New Games - Page 12742
Indy 500
1969
Qubic
1968
Qubic
1968
A text-based game of 3D Tic-Tac-Toe against a computer opponent. Originally, the game printed out the game board on teletype paper. It was later updated to include a visual display of the game board.Civil War
1968
Civil War
1968
A turn-based, strategic simulation of fourteen real battles of the American Civil War. In single player mode, you play as the Confederacy, while the computer controls the Union. Each turn you have to decide how to allocate your funds on food, ammunition and salaries and choose one out of eight strategies to use in battle (four offensive, four defensive). The sides with fewer casualties wins the battle, and whoever wins eight or more battles wins the war. The game was developed at Lexington High School by students L. Cram, L. Goodie, and D. Hibbard. In 1973, it was compiled and published on "101 BASIC Computer Games" by David H. Ahl, who credited G. Paul and R. Hess of "TIES" for adding a two-player modeHamurabi
1968
Hamurabi
1968
star 3.9Hamurabi is a text-based game of land and resource management and is one of the earliest computer games. It was originally written in FOCAL in 1968, but it was ported to BASIC in 1971. Like many BASIC games of the time, Hamurabi was mainly a game of numeric input. As the ruler, the player could buy and sell land, purchase grain and decide how much grain to release to his kingdom.PDP 10 Timesharing Basketball
1967
The first Basketball video game. You play against the computer in a text-based game of Basketball, with the ability to select both defensive setup and offensive plays each turn.Batnum
1967
Batnum
1967
Batnum, a portmanteau of "battle of numbers" is an early BASIC game based on the family of "object pile" games, which includes Nim. The player and computer take turns removing objects from a pile, with there being a set minimum and maximum amount of objects that can be removed per turn. The objective is to force the computer to take the last object.Dartmouth Championship Football
1965
An early computer simulation of American Football, written in BASIC. Players have a choice of offensive plays, and the game also incorporates many official rules, including penalties and the safety rule. Sometimes a dog will run on the field, interrupting play.The Sumerian Game
1964
The Sumerian Game
1964
The Sumerian Game is a text-based strategy video game of land and resource management. It was developed as part of a joint research project between the Board of Cooperative Educational Services of Westchester County, New York and IBM in 1964–1966 for investigation of the use of computer-based simulations in schools. It was designed by Mabel Addis, then a fourth-grade teacher, and programmed by William McKay for the IBM 7090 time-shared mainframe computer. The Sumerian Game has been described as the first video game with a narrative, as well as the first edutainment game. As a result, Mabel Addis has been called the first female video game designer and the first writer for a video game.Marienbad
1962
Marienbad
1962
Marienbad is an adaptation of the strategy game Nim, originally written in Poland for the Odra 1003 mainframe. The game did not originally have a specific title; in later literature the name Marienbad was applied retroactively. It is one of the earliest Polish computer games. It was inspired by a variant of Nim seen in the 1961 movie Last Year at Marienbad and described under the name "Marienbad" in the magazine Przekrój. There are several rows (four by default) of matchsticks, with a different number of matchsticks in each row. Both players (the human and the computer) take turns, in each move taking away at least one matchstick from a single row. The player left with the final matchstick loses.Spacewar!
1962
Spacewar!
