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In the summer of 1961, the hackers at MIT received their first PDP-1, an early computer (Levy 39)
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In the fall of 1961, Steve Slug Russell watched Minsky program on the PDP-1 and became inspired to create a "war-in-outer-space" game. He was motivated to make a space game after reading space novels centered around the character E.E. "Doc" Smith (Levy 49).
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There was a serious lack of motivation from Russell. There was even a point when he decided he could not start unless he had the correct trigonometry functions in order to model the spaceship motion correctly (Levy 50).
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The head of the hacker club, Kotok, knew some employees at DEC who would have the sin-cosine routines that Russell needed. When Kotok gave them to Russell, he told them there were no more excuses (Levy 50)
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Once Kotok gave him the routines, Russell had set to work by December of that year, ready to make his vision come to life (Levy 50-51)
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In the later stages of Russell's program, Saunders, another member of the hacking club, spend hours helping him finish what would eventually become Spacewar! (Levy 51).
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In February of 1962, Russell revealed the basic game to the rest of the club (Levy 51).
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Once Russell had revealed the game, he put the program in the public drawer. This meant it was free game for anyone to work on (which they took) (Levy 52).
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Peter Samson, a member of the club, worked on a program that created the background to the game. He called it "Expensive Planetarium" and it was a map of actual stars in real constellations (Levy 52-53).
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Dan Edwards, another member in the hacker club, created gravity within the game, thus making it possible to get too close to a star and die (Levy 53).
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Shag Garetz, another member of the club, created hyperspace, giving the game a multitude of options when played (Levy 53).
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When playing Spacewar! with the club, Kotok and Saunders created the first joystick to combat the uncomfortable position one had to sit in order to play the game (Levy 54).
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In May of 1962, the hackers played Spacewar! for the first time in public at the MIT Open House (Levy 55).
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Due to the Hacker Ethic, Spacewar! was not sold, but given to DEC in order to upload the software onto new PDP-1 computers being distributed so that others could play it with the machine (Levy 56).
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Spacewar! is an important milestone in the gaming world as it was the game that inspired Computer Space, which was released in 1971 as the first arcade game. This was the beginning of an era that would develop into a multimillion dollar industry.
