell, Peter Samson, Dan Edwards, and Martin Graetz, together with Alan Kotok, Steve Piner, and Robert A Saunders. Spacewar! is in the public domain, but this credit paragraph must accompany all distributed versions of the program.

This emulation is by Norbert Landsteiner, www.masswerk.at, 2012–2022. It is based on emulation code by Barry Silverman, Brian Silverman, and Vadim Gerasimov. The emulation code has been rewritten and extended to support additional instructions and auxilary hardware. Special attention has been paid on accurate timing and on a recreatiion of the appearance and the unique experience of the original CRT display. Further, an informative splash-screen, which is not part of the original game, was added, and there are multiple versions of the original code ready to play. See below for details. (The page has been slightly overhauled to celebrate Spacewar!'s 60th anniversary in 2022.) For some other interactive programs running on this emulator, see www.masswerk.at/minskytron.

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