Long before master chief, before Mario and Pac-Man, there was the Wedge and the Needle.
In 1962, at MIT's Research Lab for Electronics, graduate student Stephen Russell and his pals from the Tech Model Railroad Club wanted to kick the tires of the lab's new PDP-1 computer. The PDP-1, manufactured by Massachusetts-based Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), was one of the first minicomputers (which meant that it was the size of three refrigerators, rather than an entire room). It could be turned on with the flip of a switch and rigged up to a CRT display. Russell and co. decided to write a program that would control the movement of objects on the screen—objects like spaceships, one a squat triangle (the Wedge), the other long and thin (the Needle). Thus Spacewar! was born.
Generally considered the first truly interactive digital computer game (it was predated by simple demonstration programs like Marvin Minsky's Tic-Tac-Toe and William Higinbotham's Tennis for Two), Spacewar! inspired countless programmers. Shortly after the game's debut, Russell followed artificial intelligence pioneer John McCarthy, whom he had worked with at MIT, to the Farm, where McCarthy founded the Stanford AI Lab. At a lab reunion in 2009, Russell accepted a gold medal for his role in launching the video game industry. He recalled once being shooed out of the Oasis at closing time and returning to campus to find the same lot that had been playing pinball until last call playing Spacewar! on the lab's computer until the wee hours.
Others saw the potential of a coin-operated version of Spacewar!, including Nolan Bushnell, who would go on to found Atari, and Bill Pitts, '68, who created the first arcade-style video game, the Galaxy Game. (He set it up in Tresidder in the summer of 1972, beating Bushnell's Pong to the punch by six months.) Ed Logg, MS '72, who also played Spacewar! at Stanford's AI lab, paid homage to the game in 1979 when he created the arcade hit Asteroids, which included a hyperspace feature and a Wedge-like ship. And Eugene Jarvis, MBA '86, who played Pong and the Galaxy Game as a teenager ("Pong was good for five minutes, the Galaxy Game was mesmerizing for hours on end") went on to create space-shooter Defender, which beat Pac-Man for video game of the year in 1981.
Video games—coin-op and, later, home console and PC versions—took off like, well, a rocket, with Stanford faculty, students and alumni contributing pivotal innovations in fundamental technology, business, hardware and gameplay along the way. (Click image above to download our "Video Games Level-up" PDF.) Today, video or computer games are played in nearly three out of every four U.S. households. And not just by young men and boys: The average age of gamers is 37 and 42 percent of them are female. (However, women still make up only about 12 percent of the industry's workforce.)
Last year the National Endowment for the Arts made video games eligible to receive grants under the Arts in Media category, which also includes radio, film and television. And while this recognition of games as an art form proved controversial in some quarters, there's no debating that video games have forever changed the cultural landscape.
Here, in their own words, some key Stanford players reflect on the games that changed them.
Excerpts of the following alumni profiles appeared in the print version of Stanford.
Bill Pitts, ’68
Creator of The Galaxy Game
I entered Stanford in the fall of ’64. In high school I had been very interested in physics and chemistry, and I guess must have signed up for EE even though I really wasn’t all that sure what that was. Before the first classes I met with my adviser, a James Angel in the EE department, and when he saw my interests, he said typically everyone’s required to take history of Western civilization their first year, but I think we could put it off and you could take introduction to computer science, which is a new course that’s just being offered. It was taught by George Forsythe.
That sounded really neat to me, so that’s what I did. You got to go over to Polya Hall and, using a keypunch, you punched up your card deck. All the computers were behind these big glass windows and the lesser people, the ordinary people, could not go behind and touch these things—they were special. So you would give them your card deck and you’d go away and you’d come back a few hours later and they would have run your program. There would be the deck of cards with a printout wrapped around it of your run—whether it was successful or, if it crashed, it would give you some indication why, and you would have to go back and debug your program and try again.
My other hobby on campus the first two years was breaking into buildings and exploring the steam tunnels. Back then the Farm really was the farm, and you could do things like that. You could have fun and it wasn’t a crime—although they certainly didn’t like you crawling around . . . the steam tunnels were dangerous; if a pipe broke you’d get cooked alive down there.
At the beginning of my junior year I was driving along Arastradero Road heading to Rosoti’s; I passed the D.C. Power lab and it had an official-looking Stanford University sign on it. By this time I had conquered everything down on campus. I’d even been up to the very top of Hoover tower. As I passed by the D.C. Power lab I made a mental note: I need to come back here tonight with all my tools. So I come back at 11 o’clock and I’m very disappointed because all the doors are open, the lights are on, and there are a fair number of people in there and they’re all sitting around this big PDP-6 computer. The PDP-6 was one of the first commercial timesharing systems, which meant that a dozen people could simultaneously be using the one computer, and it kept jumping around making each one think they had the whole computer to themselves.
