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''Spacewar'' (stylized "''Spacewar!''") is one of the earliest digital computer video games. It is a two-player game, with each player taking control of a starship and attempting to destroy the other. A star in the center of the screen pulls on both ships and requires maneuvering to avoid falling into it. In an emergency, a player can enter hyperspace to return at a random location on the screen, but only at the risk of exploding if it is exploited. Steve "Slug" Russell, Martin "Shag" Graetz, and Wayne Wiitanen of the fictitious "Hingham Institute" conceived of the game in 1961, with the intent of implementing it on a DEC PDP-1 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After Alan Kotok obtained some sine and cosine routines from DEC, Russell began coding, and, by February 1962, had produced his first version. It took approximately 200 hours of work to create the initial version. Additional features were developed by Dan Edwards, Peter Samson, and Graetz. ==Background== Between 1959 and 1961, a collection of interactive graphical programs had been created on the TX-0 experimental computer at MIT. These included ''Mouse in the Maze''〔(The Computer Museum Report Volume 8, Spring 1984 ), archived by bitsavers.org〕 and ''Tic-Tac-Toe''.〔("The origin of Spacewar" ), ''Creative Computing'' magazine, August 1981, J. M. Graetz, archived by wheels.org, retrieved 2010-3-17〕 In the fall of 1961, a PDP-1 was installed in the "kludge room" of the Electrical Engineering Department, and even before its arrival, a group of students at a tenement on Hingham Street had been brainstorming ideas for programs that would demonstrate the new computer's capabilities in a compelling way.〔 "We had this brand new PDP-1," Russell told ''Rolling Stone'' in a 1972 interview. "Somebody had built some little pattern-generating programs which made interesting patterns like a kaleidoscope. Not a very good demonstration. Here was this display that could do all sorts of good things! So we started talking about it, figuring what would be interesting displays. We decided that probably you could make a two-dimensional maneuvering sort of thing, and decided that naturally the obvious thing to do was spaceships." Russell had just finished reading the ''Lensman'' series by E.E. Smith and thought the stories would make a good basis for the program. "His heroes had a strong tendency to get pursued by the villain across the galaxy and have to invent their way out of their problem while they were being pursued. That sort of action was the thing that suggested ''Spacewar''. He had some very glowing descriptions of spaceship encounters and space fleet maneuvers."〔 Other influences cited by Graetz include E.E. Smith's ''Skylark'' novels and Japanese sci-fi ''tokusatsu'' movies. Russell, nicknamed "Slug" because of his slow approach to programming, kept putting off starting the programming effort with one excuse after another. One of these was the lack of a sin/cos routine, needed to calculate the trajectories of the spacecraft. This prompted Alan Kotok to call DEC, who informed him that they did have such a routine. Kotok drove to DEC, picked up a tape, slammed it down in front of Russell, and asked what his excuse was now. Russell started writing the code in December 1961. It took the team about 200 man-hours to write the first version of Spacewar.〔(【引用サイトリンク】first1=mary )〕 The game went live in April. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Spacewar (video game)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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