DRAFT — awaiting Adam's lock

What Spacewar! invented

Before anything else in this building, there was a winter at MIT in 1962 and a computer the size of a wardrobe. Spacewar! is the actual first — the game every room here descends from. Two ships, a star between them, and the one idea that started everything: the machine doesn't just draw your world, it enforces it. Gravity pulls whether you like it or not. Momentum keeps what you gave it. The battlefield is physics.

Nothing here stops moving when you stop asking. Your ship falls toward the star every second of every duel, and so does theirs — the well is the third player, it never misses, and it cannot be shot back.

The accident

Watch a torpedo cross the star and notice what doesn't happen: it doesn't bend. The 1962 machine could afford gravity for two ships but not for every shot in the air, so torpedoes fly straight through a curved world — and the shortcut became a rule players learned to aim by. This production preserves the accident exactly: your shots ignore the well that is trying to kill you. The oldest inherited accident in the medium, older than the difficulty curve by sixteen years.

The panic handle

Hyperspace is the first escape button in games: vanish anywhere, reappear somewhere else — at rest, and at a price. Each jump raises the odds you return as a small explosion. The first is free. The fourth is a coin flip gone wrong. Its designers called that a feature, and they were right: an escape that always works isn't drama, it's a pause button.

The duel

Two players was the whole machine — there was no computer opponent in 1962; the processor had its hands full holding the universe together. Bring a friend: two thumbs, one phone, the court split at the middle. The house pilot flies the solo translation — same turn rate, same engine, same magazine as you, its whole personality being that it respects the well. Fuel runs dry. The magazine runs out. First to five skies. And a word from the house: drifters die first. Motion is armor here.

The room before the building

It ran on a PDP-1 that cost as much as a house, written by people who called themselves hackers before the word soured, and it traveled from lab to lab on paper tape like a folk song. Every machine in this hall — the paddle, the wall, the invasion — is downstream of this room. That's why the museum starts at zero.

This exhibit is an original reconstruction of the mechanic, not the original game.