1962
star 6.8Spacewar! is one of the earliest digital computer video games. It is a two-player game, with each player taking control of a starship and attempting to destroy the other. A star in the center of the screen pulls on both ships and requires maneuvering to avoid falling into it. In 1971 it was unofficially ported into a coin-operated PDP-11 machine and renamed Galaxy Game. As an arcade machine it was installed at the Tresidder Union at Stanford University in September, 1971, two months before the official release of Computer Space, the first mass-produced video game. Only one unit was built initially, although the game later included several consoles allowing users to play against each other.Mouse in the Maze
1959
Mouse in the Maze
1959
A game where players place maze walls, bits of cheese, and (in some versions) martini glasses by way of a light pen interacting with the screen.Tennis for Two
1958
Hutspiel
1956
Hutspiel
1956
Hutspiel is a military training simulation for the Goodyear Electronic Differential Analyzer (GEDA) that simulates at a theatre level. Its intention was to study the use of tactical nuclear weapons and conventional air support in Western Europe in the event of a Soviet invasion. The game pits two players against each other with one controlling NATO forces in France, Belgium and West Germany, and the other in control of a Soviet invasion force trying to penetrate a 150 mile frontage. Players could allocate forces across sectors of the map and set targets (such as airfields, enemy troops, supply depots and transportation facilities) for planes and nukes. Early versions of the game would have the computer continue the simulation until it was paused for further input. In later versions the game used turns of fixed time increments. The game modeled troop reinforcement, resupply and movement by rail. It did not account for terrain or weather.Pool
1954
Pool
1954
A game of pool (billiards) developed by William George Brown and Ted Lewis in 1954 on the MIDSAC computer, intended primarily to showcase the computing power of the MIDSAC. "The game displayed a 2-inch rendition of the pool cue for the players to line up their shots and ran a simulation of the colliding and ricocheting balls in real-time, implementing a full game of a cue ball and 15 frame balls for two players. Graphics were drawn in real-time on a monochrome 13" point plotting X-Y display, the screen being updated by the program 40 times a second (that is, in a normal in-game situations with 2 to 4 balls moving at once). However, for time constraints, the table and its pockets weren’t drawn by the computer graphics, but were rather drawn manually onto the display using a grease pencil." - Norbert Landsteiner for masswerk.atBouncing Ball
1953
Bouncing Ball
1953
The first known game incorporating graphics that updated in real time, rather than only when the player made a move, was a simulation of a bouncing ball created by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) student Oliver Aberth for the Whirlwind I computer. He began creating the simulation in February 1951, before the computer was completed in April. It allowed users to adjust the frequency of the bounces with a knob, and sometime between late 1951 and 1953 he made it into a game by adding a hole in the floor for players to aim for.Checkers
1952
Checkers
1952
Strachey's program inspired Arthur Samuel to develop his own checkers game in 1952 for the IBM 701 and although the IBM 701 machine on which he developed his Samuel Checkers program was among the most powerful computers of its time, its memory was not sufficient to game out every possible outcome of each move. Samuel got around this limitation by introducing what is now called “alpha-beta pruning,” a scoring system that allowed the program to evaluate the likelihood of winning from certain positions without playing them out to the end of the game. Like a human player, Samuel Checkers looked as many moves ahead as it could and made its decisions from there.Sheep and Gates
1952
Sheep and Gates
1952
A video game created by Stanley Gill and involved a dot (termed a sheep) approaching a line in which one of two gates could be opened. The Stanley Gill game was controlled via the lightbeam of the EDSAC's paper-tape reader. Interrupting it (such as by the player placing their hand in it) would open the upper gate. Leaving the beam unbroken would result in the lower gate opening.OXO
1952
OXO
1952
star 3.1OXO was a computer game developed by Alexander S. Douglas in 1952 for the EDSAC computer, which simulates a game of Noughts and crosses, also sometimes called Tic-tac-toe. OXO is the earliest known game to display visuals on a video monitor. To play OXO, the player would enter input using a rotary telephone controller, and output was displayed on the computer's 35×16 dot matrix cathode ray tube. Each game was played against an artificially intelligent opponent.Draughts
1952
Draughts
1952
A game of draughts (a.k.a. checkers) written for the Ferranti Mark 1 computer by Christopher Strachey at the University of Manchester between 1951 and 1952. In the summer of 1952, the program was able to "play a complete game of Draughts at a reasonable speed".Mate-in-Two
1951
Mate-in-Two
1951
Robot Chess is an early chess game in which the user can play against an AI. The AI is only powerful enough to compute "mate-in-two" problems and thus the game didn't represent a full game of chess. Players would enter moves of the Ferranti Mark 1 and the computer would print out the response move. The simulation ignores some chess rules such as en passant, promotion and castling.
