Tollbooth Willie
The Freeman
- Joined
- Jul 27, 2005
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I read something a friend posted in his blog about Alan Kotok. I hadn't heard about him until now. I asked him if I could post this so here it is. Special thanks to DarkPassion for letting me post this. :thumbs:
Today Alan Kotok is dead. It hurts me to write these words because few will remember him the way he should be. Although Ralph Baer is often credited with bringing us the video game console and ultimately the industry Alan Kotok gave us the first game. A little game really that was born on the MIT campus but would spark the mind of hackers and nerds the world over. The game was Spacewar!. The man, Alan Kotok. And this is my memorial blog....
Kotok was born on November 9, 1941 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Born an only child Kotok took an interest in railroad trains at his fathers local hardware shop in Vineland, New Jersey. Later on he would skip two grades and go to college at age 16. Soon he was accepted into MIT and would give birth to the first video game ever to grace a computer screen.
They called themselves "hackers". They'd twiddle the night away discussing code, eating pizza, drinking soda, and doing whatever else they did. In their early days hackers were really a sort of underground geek culture on the MIT campus. One of the few campuses at the time that had computers. And home to Spacewar! the first video game ever invented. The project was originally a part of a dare. To create a visual interactive program running on the local DEC PDP-1 computer. With the assistance of Martin Graetz, Stephen Russell, Wayne Wiitanen, Dan Edwards, Steve Piner, Peter Samson, and Robert A. Saunders Spacewar! was a project ahead of its time. The original Spacewar! featured a triangle which was the ship and asteriods that would come to blow it up but you could shoot them and they would break up. After uploading the program to the database other campuses could then download the program and alter it. One campus added stars, another added planets, and another added full blown physics. The game became an underground smash hit but Kotok wasn't always proud of himself. He felt the physics, stars, planets, and other added features tacked on too much realism. The idea was to let the game immerse players into another world. This is still an argument brought up today by games like Gran Turismo, which many feel have so much reality you might as well do the real thing. Nevertheless when computers became all the more common Spacewar! lived on. And it inspired a new generation. And introduced us all to an art form beyond our wildest dreams. In 1962, at MIT, with 9KB of memory, gaming was born...
Kotok would go on to be one of the founders of the internet and continue to be an inspiration to the gaming world. Once when asked how Kotok felt about the industry he helped spawn he chuckled lightly and said "I have only contributed the smallest amount. I see the games now and I realize that even with advanced technolgy and graphics beyond our wildest dreams we have only scratched the surface. Becuase as long as there are imaginations to explore there will always be new worlds."
Kotok lived in Cambridge, Massachusets. His wife Judith Kotok was a choir director and piano teacher at the Longy School of Music before she died in 2005. Kotok died of a heart attack in his Cambridge home on May 26, 2006. He had a daughter, Leah Kotok, a stepdaughter Federica Beck, and a stepson, Daryl Beck.
The debate still goes strong over just who did created the first video game. Some have said it was German students on 1961. Others say it was a small group of French engineers. But there is no evidence to support any of these. So, until proven otherwise, Alan Kotok along with his MIT friends dreamed up the first video game. Almost 10 years later Ralph Baer would create the Magnavox Odyssey and the first home console. Atari would create Pong the first commercially successful arcade cabinet. Midway and Namco would bring us Pac-Man the most popular and successful video game character ever. And perhaps most importantly Nintendo would bring gaming out of the corner of everyone's eyes into the spotlight. They would modernize the video game console, prove PC gaming all but obsolete, and give birth to their very own competition with the PlayStation.
But before all these things there was Alan Kotok and Spacewar! and they will both be remembered. Thank you. I only wish it weren't so late.
Today Alan Kotok is dead. It hurts me to write these words because few will remember him the way he should be. Although Ralph Baer is often credited with bringing us the video game console and ultimately the industry Alan Kotok gave us the first game. A little game really that was born on the MIT campus but would spark the mind of hackers and nerds the world over. The game was Spacewar!. The man, Alan Kotok. And this is my memorial blog....
Kotok was born on November 9, 1941 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Born an only child Kotok took an interest in railroad trains at his fathers local hardware shop in Vineland, New Jersey. Later on he would skip two grades and go to college at age 16. Soon he was accepted into MIT and would give birth to the first video game ever to grace a computer screen.
They called themselves "hackers". They'd twiddle the night away discussing code, eating pizza, drinking soda, and doing whatever else they did. In their early days hackers were really a sort of underground geek culture on the MIT campus. One of the few campuses at the time that had computers. And home to Spacewar! the first video game ever invented. The project was originally a part of a dare. To create a visual interactive program running on the local DEC PDP-1 computer. With the assistance of Martin Graetz, Stephen Russell, Wayne Wiitanen, Dan Edwards, Steve Piner, Peter Samson, and Robert A. Saunders Spacewar! was a project ahead of its time. The original Spacewar! featured a triangle which was the ship and asteriods that would come to blow it up but you could shoot them and they would break up. After uploading the program to the database other campuses could then download the program and alter it. One campus added stars, another added planets, and another added full blown physics. The game became an underground smash hit but Kotok wasn't always proud of himself. He felt the physics, stars, planets, and other added features tacked on too much realism. The idea was to let the game immerse players into another world. This is still an argument brought up today by games like Gran Turismo, which many feel have so much reality you might as well do the real thing. Nevertheless when computers became all the more common Spacewar! lived on. And it inspired a new generation. And introduced us all to an art form beyond our wildest dreams. In 1962, at MIT, with 9KB of memory, gaming was born...
Kotok would go on to be one of the founders of the internet and continue to be an inspiration to the gaming world. Once when asked how Kotok felt about the industry he helped spawn he chuckled lightly and said "I have only contributed the smallest amount. I see the games now and I realize that even with advanced technolgy and graphics beyond our wildest dreams we have only scratched the surface. Becuase as long as there are imaginations to explore there will always be new worlds."
Kotok lived in Cambridge, Massachusets. His wife Judith Kotok was a choir director and piano teacher at the Longy School of Music before she died in 2005. Kotok died of a heart attack in his Cambridge home on May 26, 2006. He had a daughter, Leah Kotok, a stepdaughter Federica Beck, and a stepson, Daryl Beck.
The debate still goes strong over just who did created the first video game. Some have said it was German students on 1961. Others say it was a small group of French engineers. But there is no evidence to support any of these. So, until proven otherwise, Alan Kotok along with his MIT friends dreamed up the first video game. Almost 10 years later Ralph Baer would create the Magnavox Odyssey and the first home console. Atari would create Pong the first commercially successful arcade cabinet. Midway and Namco would bring us Pac-Man the most popular and successful video game character ever. And perhaps most importantly Nintendo would bring gaming out of the corner of everyone's eyes into the spotlight. They would modernize the video game console, prove PC gaming all but obsolete, and give birth to their very own competition with the PlayStation.
But before all these things there was Alan Kotok and Spacewar! and they will both be remembered. Thank you. I only wish it weren't so late.
