Gaming pioneer passes away

With some MIT students, Alan Kotok was able to help complete one of the first computer games ever made. Named Spacewar, the game was made on a PDP-1 computer in 1962, 10 years before Pong was released by Atari. Spacewar took only about 9k of memory, consisted of two spaceships, and is considered one of the major influences in the development of games. Kotok was also instrumental in the early days of the Internet, working on the Alta Vista search engine project as a senior consultant. Kotok died of a heart attack at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on May 26 at the age of 64.