Unix and Linux aren’t names you might normally associate with games, but there have been plenty of games that have shaped both platforms over the years. Then and now, programmers like to kick back with games like the rest of us, and they’ve ended up changing computer history in the process.
10Space Travel
This game is important to Linux and Unix history, largely because they might not have existed if this game had not been invented.
Ken Thompson was working at Bell Labs in the late 1960s on a system called Multics. Multics was a joint project with General Electric and MIT to build a “computing utility” for what we would now call cloud computing. Thompson had created a simulation game he dubbedSpace Travel. It involved landing a spaceship on planets in the solar system.
While Multics was innovative, pioneering a lot of things we see in modern OSes, it was the Windows Vista of its day: the development process was slow, expensive, convoluted, and way behind schedule. Bell Labs pulled out of the project, but Thompson still wanted to play his game, so he developed a rudimentary operating system to run on a little-used Digital PDP-7, and this evolved into Unix.
9Rogue
WhileSpace Travelled to the creation of Unix,Roguewas one of the first games that was created on Unix systems, specifically the BSD variant in 1980. It was created by Ken Arnold, Michael Toy, and Glenn Wichman.
Inspired by theDungeons & Dragonstabletop RPG, the game featured a map based on ASCII characters, with treasure and monsters represented by letters and numbers. The object of the game is to search for the Amulet of Yendor. The game was procedurally generated, so each playthrough was different.
The game’s popularity was an impetus to create the terminfo database to standardize terminal compatibility.Roguewas later ported to home computers where it became a cult classic (the screenshot above is from the MS-DOS version), but it was the laterNetHackproject that showed the potential of whatRoguecould be as the premier “roguelike” game.
8Chess
Chess and computing have had a long relationship. Many programmers are strategic thinkers and seem drawn to the game. Unix is no exception.
Ken Thompson, one of the creators of Unix, didn’t limit his involvement in computer gaming toSpace Travel. As a chess devotee, he also incorporated the game into his research at Bell Labs with the creation of Belle, a special computer devoted to chess that was obviously named after his employer. Belle was the first computer to achieve master level play in chess tournaments in the early 1980s.
Since chess is also big in Russia, Belle was invited to what was then the Soviet Union to a tournament, but was seized at the airport by US Customs because American computing technology was banned for export behind the Iron Curtain. The government claimed that encryption employed by computers classified Belle as a weapon, but Thompson quipped that the only way Belle could become a weapon was if the machine were dropped from an airplane and fell on somebody, as reported inByte.
You don’t need fancy hardware to play chess on a Linux machine today. TheGNU Chessengine with a front end likeXBoardwill suffice if you want to lose to a machine.
7MUDs
In the early internet era, text-based role-playing games called “Multi-user Dungeons” or MUDs were popular. They took off in the university and technical communities because they were among the first networked multiplayer games since Unix machines were early adopters of TCP/IP. If you’ve never experienced one, think of it as a cross between a text adventure game and a chat room.
Since the internet was mostly based around Unix machines, this is what most players used to access them. They sucked up so much time that many universities banned them from their campuses at the height of their popularity, but early ISPs had no such restrictions for those who dialed in to shell accounts to telnet into their favorite MUDs, MUSHes, and other text-based multiplayer games.
The biggest attraction of these games was that you could meet other players, chat with them, and, depending on the type of game you were playing, kill them as well. MUDs were the forerunner of the modern MMORPG, and they still have a cult following today.
These games still have cult followings to this day. You can find a comprehensive listing onThe Mud Connector.
6NetHack
NetHackbuilt on the ideas of the originalRoguementioned earlier. While the game added a lot of features like more player classes, items, and monsters, as well as optional graphics, the real innovation was its distributed development over the early internet, which gaveNetHackits name.
The mysterious “DevTeam’s” additions were so well-thought out that a catchphrase among the game’s players was “the DevTeam thinks of everything.”
Other elements have become part of gaming lore, such as the question, “Do you want your possessions identified?” when you die. AlthoughNetHackis a single-player game, public servers such as the one onalt.orghave sprung up where players can share their scores and forums also exist where players can swap stories, including those of YASD (Yet Another Stupid Death).
5Netrek
WhileNetHackis a single-player game,Netrekis one of the earliest multiplayer games, debuting on Unix systems in 1988. While governments and businesses touted the productive elements of networking, games likeNetrekshowed off the potential for fun of the nascent internet as well.
Star Trek-themed games were popular on mainframes and minicomputers, andNetrekcontinued this tradition, letting players do battle against each other in space. You can even play it today on modern systems, including Windows, macOS, and of course Linux.
4XPilot
Another space game helped prove the value of multiplayer gaming when the internet was just starting to make its way into public consciousness in the early ’90s.
The game was developed by a couple of computer science students in Norway. The gameplay was inspired by the cult classicThrust. As the name implies, the game was intended for play on the X Window system, which by then was the de facto standard windowing system on Unix workstations.
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The YouTube channel Sparcie will give you an idea of what the gameplay is actually like:
3Prince of Persia
This game is a classic of the early ’90s, originally developed on the Apple II and then ported to more popular systems, including MS-DOS. It’s this version that’s most important to Linux history, as one Linus Torvalds bought a copy of the game along with his first PC.
A computer science student at the University of Finland in Helsinki, he divided his time between playing the game and his coding experiments that evolved into the Linux kernel. Because he wanted to play the game, he made sure that Linux supported dual-booting. This decision made it easy for other people to try out Linux without having to give up their Windows machines. This helped build a critical mass of Linux users.
2Doom
Another ’90s classic PC game would help increase the acceptance of Linux and foster the growth of Linux gaming. This would beDoom, which codified the modern first-person-shooter and helped turn the PC into a major gaming platform as well as ushering in the 3D gaming era.
When its creator, id Software opened up the source code, it would prove that the Linux and open source movements had entered the mainstream. While Linux gaming still lags behind Windows, the Steam Deck is making inroads into the gaming market. Maybe Linux will finally unseat Windows someday as the PC gaming platform of choice, but then again, the “Year of the Linux Desktop” has been a meme for as long as I’ve been using it.
1BZFlag
Unix’s affinity with networking means that a lot of multiplayer games have been developed for it.BZFlagfits this pattern. First developed for Silicon Graphics workstations, it was also one of the first 3D games to gain widespread attention. It’s effectively a multiplayer version of the 1980 Atari arcade classicBattlezone. It’s available on modern systems, including Linux, macOS, and Windows.
Instead of the primitive vector graphics of the original,BZFlagfeatures full polygonal 3D graphics along with some fun multiplayer games. There are lots of servers you’re able to access from the built-in server browser, and you can launch your own server as well.
Unix and Linux have been around so long because they’ve proven themselves useful, but it’s also allowed their users to cut loose and have some fun, as these games have shown.
