First Graphics Game Written On/For a 16-Bit Home PC

The GPI writes with a story about Scott's Space Wars, a piece of gaming history: "This game was written by the famous game author Scott Adams, who founded Adventure International, the first multimillion dollar PC game company. It was founded over 30 years ago and developed for early 8-bit home PCs, i.e. TRS-80, Apple II, Atari. Scott's Space Wars is the first graphics game that was ever written at home, for a 16-bit home computer. The original source code is available as photos of the original 1975 hand-written manuscript. The last purchaser of the manuscript paid $197,500 in 2005. A brief video shows how the game was played."

Re:Nice

[abigor]

Can you be more specific about what's so hard about starting up a software firm? I've been a part of three startups, and I'm now independent and working with another small company, and none have encountered any problems whatsoever with lawsuits or lobbyists. What exactly did you have in mind?

Also, people start movie production companies all the time (every independent movie that comes out starts their own, it seems) and they don't have any problems. A close friend of mine is a movie cameraman on various big-budget Hollywood films, and he sometimes works with smaller independents just for the hell of it. Never mentioned any legal issues.

Re:And this is meaningful, why?

[larry bagina]

hell, back in the late 50s people were doing pong-like games on their oscilloscopes.

Re:you call those graphics?

[julesh]

A) wrote the first 8-bit PC game? B) Wrote the first 32-bit PC game? and C) Wrote the first 64-bit PC game? Ok...now how about the first C64 game? What about the first PC game? What about the first Apple II game? I could probably think of a million "firsts."

First 8-bit PC game and first Apple II game are probably the same: Steve Wozniak's reimplementation of Breakout in Integer BASIC.

Re:And this is meaningful, why?

[TheThiefMaster]

Tennis For Two [wikipedia.org]

Created in 1958 on an analogue computer. ANALOGUE!

Re:Ran on VAX too

[robertc99]

I suspect the game your thinking of was "warp" written by Larry Wall. It definitely had tholians spinning a web around you. This game is hand coded in assembler for a very specific machine architecture. Theres no way it ran on a Vax.

Re:So

[digitalhermit]

Depending on platform text and graphics mode might not have been so different.

The TI99/4A, for example, had a fairly standard process to redefine characters. Even the reference guide had a short basic program to change a text character into a little jumping man animation. They weren't true sprites, but with some cleverness could do many of the same things.

The 8-bit Atari had player missile graphics with similar functionality.