THE BIG BANK: STEVE RUSSELL AND THE CREATION OF SPACEWAR

Spacewar! was released way back in 1962 on the PDP-1 and usually has the honour of being acknowledged as the first true videogame. You could certainly play games on computers before Spacewar!’s creation – versions of traditional games such as Noughts And Crosses and Draughts existed on mainframe computers as early as the Forties, and Willy Higinbotham’s famous technical demo Tennis For Two, which was created in 1958, hinted at the shape of games to come. Steve Russell’s Spacewar! was something entirely new, however, something which could only exist in digital form, and its ‘deep space deathmatch’ theme is still a mainstay of the industry it helped birth over half a century ago.

For issue 100 of Retro Gamer, we interviewed the creator of the Magnavox Odyssey, Ralph Baer, and named him ‘the father of videogames’. So does this make you the grandfather?

I’m reasonably comfortable with that [laughs]. Mostly what I did was demonstrate you could play an interesting game on a computer at a time when computers were very expensive and so no one could possibly have got one just to play games. When computers did become cheap enough [for that], some of the people who made those early arcade games