Spacewar!

Spacewar! is a space combat video game created in 1962 by Steve Russell together with Martin Graetz, Wayne Wiitanen and other members of the Tech Model Railroad Club, written for the newly installed DEC PDP-1 minicomputer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Two players pilot spaceships, a wedge-shaped craft and a needle-shaped craft, firing torpedoes at each other while maneuvering around the gravity well of a central star that can pull a careless ship to its destruction. Contributors including Dan Edwards and Peter Samson refined the physics and added the star's gravity to the design. The game was distributed along with the PDP-1's software and spread to other university and research computer installations, becoming the first video game played at multiple sites and a direct inspiration for the first coin-operated arcade video games, Galaxy Game and Computer Space, both released in 1971.