Galaxy Game
| Galaxy Game | |
|---|---|
Galaxy Game at the Computer History Museum
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| Designer(s) | Bill Pitts Hugh Tuck |
| Platform(s) | Arcade (PDP-11) |
| Release | 1971 |
| Genre(s) | Space combat simulation |
| Mode(s) | Multiplayer |
Galaxy Game is a space combat arcade game developed in 1971 as one of the last games created in the early history of video games. Created by Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck, it was one of the first coin-operated video games; its initial prototype display in September 1971 at the Tresidder student union building at Stanford University was only a month after a similar display of a prototype of Computer Space, making it the second known video game to charge money to play. Galaxy Game is an expanded version of the 1962 Spacewar!, potentially the first video game to spread to multiple computer installations. It features two spaceships, "the needle" and "the wedge", engaged in a dogfight while maneuvering in the gravity well of a star. Both ships are controlled by human players.
The initial prototype, which cost Pitts and Tuck US$20,000 to build, was composed of a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11 minicomputer attached by a cable to a wooden console with a monitor, controls, and seats. It charged players 10 cents per game or 25 cents for three, and drew crowds "ten-deep". The pair built a second prototype, replacing the first in the student union building in June 1972. It featured the capability to play multiple games simultaneously on four monitors, though due to space restrictions only two consoles with monitors were actually installed. These consoles had a blue fiberglass casing, and the PDP-11 was housed inside one of the consoles. By the time of its installation, the pair had spent US$65,000 on the project, but were unable to make the game commercially viable. The second prototype remained in the student union building until 1979, when the display processor became faulty. It was restored and placed in the Stanford computer science department in 1997, then moved to the Computer History Museum in 2000, where it remains.
At the beginning of the 1970s, video games existed almost entirely as novelties passed around by programmers and technicians with access to computers, primarily at research institutions and large companies. One of these games was Spacewar!, created in 1962 for the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-1 minicomputer by Steve Russell and others in the programming community at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The two-player game has the players engage in a dogfight between two spaceships, set against the backdrop of a starfield, with a central star exerting gravitational force upon the ships. The game was copied to several of the early minicomputer installations in American academic institutions after its initial release, making it potentially the first video game to be available outside a single research institute.Spacewar was extremely popular in the small programming community in the 1960s and was widely recreated on other minicomputer and mainframe computers of the time, later migrating to early microcomputer systems. Early computer scientist Alan Kay noted in 1972 that "the game of Spacewar blossoms spontaneously wherever there is a graphics display connected to a computer," and contributor Martin Graetz recalled in 1981 that as the game initially spread it could be found on "just about any research computer that had a programmable CRT". Although the game was widespread for the era, it was still very limited in its direct reach: the PDP-1 was priced at US$120,000 and only 55 were ever sold, most without a monitor, which prohibited the original Spacewar or any game of the time from reaching beyond a narrow, academic audience. The original developers of Spacewar considered ways to monetize the game, but saw no options given the high price of the computer it ran on.
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