SpaceWar
The creator of one of the earliest videogames, Spacewar, has died of a heart attack aged 64. Alan Kotok created the game in 1962 with help from other designers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Many people say that Spacewar was the first ever videogame created, but evidence appears to point at that game being OXO (a Tic-tac-toe game), developed by A.S. Douglas in 1952.By today's standards Spacewar was a pretty simple game. Two spaceships start on either end of the screen, and are drawn towards the sun in the middle. Each ship is armed with torpedoes fired out of the front of the ship which eventually hit something or burn out. The players have to shoot the other ship while avoiding running into anything. That's it!
In today's world, which sees huge profits form videogames, it seems rather sad that Alan hardly made a penny from SpaceWar, “The only money I made from Spacewar was as a consultant for lawsuits in the video game industry in the 1970s.”
Source: New York Times