So I saw this fantastic computer, and you could actually get up next to it and put your hands on it, and it was much neater than those ones down on campus. I started trying to get time. The machine was really for graduate students, but Les Earnest, the director of the lab, bent the rule in my case. He said if the machine’s not being used, and the resources are available, you’re a student so you can use them. That resulted in my adjusting my schedule where I’d sleep during the day and go up there all night. For the next two years, I just thoroughly loved going up to the AI project, working there rather intensively. I learned a lot and had fun.
While I’m doing that, a buddy from high school, Hugh Tuck, came over on several occasions to the AI Lab and we played Spacewar! He thought the game was great, I mean everybody did, and he said, wow, if we could build a coin-operated version of this, we could get rich. Three years later I’m working at Lockheed, where I’d been hired to be a programmer for a PDP-10, but Lockheed had never bought one so I was getting kind of frustrated sitting around without a computer. Meanwhile, DEC announced the PDP-11, which was a mini computer (it weighed 100 pounds) that you could purchase for $12,000. The next time I saw Hugh I told him now we could build a coin-operated version of Spacewar!
So Hugh and his brothers and sisters all chipped in, and together we had $20,000. Which is what it cost, by the time we were done buying the other components we needed, to get the first system built. Hugh and I knew that at that price it was too expensive, but we figured we’d build one and see the response and from that we could work backwards and see how cheap it needed to be to be successful.
We installed [the Galaxy Game] upstairs in Tresidder, where there used to be soundproofed rooms for listening to music. Outside two of the rooms was a kind of a lobby area and so the game was put there in the corner. Now in this first version, there wasn’t room in the cabinet for the computer. So there was a big cable that came out the back, went up the wall and then we had the computer sitting in the attic up above. The response we got initially was just incredible. People were packed around the machine continuously and standing on chairs trying to look over to watch. At that time, a game like that was just magical, to see these little things that you could steer and fire torpedoes.
After six to eight weeks of this enthusiastic response, Hugh and I decided to move forward; we didn’t really fully remember that this was just to figure out how cheap we had to make it. We made a little concession: We’d build another system and this time we’d have a more sophisticated display processor so it could drive two or even four displays and we could amortize the cost of the computer. The next system had very nice Fiberglas cases that Hugh had designed and we had a professional company, Peterson Products up in San Carlos, build. That was probably six months after the first one and that stayed for eight years and became a real mainstay.
The kids there developed their own rules. Friday, Saturday evenings there’d be a crowd of young guys around the machine, and there’d be people waiting to play. And when you’d come up, you’d take your quarter and put it on top of the machine—there’d be a line of quarters and that was the waiting line. When it came your turn, you’d take your quarter and drop it in and that got you three games. It was 10 cents a game, three for a quarter, and if you won it didn’t cost you anything. So people who were really good could put their quarter in and sit there for half an hour.
Maybe the best player was this young kid who was in 8th grade when he first came. This is ’75. And I made a deal with him that if you come by and clean the machine, then you can have some free plays. Then later, apparently, I gave him some instructions: If you’re driving in on the bad guy and you’ve got him in your sights and you’re firing torpedoes, if he drops into hyperspace—which just basically is a different space and he’s not visible but he’s still right in front of you, he hasn’t changed position—if you pop into hyperspace and keep firing and if one of your torpedoes hits him in hyperspace you’ll know because you’ll see the explosion. That was a very risky move because it took a quarter of your fuel to get in and out of hyperspace, and if you ran out of fuel in hyperspace you’re trapped. And if you ran out of fuel during the transition either way, then you blew up.
This kid, his name was Jonathan Rosenberg [son of economics professor Nathan Rosenberg], was enamored with the game and he would play all the time. Jonathan up until recently was a senior VP at Google, and about three years ago he wrote a post to their internal blog that was designed to kind of inspire the troops, and he told the story that I just told you. His point being that sometimes you have to take a big risk to get a big reward. And he printed out a copy of that blog post and sent it to me, saying do you remember me? I sent an email back saying of course I remember you, thank you so much for that story, and then I kind of changed the storyline into, by the way Galaxy Game needs to be saved right now, it needs a jump to hyperspace.
