What Are the Oldest Games That Can Be Played on a PC?

Computer gaming may seem like a fairly modern concept, but it’s been around for more than five decades. Of course, a lot has changed over that time as developers have been able to take advantage of improved technology to make bigger and better titles. 

Some types of games have also come in and out of fashion, just like we see with movies, music, and other forms of entertainment. For example, side-scrolling platformers were all the rage in the 1980s, but by the 1990s, they’d fallen out of favor as 3D environments became popular. Games like Super Mario have become trendy again though in more recent years, as players fall back in love with the simplicity of the side-view 2D environments. 

These older games are often referred to as being “retro”, but they are actually nowhere near as old as some of the oldest titles that can be played on a PC today. That is an accolade that belongs to these games. 

SpaceWar!

SpaceWar! was the first video game ever made. It was developed by several academics that worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology back in 1962. The team wrote the code for the game so that it would run on the university’s new DEC PDP-1 minicomputer. 

It was a multiplayer game that saw the two players control a spaceship each, engaging in a digital dogfight as they orbited a star. 

It is possible to play SpaceWar! Today on an original PDP-1 machine at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, though only on select days. A more convenient option is to try it out in a browser-based PDP-1 emulator.

Despite being almost 60 years old, there are still some games that are older than SpaceWar!

Poker

Poker is a game that predates computers and video games, though it has enjoyed a new lease of life thanks to the online poker community. It has a long and fragmented history, with several different games that have the attributes of poker appear to have evolved independently of each other in different parts of the world.

Over the last century or so, these games have come together to create the popular poker variants that we know today. 

The online version of poker is almost identical to the live version. The same positions and their associated strategies exist in both. They also share the same rules, hand rankings, and terminology, so those that are used to playing in person will be able to jump straight into competing on a PC. 

Chess

Chess is considerably older than both SpaceWar! and poker, having been first played in India more than 1,500 years ago. The in-person version is perhaps more famous thanks to TV shows like The Queen’s Gambit and Grand Masters that are household names like Gary Kasparov. 

Despite this, many more players enjoy the game through their computers thanks to websites that match you against other players or an AI opponent. 

Many of these chess websites also make it easy for new people to get into the game by providing guides to the rules and basic mechanics, and even have different difficulty settings so novices don’t get overwhelmed. 

Checkers

Checkers is a game that shares several attributes with chess. Most obviously, it uses a checkered board that players place their pieces on. It is significantly older than chess with historians finding evidence of it being played around 5,000 years ago in Ancient Persia. 

Checkers is easier to learn and play than chess because each piece carries the same value and (for the most part) can only move in one direction and one space at a time. 

Like chess, checkers can be played through many websites, as well as through free downloads available through marketplaces like the Microsoft Store. 

While there may be some older games, such as Ancient Egypt’s “senet”, checkers is the oldest game commonly played on PC today. The problem with digital recreations of senet and others like it is that no definitive records of the rules exist today. Therefore, we don’t know for certain that our recreations are truly representative of what was played by the Pharaohs and their subjects.