MAY THE LULZ BE WITH YOU

A long time ago in a laboratory far, far away … The primal scene of hacking, remembered and repeated with all the force of mythology, was the creation of a game—one of the first and most influential works in the history of video games: Spacewar! This legendary feat of coding came together at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1960s. The original hackers—that is to say, the MIT research scientists, students, and technology enthusiasts who called themselves hackers—were engaged at the time in experimenting with the university’s new DEC PDP-1 mainframe computer and CRT display.