After I pulled Galaxy Game out of the coffee house in ’79, because it had gotten to the point where I just didn’t have enough time to keep it running—and by that time it had finally generated enough cash to pay back the principal investment—the pieces all sat around my house for the next 20 years. The Fiberglas cases were empty, but they were out under a big Monterey pine tree in my backyard. Then for whatever reason, I decided in ’98 or ’99, hey it would really be neat to bring these things back. So I called up Ted Panofsky, who was an engineer who worked up at the AI Lab maintaining all of their equipment. When we were building the second version of Galaxy Game I had hired Ted to build the display processor, and the two of us spent probably four months getting it running again.
Then I moved it over to the Gates computer science building; it was up there on the 4th floor, where it could really only be accessed by graduate students. The four years it was there it was very reliable, I never had a problem with it. But it wasn’t getting very much use, and my goal was to get it used as long as we could. I thought of the Computer History Museum, which at that time was still in some buildings near the big hangar [Moffett field]. I was a volunteer over there. They said, we’ll take it, but only on the condition that you give it to us, we don’t want any loaned equipment. They got the machine, and for the next year while they were still in the old facilities it could be powered up from time to time.
They hosted an event there, a Spacewar! contest. We had a four-person play-off: It was Nolan Bushnell, and I, Steve Russell and somebody else. And I’m happy to say I won. But I can also tell you that none of us was any good. It’s a game you really have to play for a while to get a feel for the timing, because you’re leading the other guy with your torpedoes. So for the first year it was powered up occasionally and used at the Computer History Museum. When they moved to the new facility they had a space called their visible storage exhibit, so they put it in there and it could not be turned on. That was kind of frustrating to me.
So when Jonathan sent me that blog post I very quickly seized on it. I just knew Google had to be one of the main benefactors of the museum, and if they asked for the machine they’d get it. That was the easy way to spring the machine loose. Jonathan responded back almost instantly to my email and said he’d love to. So it took awhile but we got the machine back. It took four months to get it running again; it didn’t like being left off that long. Finally it was moved over to Google in the spring of 2010. It ran there for a year, 15 months, then the building where it was was getting totally remodeled, so it’s in storage right now. Hopefully it will come out soon and find a new home where it can live out its days.”
Trip Hawkins, MBA ’78
Founder of Electronic Arts, 3DO and Digital Chocolate
First video game experience:
“My father in the 1970s had worked in San Diego with a brilliant engineer named Lane Hauck who later made arcade games. (He invented the game mechanic, initially called Blockade, that was the basis for Snake and other clones.) Around 1971 Lane bought a PDP-8 kit and built it at home. It was a box about the size of a bureau drawer, with red lights and switches and was connected to a KSR-33 printer, the kind then used in newsrooms (like a ticker, only bigger) with the rolls of yellow paper, and it could pound out 10 characters per second. (I can hear the chugging sound even now.)
Lane built a game called MOO, similar to what later emerged as a board game called Mastermind, where you try to guess a four-digit number. You would enter a four-digit guess on the KSR-33 keyboard and it would then tell you how many moos and cows you had. A cow was the right digit in the wrong place; a moo was the right digit in the right place. On one round of the game I got the answer in three turns and Lane was upset, he didn’t think that was possible and thought I’d only made a lucky guess. Of course I already knew I loved games and was already interested in computers and was already making board games. (I had designed my first commercial board game—Accu-Stat Pro Football—in 1970 and published it in 1973.) Playing on Lane’s PDP-8 kit was a key event on my road to determining by 1975 that I was going to make computer games and found my own company.
Yes, I decided in the summer of 1975 that I would found EA in 1982. And as they say, the rest is history.”
Favorite video game:
“Doctor J and Larry Bird Go One-on-One. This was my baby, the first commercial sports game from EA, published in October 1983 on the Apple II and appearing on many other platforms over the years. It was arguably EA’s first true ‘hit’ because it got to the No. 2 rank on the Apple SoftDisk game chart and then went big on every other platform. It was the first video game in which a celebrity appeared as a character, which began a huge trend of its own in addition to the birth of EA Sports.
I did everything for this game—I designed it, down to the last details including the touch controls and the janitor sweeping up after you broke the backboard with a [Darryl] Dawkins-caliber slam dunk. I produced it. I hired, set the compensation and closely managed every person that worked on it. I made the deals with Erving and Bird, the first of their kind. The success of this game then spurred me to take on the bigger challenge of 11-on-11 football, my personal dream, which became Madden Football. Even by today’s standards in terms of technology, graphics and UI, the One-on-One game would be considered a classic and would be just as fun today as then.”
