

Spacewar, the first 2D top-down shooter, turns 50 - ilamont
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/10/spacewar-the-first-2d-top-down-shooter-turns-50.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss

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jones1618
I love how in the video the young guy asks "Does it use a frame buffer?" Dude,
this beauty didn't use bitmaps or raster graphics at all. Rather, it was a
glorified oscilloscope you programmed by directly controlling the deflection
of the tube's electron gun. To draw a line you'd tell it to keep the electrons
firing during the deflection. If not, you got a dot. That's it.

For a brief period of time vector games like Asteroids and Gravitron made it
into arcades where their "smooth", rotatable graphics looked quite
sophisticated beside all the blocky, pixelated games like Pac Man or
Centipede.

Somewhere in storage at our old house I even have a vector-based game console,
called the Vectrex. I really need to dig it out for my boys to play with.

