Way back in the dark ages, computers and games didn't go together. Computers were huge, costly devices that had to be put to a serious use all hours of the day. It was only the new breeds, like DEC's early mini-computers, that made computer games possible. The ancestors of all modern games are Spacewar and Adventure.

Spacewar dates back to 1962, punched up on paper tape for the DEC PDP-1 at MIT. Put together by E. E. Smith fans, Spacewar was not only a true computer game, it was even two player, featuring two battling rockets circling around the gravitational field of a star. I played Spacewar in the Cambridge computer lab in 1977, and it was still thrilling - nothing had appeared to better it in 15 years. Spacewar goes straight for the adrenaline - for more cerebral stimulation Adventure was to follow.

Though based on a primitive Xerox game, Adventure defined the text adventure. Developed at the Stanford AI Lab on a DEC PDP-10, it was an attractive form for early developers. Almost anyone could put a text adventure together, and the typical subjects appealed to the Tolkeinesque fantasy boom of the time. Although the original theme of Adventure (soon to spawn many followers, most famously Zork) was pure fantasy, some later adventure games would have a science fiction theme.

The earliest days on paper are harder to pin down, partly because the term "science fiction" was coined long after the first books were written. The clearest early example is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. More correctly Mary Godwin's, as the 19-year-old author was not yet married to Shelley, the original Frankenstein is pure science fiction, despite the horror movie antics that have followed. Like most writing of its time (1816 to be precise), Frankenstein is heavy going today. Even so, the combination of the then very new possibilities of electricity, the macabre biology of the recreated man, and the creation's philosophical musings (the original creature was anything but a grunting monster) are worth battling with.