Early in 1962, a young MIT student was on his way home in the nearby town of Lowell, Massachusetts.
As Peter Samson stepped off the train and gazed up at the stars above, a meteor streaked across the heavens. Mr Samson reflexively grabbed for a game controller that wasn’t there, and scanned the skies, wondering where his spaceship had gone.
Mr Samson’s brain had grown out of the habit of looking at the real stars. He was spending way too much time playing Spacewar!
His near hallucination was the precursor of countless digital fever dreams to come – that experience of drifting off to sleep dreaming of Pac Man, or rotating Tetris blocks, or bagging a rare Pokemon Jigglypuff.
In 1962, that ability of a computer to yank our Pavlovian reflexes and haunt our sleep would have been unimaginable to anyone but Peter Samson and a few of his hacker friends.
They were avid players of Spacewar!, the first video game that mattered – the one that opened the door to a social craze, a massive industry, and shaped our economy in more profound ways than we realise.