New side project for the Museum of Screens: An overview of several free tools for making web games, aimed at aspiring game creator. I won't post it right away on the museum of screens, but you can already check it out if you want:

Here we go with Spacewar! (1962). Maybe not strictly the first videogame, but for our purposes it's certainly the most interesting place to start, as it:

• 1. isn't trying to replicate an existing board game or sport,
• 2. would directly inspire the first arcade videogames (which we'll be looking at),
• and 3. actually was made (sorry, Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device).

Born as a tech demo for the Programmed Data Processor (PDP-1) minicomputer, Spacewar's openly-distributed source code was widely iterated upon and can now be found in many online implementations.

Two player-controlled spaceships, "the needle" and "the wedge", duke it out with torpedoes while gravitating towards the center of the screen, where a star sits. Touching that star will warp you to the outermost edges (or just kill you, in some versions).

Besides shooting and engaging the thrusters to move, the players can activate "hyperspace", which, as a bid to escape an impending torpedo, teleports them to a random point in the screen but has a chance to explode your ship. Your ship's fuel and ammo are limited resources, but its on you to track how much you have left.

Of course, it's multiplayer-only, so as far as play experience goes I didn't get anywhere with it beyond fiddling with the controls. The ships are quite sluggish so you'll have to start wrestling with the gravity well as soon as the game starts.

Galaxy Game (1971) brings Spacewar (minicomputer and all) to the coin-operated format and features some built-in options, including faster ships (thank God) and a "one-player" mode, which just has the second ship lazily propelling itself forward. GG's version of hyperspace only makes you invisible and intangible for a moment, so if you do it without moving, you "teleport" to the exact same place you were before. It also does a number on your fuel tank (now displayed on the screen).
Maybe its just a MAME issue but the gravity well didn't work at all, despite there being options to turn it on and off. Wikipedia insists it should function... but as of writing this, the "Gameplay" section of Galaxy Game's article seems to be copypasted from the Spacewar article, without accounting for these differences.

Regardless, GG's creators, Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck, would not go on to work on other titles, as their ambitions didn't go much further beyond building a faithful replica of the PDP original and hopefully making a few bucks in the process.

Future Atari founder and dad of rat Nolan Bushnell, on the other hand, very much would have liked to make a lot of bucks, and, already being enamored with the arcade industry, he saw potential in Spacewar, so he dragged along his pal Ted Dabney (whom Nolan had a tendency to leave out of the story) to work as "Syzygy Engineering" alongside trivia game machine manufacturer Nutting Associates on something reasonably Spacewar-shaped.

Computer Space (1971) foregoes the use of an expensive minicomputer (which kept Galaxy Game from any chance at wider distribution), shedding accuracy to Spacewar along with it. The second player and gravity well get traded for a pair of enemy saucers, one of which fires potshots in your general direction.
Since it was made up of some elaborate custom hardware, it is not and probably never will be emulated, so all I'll have to go off from are a couple fan-made recreations and video footage.

Presumably to account for the more mobile adversary (Nolan and Ted's recollections don't really get into particular game design decisions), the player can now tilt the torpedo's direction with the same inputs you use to rotate the ship (maybe this was a feature in some previous version of Spacewar?).

You get 99 seconds per play, and the game keeps track of both you and the saucer's "score" right there on the screen. Annoyingly, the ship and saucer will sometimes respawn on top of one another, mutually destroying themselves and cutting into your play time.
What Computer Space's instructions call "hyperspace" has nothing to do with Spacewar's hyperspace mechanic. It just means you get an extra 99 seconds and the background turns white.

Computer Space is good fun, but it's a little tough even when playing it nowadays, so you can imagine how much harder it would have been from the perspective of an early 70s audience to whom a game like this was totally unfamiliar.
This is just my speculation, but, as multiplayer games, Spacewar and Galaxy Game would ideally be played with people around each-other's skill level, so it evens out and players learn from each-other. Computer Space's machine-controlled opponent poses a flat skill barrier, which might've been a contributing factor for the lukewarm response (at least compared to their next game) from the bar-goers they wanted to court.

Much like the vacuum of space, Galaxy Game and Spacewar were dead silent, but Mr. Bushnell would've been well-acquainted with the attention-grabbing bells and clicks of pinball tables, so Computer Space inaugurates proper sound design for videogames: besides the ambient droning and explosion noises, both your shots and the saucer's missiles emit a distinctive buzz whenever they're on screen.

My version

As I've indicated, my main motivation with this chronogaming project is getting more hands-on experience with game making. For each release I look at, I'll be replicating its basic gameplay in my game engine of choice, Godot.

Godot offers 2D physics right out of the box with the "RigidBody2D" node, which suits the spaceships well enough. I don't know the first thing about physics calculations so getting this to feel right ended up being a matter of trial and error tweaking the values as I prototyped the game. Maybe that's a little something like what those university hackers were doing, altering Spacewar's pre-existing code.
The "Area2D" node that handles the gravity well was particularly annoying to get right as it gave some drastically different results depending on its size relative to the ship. Even now, I'm not quite satisfied with how it feels.

I ran into a slight bump with the ships; since RigidBodies are meant be moved only by the physics engine, teleporting the ship couldn't be as simple as manually setting a new position. Thankfully this Stack Overflow answer helped.

I think it might be a little too fast compared to the inspiration.
Anyhow, I'm just glad I finally got this out. This took waaay longer than it needed for an exercise, but I'm sure I just need a little more practice to get into the flow of things.

You can try it out here. Feedback is appreciated.

the badge i commed at anthrocon got in!!!!

this was by marjorie rishel, of lepus studios!!!!