Whose subordinates are they?! The 60-year-old game has 130,000 players online at the same time!

Many people may not have heard of Spacewar because it has a history of more than 60 years and is older than most players. Although there is no store page on Steam, it is reflected in the SteamDB list of online rankings, and the online peak reached more than 130,000 players at the same time. This phenomenon may be related to the currently highly-watched simulator "Schedule I".

Spacewar is one of the world's earliest computer games. The space combat game written by MIT student Steve Russell and his team in 1962 on the PDP-1 computer platform, which has a very important influence in the history of early electronic games.

　　"Spacewar" is a two-player space shooting game. Two players each control a spaceship and attack each other in the background of the starry sky, with the goal of destroying each other's spaceship. There is a star in the center of the background that produces gravity, sucking the nearest spacecraft over it, causing the crash. The player's spacecraft has a limited fuel and can instantly move to a random position using risky super-light jumps.

　　So why this old game, which has been more than 60 years old, suddenly attracted a large number of players to go online is actually related to Valve's opening to developers to test Steam API tools.

　　Spacewar is a public domain game, Valve uses this game as an example to provide developers with basic functions used to test the Steam API, such as multiplayer connection, achievements, rankings, etc.

Usually, game developers need to formally apply to Valve to hang their games on the Steamworks API, but many pirated games will use Spacewar’s AppID to “disguise” the game, thus obtaining Steam’s multiplayer connection function. This is because Spacewar's API is open by default and can be used by any developer during testing, which gives pirated games an opportunity to take advantage of.

　　In other words, when a pirated version of a certain game is popular, a large number of players will log in to the pirated connection mode of the game, and these pirated games will be disguised with the AppID of "Spacewar".

　　Now, the sudden surge in the number of online users of Spacewar happens to overlap with the craze caused by Schedule I after it was released on March 25. On March 30, the online peak of "Schedule I" broke through 400,000, and the same time point was also the historical peak of "Spacewar".

　　It is worth mentioning that on February 26, 2023, the online peak of "Spacewar" reached 70,000, when the multiplayer cooperative horror survival game "Son of the Grim" was launched on February 24; and on January 28, 2024, "Spacewar" broke through the online peak of 100,000 for the first time. The most eye-catching game at that time was "Palworld", which surpassed the online record of "Counter-Strike 2" (CS2).

　　So, "Spacewar" has become an occasional topic of attention and discussion among players over the years, and it also makes people understand that the number of people in "Spacewar" has increased for a certain period of time, which is likely due to the piracy of a certain game.

Although developers hate pirated games, this is a very important official API testing tool after all, and direct removal may affect many developers. In addition, developers of pirated games will always find new ways to switch to other test AppIDs (such as other free developer tools), making Spacewar a gray area of ​​Steam development tools.

　　So, although piracy is a potential problem, Valve seems to have not taken strong intervention measures over the years. After all, playing and downloading pirated games itself comes with risks for players. Most Steam players care more about the collection and badges of the game library. These accumulated achievements and fun cannot be brought by pirated games.