Space War
- $6.99
- Regular price
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$7.99 - Sale price
- $6.99
- Unit price
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Item Condition
Game only: the cartridge in a protective holder, no box or manual. The photos are our own, taken from our stock of this game — look them over for condition, packaging and details. Every cartridge's shell, label and board are checked for authenticity when it comes into the store, and it's tested before it's listed. It ships in a collector's bag or a hard plastic case.
Item Description
The idea at the heart of Space War is older than Atari itself: two ships, a black sky and a duel to the finish. Spacewar!, created by Steve Russell and his collaborators at MIT on a PDP-1 computer in 1962, is one of the earliest video games ever made, and this 1978 Atari cartridge brought that pioneering concept into the living room for anyone with a pair of joysticks.
With 17 variations on one cartridge, there is a lot to explore. Games 1 through 13 are two-ship dogfights, and the physics are the star: ships keep their momentum, and fuel is only spent when you thrust or engage hyperspace, so the best pilots learn to drift into position and save their burns for the decisive moment. Hyperspace works as a cloaking device rather than a random jump, letting you vanish briefly at the cost of fuel. Some games include a starbase where you can resupply, others leave you to manage what you have, and the screen edges can either wrap around or hold you in. Certain variations place a planet in the middle of the battlefield, adding an obstacle to fight around. The first pilot to score 10 points inside the 10-minute limit wins.
Games 14 through 17 can be played alone, and the Space Shuttle games turn the action from combat to precision flying, challenging you to connect with a floating module. On the harder difficulty setting you have to match its speed and angle, which makes for a surprisingly tense solo challenge.
Sears sold the same game as Space Combat through its Tele-Games line. The duel-near-a-planet concept would echo for decades in games such as the Star Control series, which makes this cartridge a direct line from a 1962 university lab to the home console era, and a fascinating way to play one of gaming's founding ideas on real 2600 hardware.
Fast factsgame data via IGDB
- Released
- 1978
- Publisher
- Atari
- Genre
- Simulation, Arcade
- Players
- Single player, Multiplayer
About the game
This video game is an Atari 2600 port of Spacewar!, the famous 1962 computer game by Steve Russell. The cartridge comes programmed with 17 game variations. Variations 1 to 13 are duels between two ships and 14 to 17 are for one player. In some of the variations the ships fight near a planet which has gravitational attraction. This concept was used in the Star Control series of games.
Summary from the IGDB community database — the condition and contents of this listing are described above and in the photos.Watch gameplaySpace War on Atari 2600
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Atari 2600
Space War
$6.99
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Atari 2600
Space War
$6.99
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