Richard Marks, MS ’91, PhD ’96
Creator of EyeToy Camera and Move Controller for PlayStation
First video game experience:
“My family had a Magnavox Odyssey system. I remember pressing the overlays onto the TV screen, and the dial controls that let you put ‘English’ on the ball. I also played a lot of the electronic game Simon. A lot. I was fortunate enough to get to meet Ralph Baer a few years ago (he created both the Odyssey and Simon).”
Favorite video game:
“It is hard to pick just one, but my favorite is probably Sea Battle for Intellivision. It was a two- player-only game, as many games were back then. My father and I played hours and hours of Intellivision, but I liked Sea Battle the best because it had such a strong strategic element. Playing those games is a great memory; I’m glad there was not a single-player version.
Similarly, I love Gauntlet because of the countless quarters I spent on it with my close friends in high school. We actually didn’t play many games then, because it was right around the time of the console crash. But since Gauntlet was for four players, it was a lot of fun to do as a group. The Warrior always burned through about twice as many quarters as everyone else (sorry Chuck!) We played it most often in a 7-Eleven, which seems pretty strange now.”
Stanford video game memory:
“When I was in my second year of grad school, in 1991, I rented an action-RPG for my Sega Genesis. It was a three-day rental I think, and I really liked the game, so I wanted to finish it before I returned it. So I pretty much played nonstop for three days. I’d been playing for about a six-hour stretch when my wife came in and put her toe over the power button as a joke. Well, sure enough, she slipped and. . . . We are, amazingly, still married.
It isn’t really a moment, but my graduate research at Stanford was using computer vision for controlling an underwater robot. All the work I did at Stanford is relevant to what I do now for PlayStation. Even working in robotics is highly related to working in video games. (Video games just don’t have quite as many real-world constraints!) The lab I was a part of, the Aerospace Robotics Lab, really focused on making things that truly worked, not just ivory-tower research. That same mentality has worked well for me in the R&D group at PlayStation.”
Don Woods, PhD ’81
Expanded text-based game adventure
First video game experience:
“I cannot recall my first video game. Certainly I played Pong when it came out, so since that’s often considered the first video game I guess it was my first as well. Even Adventure is not truly a ‘video game,’ and I’m not sure what that term includes. For instance, what about John Horton Conway’s Game of Life (the cellular automata simulation), which appeared in several of Martin Gardner’s columns in Scientific American? I wrote my own programs for it that printed each ‘turn’ on paper, but I did also see and use programs that displayed the game on early video screens.
It’s all part of a spectrum of games played on computers, and I’ve been playing those since the early ’60s. Though I’m sure there were trivial games such as tic-tac-toe, the first computer game I recall encountering was a text-only golf game. One chose clubs, but there was no aiming or timing or other dexterity-based element; each club went a certain average distance, and the game added a random element to both the distance and the angle based on some questions the player answered at the start, including handicap and biggest golf problem (hook, slice, poor distance, etc). The game was written in BASIC and I rewrote it in Fortran as a way of learning the latter language.”
Favorite video game:
“I actually haven't played all that many. I guess in terms of amount of time frittered away, my favorite time-sink was Heroes of Might & Magic II, but again that’s largely because I know I’m easily addicted to such things so I’ve avoided getting sucked into them too often!
If you include multiplayer online games, then my favorite has to be EverQuest, which I started playing in 2003 when I was between jobs and was considering teaming up with some like-minded friends to start Yet Another MMORPG [massively multiplayer online role playing game] company. I’d never played any of them so someone let me try out EQ to get an idea what they’re like. Did I mention I’m easily addicted? I play several other MMORPGs now—Lord of the Rings Online, Champions Online, World of Warcraft, Star Wars: The Old Republic—but EQ is still my favorite.
As for why? I could say it’s because I’ve spent thousands of hours playing EQ (and hundreds playing HoMM2), but that just begs the question, because I don’t really know what it is that grabs me about certain games. The same is true for non-computer games: There are board games and card games that I’ve played thousands of times, but I’d be hard pressed to say why I find those games in particular to be so replayable.”
Stanford video game memory:
“I discovered my passion for games long before college. The main Stanford-centric gaming event for me was being introduced to Adventure, when fellow student John Gilbert [PhD ’81] discovered it on the SUMEX machine at the medical center, and the subsequent development of the game as I made it available to other sites via Stanford’s connection with the ARPAnet.
The one ‘aha moment’ anecdote I associate with Stanford was when Zork was being developed by a group of MIT students, and I was playing it over the net (many sites were pretty laid back about access in those more innocent times), and from my score I could tell I’d solved all of it except for one particular puzzle. After a long night playing Zork at the old Stanford AI Lab (the one out in the hills, aka D. C. Power Lab), I was driving home and suddenly realized what to do to solve that last puzzle. The next day I went back to the lab and fired up Zork and discovered the authors had added another whole section it. I decided I was never going to reach the endgame and stopped playing it!”
