Video games were introduced as a commercial entertainment medium in 1971, becoming the bas

Russell, Witanen, and Graetz wanted to create a program that would test and tax the new computer's capabilities and drew on their love of science fiction in deciding to make a game involving spaceships. Russell was primarily responsible for the design of the game, which was finished in 1962. Called

Dialup bulletin board systems were popular in the 1980s, and sometimes used for online game playing. The earliest such systems, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, had a crude plain-text interface, but later systems made use of terminal-control codes (the so-called ANSI art, which included the use of IBM-PC-specific characters not actually part of an ANSI standard) to get a pseudo-graphical interface.