Bite-Sized Game History: The Origin of Shmup, the First Article About Spacewar, and the Last Gasp of Game Videos

Before GameTrailers made its debut in 2002, it was fairly difficult for publishers to make trailers for upcoming games available over the Internet. Large file sizes and slow download speeds made the entire thing rather impractical (not that we didn’t try).

We’ll be talking about how publishers made game trailers available in the days before widespread broadband adoption in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, as well as uncovering a pair of firsts.

You can find a lot of dedicated video game historians on Twitter, and in 280 characters or less, they always manage to unearth some amazing artifacts. Bite-Sized Game History aims to collect some of the best stuff I find on the social media platform.

Video game genres run the gamut from the straightforward (such as Horror or Sports) to the technical (First Person Shooter and Platformer grew out of specific gameplay elements) to the incomprehensible (I defy you to come up with a simple definition for Metroidvania or Roguelike). The Shoot ‘Em Up lies somewhere between these three extremes, though you’ll also find that many people shorten this genre identifier to Shmup.

Like the aforementioned Metroidvania, nobody’s really sure where Shmup came from. After all, it was just a goofy nickname, and tracking it back to its source seemed impossible. Or was it?

As rediscovered by Castle Zotz, the July 1985 issue of Zzap! 64 (a British gaming magazine devoted to the Commodore 64) might be the first usage of Shmup:

Spacewar isn’t a classic Shmup, but it is the earliest example of space combat in a video game. Originally created to run on a PDP-1 minicomputer by several members of the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club in 1962, the game quickly spread to other college campuses.

It would take nearly a decade for the game to enter the mainstream with a profile in Analog in 1971 (and an account of the first video game tournament in Rolling Stone a year later), but the students at MIT were enamored with Spacewar right from the very beginning.

A reporter from MIT’s The Tech newspaper was the first person to write about the game (then known as Space War) just days after it went online in April 1962:

If you’re old enough to remember Spacewar, you probably also remember VCR Board Games, which attempted to add a video component to tabletop gaming in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The short-lived trend helped inspire a new round of FMV games such as Night Trap and Sewer Shark.

But did you know that publishers also produced promotional videos containing trailers and behind-the-scenes featurettes for their games well into the 2000s? It’s true, and Scanlines recently unearthed a few examples (including a Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty tape):

Thanks to Castle Zotz, Jon-Paul Dyson, Ethan Johnson, and Scanlines for providing the tweets for this edition of Bite-Sized Game History.

Author: VGC | John

John Scalzo has been writing about video games since 2001, and he co-founded Warp Zoned in 2011. Growing out of his interest in game history, the launch of Video Game Canon followed in 2017.