The History of XS Space: Spacewar!, Asteroids and the Browser Arena

XS Space is LarkSpark’s own game, and its own story is short. The kind of game it is has a long one. Ships seen from above that keep moving after the engine stops go back to a university lab in 1962. Putting many of them in one place took the Internet. This chapter follows that line, names the games that inspired XS Space, and ends with the game itself. The rules cover how it plays today.

Spacewar! and the first dogfight

In 1961 three young programmers around the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Martin Graetz, Stephen Russell and Wayne Wiitanen, planned a game for a computer that hadn’t been installed yet. The machine was a Digital Equipment PDP-1, and by 1962 Russell and a handful of friends had the game running on it. The Computer History Museum notes that Peter Samson, Dan Edwards and Graetz made significant improvements that spring. They called it Spacewar!, exclamation mark included.

Two players each flew a ship, known as the Needle and the Wedge, around a star in the middle of the screen. The star pulled on both ships, and the program worked out that pull with Newton’s physics. You turned, you fired your rocket, and you kept going after the rocket stopped. Torpedoes were limited and so was fuel. A hyperspace button threw a ship somewhere else on the screen, and the ship could blow up on the way back.

Spacewar! was never sold. It was copied from lab to lab, and The Strong National Museum of Play says it was the most popular game on most computer systems for about a decade. Nearly everything in this chapter grows from its two ideas: a ship that keeps drifting until you push the other way, and another person at the controls of the ship you are shooting at.

Into the arcade

People at Stanford were among the first to charge for it. Bill Pitts and his high school friend Hugh Tuck built a coin-operated version called the Galaxy Game and set it up in the university’s Tresidder student union, at ten cents a game or three for a quarter. The Strong has a coin-operated Spacewar! in Stanford’s student union by 1971, while Stanford Magazine’s account puts Pitts’s installation in the summer of 1972. A second version stayed until 1979.

Nolan Bushnell had the same thought. His Computer Space, built by Nutting Associates in a fiberglass cabinet, came out in 1971, and The Strong records that many players found it confusing. Bushnell’s next game was Pong. In 1977 Larry Rosenthal created Space Wars, an arcade game inspired by the PDP-1 original, and licensed the game and his vector monitor technology to Cinematronics. Vector screens drew bright, crisp lines, which suited small ships on a black sky.

Atari’s Asteroids arrived in November 1979. Lyle Rains proposed the idea and Ed Logg designed it, and The Strong traces its inspiration to Spacewar! and Computer Space. Five buttons turned the ship left and right, fired the engine, fired the gun and jumped through hyperspace. Atari sold more than 70,000 cabinets, which put thrust-and-drift flying in front of a far bigger crowd than any lab game had reached. Its turn-and-counter-thrust steering is still the pattern for games like this one.

Many players, one galaxy

Spacewar! was for two. The next step was a game for a crowd, and it came from university networks. Andy McFadden’s history of Netrek starts with Empire, written for the PLATO system by John Daleske and Silas Warner, which he dates to 1972. Empire had four teams named after the powers of Star Trek, and the history records several games played with fifteen pilots on each side.

The idea moved to newer machines one rewrite at a time. In the mid-1980s Chris Guthrie designed and largely wrote Xtrek at the University of California, Berkeley, for the X Window System. Early in 1988 Scott Silvey and Kevin Smith, also at Berkeley, began reworking its source into Xtrek II. Smith posted the code to Usenet late in 1989 and it spread quickly. Under its later name, Netrek, it had players forming teams to fight for control of a galaxy.

XPilot and the thrust games

XPilot’s website dates the game to 1991 and describes it as a multi-player 2D space game. It credits the first line of development to Bjørn Stabell, Ken Ronny Schouten and two others, with many contributors after them. The project names its own ancestors too: the Atari arcade games Asteroids and Gravitar, and the home computer games Thrust on the Commodore 64 and Gravity Force on the Amiga. All four are about a small ship, an engine and momentum.

XPilot put that kind of flying on a network, and it has stayed an open source project that split into several lines of development. A year earlier, in 1990, Star Control had taken another route from the same starting point. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction credits its design to Fred Ford and Paul Reiche III and says its combat between ships was modeled on Spacewar!. What it added was a wide variety of ship designs with different abilities, balanced against each other.

