Trigger Happy
same pivotal decade that saw the global war of the space race and the tectonic cultural shifts of pop music, videogames had launched a successful initial blitzkrieg on the digital plains.
The lessons of the PDP-1’s unwitting involvement in game history are twofold. First: give a man a tool, and he will play with it. Second: pretty soon, everyone will want one. Spacewar, however, never became a mainstream entertainment, because so few people had access to computers at the time.7 The videogame concept was there, but it had to wait ten years for cheap computer-chip technology to make possible its wider distribution.
Meanwhile, throughout the 1960s, the small community of mainframe programmers produced other highly influential game templates in tiny programs. Lunar Lander was a turn-based game with a text interface that required the player to administer rocketthruster firing without running out of fuel before meeting the surface. Hammurabi was the first God game, requiring the user to manage a feudal kingdom
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7 DEC sold about fifty PDP-1s in total. Even by 1971, there was only a total of about 50,000 computers in the world (The Economist, September 28, 1996). By the end of 1993, there were more than 173 million computers in use, not counting videogame consoles.
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