Eugene Jarvis, MBA ’86
Creator of Defender and founder of Vid Kidz and Raw Thrills
Favorite video game:
“The coolest thing about being a video game designer in the early days was the complete absence of management and bureaucracy, as game teams were solo lone-wolf jobs or involved a very small team. Budgets were super low, but designers had near perfect creative freedom within hardware constraints. You could design the game you wanted to play free from focus groups and marketing groupthink. (No one is as stupid as all of us put together!)
So not surprisingly, my all-time favorite game was one I designed in 1982—Robotron: 2084. I have played this game for thousands of hours, never quite making it to the 1-million-point mark. I still have flashbacks with dreams inhabited by Robotrons! ‘The human race is inefficient and therefore must be destroyed!’ The cool thing today is that with an iPad and standard development tools anyone can design their ultimate video game! No excuse for playing commercial product!”
Stanford video game memory:
“I was a feral Palo Alto kid looking for trouble so I spent a lot of time in my pre-college years hanging out at Stanford for kicks; my early video game experiences at Stanford were as an outsider. (It wasn’t ’til 1984 that I became a legit Stanford grad student.) The three Stanford video game experiences that stand out:
1) Hanging out as a teenager at Tresidder in the early ’70s watching the college kids play the multi-console version of the Galaxy Game—the game seemed to be always packed and I could never get on it!
2) Learning about microcomputers at the Home Brew Computer Club at SLAC in the mid 1970s, and seeing Jobs and Wozniak demo the Apple I, precursor to the Apple II—one of the greatest video/computer game platforms of all time.
3) Sneaking into the old AI lab at Felt Lake and checking out the crazy AI robotics stuff going on—really just a big meatspace computer game.”
Ed Logg, MS ’72
Creator of Asteroids, Centipede and Gauntlet
First video game experience:
“I was doing some work at the Stanford AI lab in the hills when I saw some of the others playing a game they called Spacewar! on their DEC [Digital Equipment Corporation] PDP machines. I thought this game was absolutely amazing. Even though I was not very good at it, it definitely stuck with me throughout my career. For example, when Asteroids was in development I used the ideas from Spacewar! to provide the game with hyperspace as well as the shape of the player’s ship.
I remember playing [the Galaxy Game]. It was really just the same game I had played at the AI Lab except I needed to put money in to play. I always say this is the first coin-operated video game I ever played and probably the first coin-operated video game, period.”
Favorite video game:
“I do not really have a favorite. There have been many games I really liked playing. Spacewar! was clearly my first. Since then there have been a string of favorites: Super Breakout, Asteroids, Centipede, Spaceward Ho and Robotron just to name a few.”
Soren Johnson, '98, MS '00
Designer on Civilization III/IV and designer/programmer of Spore
First video game experience:
“I don’t remember the first time I saw a video game, but I do remember when my dad brought home our Commodore 64, which is a machine that transformed my life. The computer started with a command-line prompt that understood BASIC, so I learned some simple programming right away, and—of course—began trying to make games. The games that transformed my life at that age all came from Electronic Arts. Their early games, such as Seven Cities of Gold, Pinball Construction Set, Lords of Conquest and Adventure Construction Set had ambitious goals. And the company’s packaging put the designers right out in front, as if they were musicians or artists. It was an inspiring thing to see as a 7-year-old.”
Favorite video game:
“My favorite video game is Sid Meier’s Pirates!, an action/adventure/RPG hybrid game that let the player be a pirate in the 17th-century Caribbean. The game contained a remarkably accurate map of the region (which updated itself by decade) and provided players an incredible amount of freedom in deciding how to navigate that world. Players can ally with one of four different countries (Spain, France, England and the Netherlands) and then decide how to play, as a treasure-hunter, privateer-for-hire, pirate on the open sea, or even merchant trader. I have a natural interest in historical setting (unlike the sci-fi or fantasy settings so common to video games), so Pirates! hit all the right notes.”
Stanford video game memory:
“As a game developer, I am most known for my work on the Civilization series. In fact, I bought my copy of the original version of Sid Meier’s Civilization in the Stanford Bookstore on my first day on campus. Perhaps not a wise move for a young student as Civ games have a tendency to keep the player going for ‘one more turn’ until the sun comes up. I had a few sessions like that my freshman year, and six years later, I accepted my first full-time job to work on Civilization III.”
Greta Lorge, '97, is a freelance writer and editor in San Francisco. Mike Antonucci is a senior writer at Stanford.
