One of the most fun parts about watching a popular nerd franchise like Star Wars is spotting all the hidden easter eggs. It’s there if you know it and it does not take away from the experience if you don’t.
Recently, in the second episode of The Book of Boba Fett — now on Disney+ Hotstar — we see the former bounty hunter, walking into Tosche Station (the one Luke referred to in The New Hope) on Tatooine.
His mission was to take the speeder bikes from a bunch of Nikto biker that has been terrorising the area (seen in episode 1 of the series).
Camie and Fixer, Luke’s friends, were there too.
Near the entrance to the bar is a Tatooine version of a cocktail table arcade machine. It’s circular display mar seem alien but the game that was playing on it is not something from a long, long time a go or a galaxy far, far away.
In fact, it’s a video game from 1960s.
The game featured in The Book of Boba Fett (Credit: Jeff Grub/Twitter). The original Spacewar on an oscilloscope monitor (Credit: ThoughtCo).
spacewar!
The game being played at Tosche Station was a two player shooter called Spacewar! It was originally developed by by Steve Russell in collaboration with Martin Graetz, Wayne Wiitanen, Bob Saunders, Steve Piner, and many others.
It was made for the PDP-1, a computer the size of two refrigerators.
The game pits two spaceships against each other, both orbiting a central star.
If you’d like to try the game for yourself, head on over to the Masswerk website where they have emulated the DEC PDP-1 in HTML5 and Java script.