Spacewar! is the world’s second video game. Created by MIT students in 1962, it – like Tennis for Two – earned a shrine in Ready Player One. Quote The museum’s bottom level, located in the planet core, was a spherical room containing a shrine to the very first videogame, Tennis for Two, invented by William Higinbotham in 1958. The … Read more
Battlezone is a first-person tank game released by Atari in 1980. Like Star Wars Arcade, it uses vector graphics to create a three-dimensional representation of its gaming world. It helps inform the visuals of Ready Player One. Quote On the surface, Archaide looked exactly like the environment of the 1981 game Battlezone, another vector-graphic classic from Atari. In … Read more
Star Wars Aracade is a vector graphics-based video game released by Atari in 1983. Additional versions were released for home consoles (albeit with inferior graphics). The game plays a minor role in Ready Player One, serving as the inspiration for the arcade museum planet of Archaide. Quote The planet’s only surface feature was a web … Read more
Madness and the Minotaur is a text adventure game for the TRS-80 in 1981 by Spectral Associates. It plays a minor role in the book Ready Player One. Quote I knew from my research that the cassette recorder functoned as the TRS-80’s “tape drive”. It stored data as analog sound on magneetic audiotapes. When Halliday had first … Read more
Pyramid – aka Pyramid 2000 – is a clone of Colossal Cave Adventure that trades the original game’s fantasy tropes for an Egyptian-themed pyramid crawler. Radio Shack published the game in 1979 for the TRS-80. Quote I knew from my research that the cassette recorder functoned as the TRS-80’s “tape drive”. It stored data as analog sound on … Read more
Bedlam is a text adventure game released by Radio Shack for the TRS-80. Written by Robert Arnstein (Raaka-Tu, Pyramid 2000) and released in 1982, the game sets you up as a patient trying to escape an asylum. Quote I knew from my research that the cassette recorder functoned as the TRS-80’s “tape drive”. It stored … Read more
Raaka-tu is a text adventure game (we call it interactive fiction today) released by Radio Shack in 1981 for its TRS-80 and TRS-80 Color Computer. The game was written by Robert Arnstein. Despite playing a ton of text adventure games as a kid (such as Colossal Cave, Zork, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), I never … Read more
Released in December 1982, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial is a notoriously bad game. Based on the Steven Speilberg movie of the same name, popular gaming lore blames it for the collapse of the video game industry in 1983 and claims hundreds of thousands of E.T. game cartridges were buried in a landfill. There’s some truth to this … Read more
Starmaster is Activision’s take on the emerging first-person, star-fighter genre. Released in 1982 and written by Alan Miller, it features gameplay similar to Atari’s Star Raiders (without the complexity of the “Video Touch Pad Controller” add-on hardware). It plays a minor role in Ready Player One, appearing in a single line. Quote Beside the Atari was a shoebox containing … Read more
As a kids, Yars’ Revenge was always one of our go-to games on the Atari 2600. Despite not being a two-player game, my friends and I would spend hours trying to get the highest possible score … and see if we could catch a glimpse of the Ghost of Yar. Atari released Yars’ Revenge in 1982. Created by … Read more