In 1962, a group of MIT programmers turned a 120,000-dollar PDP-1 the size of three refrigerators into a two-player space dogfight, and in the process laid the groundwork for the modern video game industry. This episode follows Steve Russell, Martin Graetz, and Wayne Wiitanen of the self-styled Hingham Institute as they drew on the Lensman novels and Japanese tokusatsu films to stress-test the first real-time computer display, and how Alan Kotok ended Russell's procrastination by driving to DEC to fetch a trigonometry routine on paper tape.

We explore how roughly 200 hours of raw assembly code produced inertia, limited fuel and torpedoes, a firing cooldown, and a wraparound screen, and how the open hacker ethic let Peter Samson add an astronomically accurate star field, Dan Edwards add a central star with gravity, Martin Graetz add a risky  ...