SubSpace and the dial-up arena

In the mid-1990s Virgin Interactive Entertainment hired a producer named Rod Humble from Kesmai, where he had worked on the air combat game Air Warrior. Ryan Barrett’s 2001 study, written for a Stanford course, says Humble brought in Jeff Petersen, a programmer he had worked with there, and that the two had a rough prototype within a month. The first public test went by the code name Sniper. Wikipedia’s summary of an early review describes it as a test of how bad lag would be with many players on dial-up connections. Virgin published the finished game, known as SubSpace, late in 1997.

SubSpace looked down on small ships from above. Barrett describes movement in the style of Asteroids, with momentum carrying a ship on after the engine stopped. Its best-known rule was about energy. A ship had one supply, and that supply was both its health and its ammunition. Power-ups scattered around the maps upgraded a ship in flight. Barrett writes that it was one of the first games to let hundreds or even thousands of people play at once. Humble told Vice why he thought the flying worked: “Newtonian movement like that is inherently pleasant to control.”

Virgin Interactive Entertainment shut down in 1998, and the players kept the game going on servers they hosted themselves. In 2001 programmers from that community released a new client, known as Continuum. On July 3, 2015, the player-run game reached Steam under the title Subspace Continuum, free to play, and Vice reported that no publisher was involved. The Steam listing was still up in 2026, about thirty years after the Sniper test.

The browser, the .io games and the closing circle

In April 2015 a Brazilian developer, Matheus Valadares, put a game called Agar.io on the web. You were a cell, you grew by absorbing smaller cells, and a bigger cell could absorb you. GamesBeat reports that the publisher Miniclip met Valadares in Lisbon and acquired the publishing rights within a week. Steve Howse’s Slither.io followed in March 2016 with snakes that eat colored orbs to grow, and Valadares’s own Diep.io had reached the App Store by that July.

People called these .io games after the ending of the web addresses many of them used. GamesBeat describes them as arena-based multiplayer games that run in a browser and are very easy to get into. In the best-known ones you typed a name and you were playing. Everyone shared one arena, what you collected made you bigger, and you lost it when you died. A very large audience learned to expect an online game that starts in seconds.

A second idea came from another direction. Vice’s 2020 interview with Brendan Greene traces last-player-standing games to Koushun Takami’s 1999 novel Battle Royale and the film made from it, then to Minecraft servers running Hunger Games matches in 2012, then to Greene’s own mods. His PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds went into early access on March 23, 2017, with 100 players on an island and a play zone that keeps shrinking. XS Space’s storm and circle belong to that line of thought.

What inspired XS Space

XS Space takes its flying from Asteroids. You turn, you thrust, and the ship keeps going until you push the other way. Everything else in the game is built on that feel, and a pilot who has played Asteroids already knows how to steer.

The rest comes from the family of games in this chapter. Arena shooters such as XPilot and SubSpace showed how well that flying works with many pilots in one place, with one supply of energy to manage and prizes to pick up along the way. The .io games showed that an arena can be open to anyone within seconds. The battle royale games showed what a closing circle does to a fight. Games like these were the inspiration, and XS Space reimagines that kind of play for the modern web.

XS Space on LarkSpark

XS Space first ran as a site of its own at xsspace.io. In October 2026 it was folded into LarkSpark, and the old address now forwards to the hangar here. It runs in a desktop browser with a keyboard and needs no account. You pick one of eight ships, two for each of four elements, and launch into an arena shared with other pilots and with bots flown by LarkSpark’s cast of characters, each in a ship of their own.

In November 2026 the arena was rebuilt. A map of fixed tiles gave way to a map generated fresh each time the arena restarts. Rock can be blasted away with bombs and mines and grown again with a Terraformer, and asteroids drift through. The rectangle became a circle with a storm outside it, and the circle grows and shrinks with the number of pilots.

The score is Xenite. What you hold is your place on the leaderboard, and a destroyed ship drops what it carried for whoever gets there first. The ships and weapons chapters cover the fleet and its tools, and the strategy guide covers staying alive. The flying is the part that is more than sixty years old. You thrust, you let go, and the ship keeps going.

The history of XS Space