Moreover, the Spacewar program became an integral part of a spreading hackers' culture as it was carried on punched paper tape to the dozen or so research centers and universities that had the early PDP minicomputer.
"What I was most pleased with was that a number of people saw Spacewar and went off and said, `I can do that' and then implemented their version on another system without looking at the source code," Russell said.
One of those inspired by the game was Nolan Bushnell, who went on to found the Atari Corp. He was first seized by the idea of commercializing video-game technology when he came across a version of Spacewar while a graduate student in engineering at the University of Utah.
In 1971 he introduced an arcade version of Spacewar called Computer Space, which was a commercial flop. Bushnell kept at it, though, and soon introduced the more successful Pong.
The game also made an impression on two other entrepreneurs-to-be, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the founders of Apple Computer, who as teenagers would ride their bicycles to Stanford's artificial intelligence lab, where the game was frequently played.
But credit for the first commercial video game actually goes to Bill Pitts, a Stanford graduate who, with a high school friend, Hugh Tuck, installed Galaxy Game, a coin-operated version of Spacewar, in Stanford's student union several months before Bushnell introduced Computer Space.
It became a huge hit and was played by students for more than six years, allowing Pitts to pay back the US$60,000 he had invested in the project. Today his version of Spacewar can be found at the Computer Museum History Center in Mountain View, California, where it has been restored for play on a vintage Digital Equipment PDP-11.
For his part, Russell, now 64, is only an occasional gamer. He visits arcades to keep up with video game technology and spends a couple of hours a month playing at his own PC. But his tastes, like the times, have changed. Now it is solitaire, not spaceships, that keeps him coming back.
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