Spacewar! Trivia Questions

Spacewar! was developed in 1962 for the PDP-1 computer and was indeed written in PDP-1 assembly language, making the statement true.

Developed in 1962 by Steve Russell and others at MIT, Spacewar! ran on the PDP-1, one of the first minicomputers.

Spacewar! was not commercially released on a home console in the early 1970s. It was distributed free on early computers; the first home console port arrived later (e.g., Atari 2600 in 1982).

Spacewar! featured a realistic gravity well from a star that pulled ships, adding strategic depth beyond simple shooting.

'Ender's Game' was published in 1985, 23 years after Spacewar!. The real inspiration came from sci-fi like 'Buck Rogers' and 'Doc Smith'.

The original controllers were custom toggle switches; joysticks came later. The first joystick controller was for the 1967 game 'Brown Box'.

Pressing hyperspace made your ship vanish and reappear elsewhere, but with a chance of exploding—a risky last-ditch move.

The entire game, including code and data, occupied roughly 2,000 words of the PDP-1's 4K (18-bit) memory, a remarkable feat of compact programming.