Talk:Spacewar!/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Indrian (talk · contribs) 04:57, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

I am somewhat tardy on another review for PresN, but I can't pass this one up. Comments to follow in the very near future. Indrian (talk) 04:57, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

Lead

• is a space combat video game developed in 1962 as one of the first games developed in the early history of video games. It was initially designed and developed by Steve Russell - That's a lot of developing.

• Fixed.

• Don't know if this needs to go in the lead or somewhere else, but both Bob Saunders and Steve Piner helped Russell code the base game, and they are usually attributed along with all the other authors. Levy's book Hackers particularly singles out Bob's contribution.

• Added, both here and in development

• "built an early gamepad to reduce the difficulty of controlling the game." - This is partially true, but all sources agree that the primary reason for the gamepads was sore elbows rather than better controls.

• Added; I had a bit about that later on, but not in the lead

Background

• "as an improvement over the TX-0" - This is true in the sense that the PDP-1 was a better computer, but this wording implies it replaced the TX-0, when in fact both remained in operation.

• Added a note that the TX-0 stayed around

• "living in a tenement building on Hingham Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts" - Graetz and Wiitanen lived at 8 Hingham Street, Russell did not, although after Wiitanen was called up, he did move in with Graetz.

• Clarified

• "The ships fire missiles" - This is incredibly pedantic, but I think the creators refer to these as "torpedoes" rather than "missiles."

• Yeah, some of the sources called them missiles so I standardized on that, but I do recall that the Saga interview everyone was calling them torpedoes

• "an early operational game by February with rotatable spaceships by February" - I usually correct obvious grammar mistakes myself, but I was not sure how you want to resolve the double month here.

• Whoops, rewrote that sentence several times and left a bit behind.

Legacy

• Not sure this is really needed for GA as opposed to FA, but I would consult this paper by Marty Goldberg and Devin Monnens for a little more context on the spread of the game. Basically, they found that while the game was widespread by the end of the 1960s, the dissemination of the game was slower than usually claimed, particularly since CRT terminals were not common until the end of the decade.
• Not super critical or anything, but I would add Star Control to the list of games directly inspired by Spacewar!.

That's it for now. In addition, the article needs a few grammar tweaks, but I will go ahead and make those myself at some point. I'll go ahead and put this  On hold as we continue to work on it. Indrian (talk) 19:58, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

Hit most of these; still need to read the paper and use it. --PresN 21:44, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

@Indrian: - thanks for that Kinephanos sources, that was a great read. Now added to the article, and all of the review points have been addressed. --PresN 20:44, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

@PresN: I still need to give the article a proofread, but after that we should be ready to go. Indrian (talk) 21:21, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

@PresN: Finally getting around to the final proofread and noticed another thing. As written, the article implies that the games on the TX-0 were written by students. In fact, Mouse in a Maze was written by two faculty members, Doug Ross and John Ward, while I have never seen an attribution for the tic tac toe game. The language of that section of the background needs to be tweaked. Indrian (talk) 14:56, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Tweaked to call out students + university employees, which hopefully covers both faculty and research assistants. --PresN 15:00, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Finally finished my grammatical edits to the article, and I am now ready to promote to GA status. One down, two to go! Indrian (talk) 15:19, 27 March 2016 (UTC)