The game that was designed to run on an oscilloscope!
Space War gets nominated as the world's first video game, and, granted, it sure was one of the first, though, who the first ever game might be, I think will always be a question of looking into a muddled, gray area, not that easy to define territory. Still, this was a game that was used to demonstrate what a video game could be. You basically control a ship, while the opponent controls a ship also. The original game's controllers were improvised paddle systems, but, in this DOS recreation, you can use your keyboard! The game, again, the original, used vector graphics, plotted on the screen of the oscilloscope in real time. Of course, that approach is not available on a PC, but, to its merit, the game draws the dots it uses pretty close to the original. Anyway, you will want to learn a bit about the game's use of gravitational physics, (which can be toggled on or off, though, with them off, the game adds some diversity to the mix) as this can aid you better fire your torpedoes. Yeah, it's a pretty darn cool arcader, for a first game ever, quite diverse and hard to master. What else can I say about it?! That it is packed inside 9KB, probably less than the storage needed for this review, hehe! So, as an alternative, I'd say try OXO, a tic tac toe game, one that also gets mentioned as one of the first games ever. The original dates back to 1952 but this recreation was released in 2002.
