TITLE
‘Spacewar!’: Birth of the Game Industry
AUTHOR
Brian Crecente
PUBLICATION
Variety
YEAR
2018
ARTICLE TYPE
Article
FROM THE ARTICLE
It was a pilgrimage of sorts.Some of the biggest, most established names in the nearly $140 billion game industry quietly descended on Washington D.C. this week.
Names like Warren Spector, Richard Garriott, Todd Howard, Ted Price, Tracy Fullerton, Ed Fries — museum curators, university chairs, association leaders. It was a cabal of creators there not as speakers, but listeners and fans. They were there to honor the birth of an industry that has grown to what would’ve been unimaginable heights decades ago.
For an hour Thursday night, packed into Coulter Plaza Stage in the bottom floor of the Smithsonian American History Museum’s west wing, the video game industry’s thriving present sat quietly facing its inceptive past: a group of seven elderly men neatly arrayed in chairs recounting the almost accidental creation of the video game industry through the birth of its first released game.
GAMES MENTIONED
Spacewar!
NOTES
A report on a roundtable discussion with the creators of Spacewar!, just before a presentation for the Videogame Pioneers Initiative at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.