MIT students celebrated the golden anniversary of Spacewar! - which is one of the first video games in history - by recreating it on a computer that can be handled on the palm of your hand. Four students of MIT began creating the game Spacewar! during their free time in 1961 and finished it in February 1962. It was built on the Digital Equipment PDP-1, a computer unit around the size of an ordinary refrigerator. The game features two spaceships attempting to shoot each other down, with one of the spaceships under the control of the player. Massachusetts' engineering students showcased their work at the museum of MIT. This process of turning a 50-year old game to a modern one is almost likened to digital archeology. It must be difficult to port it into a modern programming language for it is very low-level considering the time it was created. In addition to that, it used a lot of tricks specific to the machine it was first built on due to the limitations they had on the software. The students transferred the software to the Arduino platform, a microprocessor the size of handheld gadget. The game was not really meant for commercial purposes but only for the enjoyment of the creators. In fact, majority of Americans barely had access to a PDP-1 at that time. During the 1970′s it became a commercial success when it appeared in arcade platforms and personal gaming consoles like the Atari 2600. This anniversary of Spacewar! came amidst the most recent sales figures of video games in the American market this month that showed a decline of millions. According to a consumer group, sales of video games went down by 34%, despite the USD 1.14 billion sales. This is compared to sales figures of January last year. The outlook seems to be even more worse for video game consoles, sustaining a fall of 38% in sales. Most experts are thinking that this decrease in sales is only because of the low number of new game releases. But several games did sell well including Call of Dut

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