Duel Analog: Spacewar! vs. Angry Birds

The modern videogame as we know it was born in 1962 thanks to a team of student engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was on ancient, bulky and expensive computers--the PDP-1, namely--that three students, Steven "Slug" Russell, Martin "Shag" Graetz, and Wayne "just Wayne" Witanen, approached an incredibly open-ended problem: How could they show off this computer's ability to create visual images?

What they came up with was Spacewar!, a computer-based galactic dogfight that proved a novel concept for the time.

Fuck off, bro! Nah bro, you fuck off! (via)

Videogames had existed for nearly ten years before this, of course, but only in a very abstract form—and on analog computers, to boot. Nearly all of proto-ludo videogame history was written by professors and their students, because the type of computer hardware required to run these games cost thousands upon thousands of dollars, and the companies and corporations who could afford them certainly didn't approve of employing these machines for leisure activities.

Beyond the relatively abstract renditions of tic-tac-toe in 1952's OXO and the titular sport in 1958's Tennis for Two, no videogame had ever created anything representational, where plot and purpose could be instigated or expressed in any fashion by the visuals themselves. As the name implies, Spacewar! is a game about war in space, and was inspired by the Harry Potter equivalent of the time, the Lensman space-opera serials.

Though it may be hard to imagine now, the visuals and technology behind Spacewar! must have been jaw-dropping for the time. For context, this is the same year the Beatles (as the Beat Brothers) made their first recording, and when as a nation we brushed death with nuclear communism in the Cuban missile crisis.

Yet videogames would remain under the cold, fluorescent lighting of academia for nearly a decade longer, as evidence by Russell and his team never making a dime off Spacewar! There simply wasn't a market for it--those that could afford computers had little interest in using their expensive calculators to play games. Besides, the project was anything but a console-selling program. As such, Spacewar! would only gain popularity as it spread across the country by way of ARPAnet. By the time professional carnival barker and future videogame tycoon Nolan Bushnell got a look at Spacewar! at the University of Utah, a space race of sorts had erupted for new grads across the country.

This is Spacewar!

Much like all the white boys making Super Mario-inspired indie games today, Bushnell and other grads in the Spacewar! clone race were flat out sprinting to bottle the Spacewar! magic and bring it to market. While Bushnell’s 1972 game Computer Space wasn't a hit, it was first to be widely available on the market, making it the first commercially available videogame, pre-dating Ralph Baer and Magnavox's Odyssey by a few months.

But despite its Googie plexiglass cabinet, the game was just too complicated for your average player. The failure of Computer Space inspired Bushnell's future mantra: So simple, a drunk can play. This would be the central idea behind 1972's PONG, by Atari, the company Bushnell formed with the rest of his Computer Space team just a few months later.

So what you have with Spacewar!, then, is a revolutionary piece of software, made in America, that inspired an entire generation of copycats, and was later justified in this brave, new videogame wild west by the term "genre-forming." This was software created by a small team of students with zero market value due to astronomical hardware costs, and that featured space-themed, physics-based gameplay and representational graphics.

Which brings us toan evolutionary piece of software, made in Finland, that was inspired by a free-to-play Flash game. It's software created by a medium-sized team with big venture-capital backing, with explosive amounts of market value due to the astronomical adaptation rate of its hardware, featuring bird-themed, physics-based gameplay and representational graphics. It's called Angry Birds. Maybe you've heard of it. Or even play it.

Angry Birds take over a Japanese McDonald's (via)

Now, this game succeeds Spacewar! by nearly a half century. In that span, many similar stories occurred, where game devs and audiences explored the copycat question. In 2009, I can remember that sweet Ghostbusters game that was totally a riff on Gears of War which was totally a riff on Resident Evil 4, and so on and so forth. You start to see the blurry lines between "evolution" and "copying" that can only be distinguished by that intangible, guttural reaction of acceptance--"fair enough"--or disapproval, “C’mon, dude." Which inevitably brings us to Angry Brids, where that gut reaction must be truly wrenching for the fowl's "fair enough" predecessor, a game called Castle Clout.

Castle Clout was developed by Liam Bowmers in 2008. As a free-to-play web browser Flash game, players hurled giant stones from the medieval siege artillery, bettwen known as a trebuchet, at the besieged monarchy. It certainly drew influences from earlier artillery-style games, but its feel-good physics set it apart, making it a noteworthy Flash title in 2008.

Before you knew it, Castle Clout "inspired" dozens of "C’mon, dude" feudal style artillery knock-offs, some of which (see: Crush the Castle) were given permission by Bowmers himself. As is often the case when building a better mousetrap, you've got to transcend your own personhood to understand that intangible concept of "mass market," which remains mobile game developers’ biggest hurdle in relatively democratic smartphone marketplaces.

And that’s how Angry Birds has managed to net 1 billion downloads to date, forecasting our ultimate demise in a barrage of various avian ammunition. By injecting the very Flash game-like Castle Clout with colorful cartoon characters (no doubt a lesson from the work of both Walt Disney and Shigeru Miyamoto), fresh hardware (the newly released iOS for ultra popular iPhone) and its obvious gameplay mechanic to embrace the touchscreen revolution of, So simple, a commuter can play, Angry Birds took off towards superstardom. With downloads surpassing 1 billion, a slew of theme parks in the works, motion picture deals, even a crossover with Merchandiser with a Thousand Faces George Lucas via Angry Birds Star Wars, Angry Birds has had more facetime with the general public than any videogame in history, and is perhaps on course to surpass gaming's Mickey Mouse, Super Mario himself.

The key difference between these two games has all to do with timing. Had Spacewar!, the focal point of over 20 games currently exhibited in a 50-year retrospective at the Musem of the Moving Image, ever had a legitimate shot at sales, it could have been the first game for the masses. Instead, it enjoyed a fairly limited audience inside university computer science departments. Angry Birds, on the other hand, took a concept previously reserved for the non-commercial Flash gaming scene and turned it into the killer app for a hugely successful hardware just as it was approaching critical mass.

Between the bookends of Spacewar! and Angry Birds lies the steps to the videogame industry's danse macabre. In the death of games some will achieve glory, and others will certainly fall through the cracks of history, while only those savvy enough to know when to pull up a dead idea succeed. Making a hit game isn’t an exact science, obviously, and through this example you can almost empathize with the play-it-safe publishers who control the greenlight in the AAA industry today. It's no wonder that this console generation will end under a canopy of huge safe-bet franchises–these gaming juggernauts invest millions of dollars into producing just a single game.

With the thick overgrowth above choking out those budding, cheaply-made new ideas, the historical precedent is to let the artists or academics starve, and after it becomes popular enough, become “influenced by” them and build the better mousetrap. But maybe that’s all starting to change. Maybe.

Duel Analog takes two seemingly disparate videogames and shows their differences and often shocking similarities, spanning the entire history of gaming.

Ilustration by Colin Snyder. Follow Colin at @scallopdelion