A strange little side quest
Whack The Thief may feel immediate, but the ideas around video-game history have been evolving for a very long time. Pong was field-tested in California bars in 1972 and helped launch the modern arcade-game era. The surprising part is how quickly the next milestone followed. Spacewar! appeared on MIT's PDP-1 in 1962 and became one of the earliest influential computer games shared among programmers. The screen is modern; the urge to test skill, pattern and timing definitely is not.
