Museum of Computing Machinery

'Spacewar!' is often considered the first video game: developed at MIT on a PDP-1, it represents two spaceships of different shapes that move by accelerating and rotating. This game inspired Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari. Thanks to this company, arcades, which until then had only hosted electromechanical games, began to spread Pong, a ping-pong simulator. Its stylized graphics required such simple hardware that it was born as a home console, the Magnavox Odyssey in 1972, and, after the success of the Atari version, generated a flood of clones, including Inno-Hit's Sportron. The birth of new microprocessors led to games like the electronic chess Chess Challenger and especially the Atari 2600, from 1977: this programmable console transformed video games into reproducible software, opening the global market for cartridge titles. 1985 marked the arrival of Japanese consoles in the United States: the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Sega Master System. In Europe, the digital revolution traveled on home computers. Even essential machines like RadioShack's TRS-80, from 1977, became platforms for video games. The 1980s were dominated by bestsellers like the Commodore 64 and Sinclair's ZX Spectrum, symbols of an era where creativity surpassed hardware limitations. Feel free to take some time to write "Hello World" with the Commodore 64, and play with the arcade box. Consultation of the handbooks is allowed.