Spacewar! (1961) was the first video game ever made available to a general audience. It was created by Steve Russell, a student at MIT, with the support of the Pentagon: with the help of commercial game technology, the military planned to adapt soldiers to the tactics of command combat and rapid decision-making. In developing the game, Steve was inspired by the space race between the U.S. and USSR and Disney’s Man in Space. Spacewar! was designed for two players. They had to control spaceships and try to destroy each other. In doing so, players had to dodge asteroids, earn points, and avoid the star in the center of the screen – it would swallow the ships on impact. Russell coded Spacewar for 200 hours: it publicly premiered in May 1962 – the game set a successful template for successive generations, such as Space Invaders and Missile Command, and became the progenitor of all space video games.
Granddaddy of joysticks appeared in the early XX century: in 1907 the French aviator Robert Esnault-Peltry patented the flight control stick: the accuracy of control has increased, and the following controllers appeared functions that measure the force of pressing. But the first game joystick was invented in 1967 – it was part of the world’s first home game console Magnavox Odyssey.
The first arcade game was Pong (1972). It was a table tennis simulator on a TV-like console game system – it began the golden era of arcade games. In the year of its release, Atari sold more than 800 Pong machines: after the success of Pong, arcade halls began to open all over the world, and the games became a mass culture.
The very first eSports tournament took place in 1972, when 24 Stanford University students decided to compete in the game Spacewar for a subscription to Rolling Stone magazine. Since then, much has changed in cybersports: in recent years, the inclusion of cybersports in the Olympics program has been considered more than once, the number of participants and the value of the prize has increased – just look at The International 2019 with a prize fund of $34 million. This is the ninth The International held by Valve on its own game Dota 2. It was held in Shanghai in a hall with a capacity of 18,000 spectators. Two million people watched the final match online.
The technology of controlling the computer with the help of motion appeared in 1977 and was called The Pantomation. Motion capture was done with analog cameras and chromakey – the Pantomation tracked colored objects in the visual field and triggered sound and graphic events based on the information read out, creating an augmented reality effect. Only decades later, in the 21st century, the technology was tested by the Xbox (Kinect) and PlayStation (PlayStation Move).
The first ever “Easter Egg” was created in the 1980s, when Atari was the leader of the video game entertainment market: its developers were forbidden to reveal their names in the game and appear in the credits. The company did this so that competitors wouldn’t poach programmers, though it justified itself by saying that space on the cartridge was limited, so it wasn’t worth cramming it with unnecessary words. Warren Robinette in Adventure (1979) was the first to go against the system: he knew that if you overload the Atari system with a lot of objects, the screen will start flickering, so he secretly placed a cube in one of the game locations, causing a failure when going to the next level and taking the player to a room with the inscription “Made by Warren Robinette”. Management noticed the “ghost” after the release of the game and pretended that it was planned – by the time Robinette promoted his name had already left Atari, founded his own company and began to cooperate with Nasa, developing virtual reality projects.
