Space Travel
Space Travel, written by Ken Thompson on a Multics system in 1969, is a Top Down View 2D Simulation Game of flight around our solar system. You fly a spaceship, flying to and landing on the planets and their moons. It's a Wide Open Sandbox with no goals or enemies. Just fly around. Each planet and moon exerts gravitational pull on your ship, changing its trajectory. Sizes, masses, and distances of of the planets and moons are all depicted realistically. Planets and moons follow orbits, but not realistically; the orbits are perfect circles and all on the same plane.
It's of historical interest because Thompson and Dennis Ritchie invented UNIX to port it to an unused DEC PDP-7.
Tropes used in Space Travel include:
- In-Universe Game Clock: The planets and moons following their orbits.
- No Plot, No Problem
- Ragdoll Physics
- Simulation Game
- Top Down View
- Wide Open Sandbox: Probably the Ur Example.