PDP-10 Timesharing World Series Review (DOS)
~by tankMage (April 2024)
A living piece of history.
I knew I had to try PDP-10 Timesharing World Series the moment I saw it while browsing a website. It’s not every day you stumble across a game that was made way back in 1965. As one would expect, it’s a simplistic game that asks players to choose a number between 1 and 1000, then generates a spreadsheet detailing all of the major plays in a hypothetical World Series game featuring the Dodgers and Yankees. I’ll keep my feelings about the Yankees out of this review, but I wonder why they were chosen since the World Series was the Dodgers vs. Twins in 1965. I guess one of the programmers was a Yankees fan.
Honestly, there’s really not a lot to say about this game. It works as advertised and I can see it being something fun to do on slow work days back in the 1960s if you had access to a mainframe. By modern standards it barely qualifies as a game, but the contributions of World Series and other games from this era to the evolution of computer games are immaterial.
John Kemeny and Keith Bellairs are credited as the developers. It would be great if we could find out what the creators of World Series were thinking when they made it. I looked up Kemeny and Bellairs, but found only a short Wikipedia article on the former and nothing on the latter. That said, Kemeny (if I have the right guy) was an important figure in the development of modern computing who did a lot of work on basic programming, so it’s not surprising he had a hand in creating an early computer game. Sadly, Kemeny passed away in 1992, which means there’s no way we can ask him about World Series. Why he and Bellairs made the game will likely remain a mystery forever.
While the motivations of its creators may be forever a matter of speculation, the game is playable on DOSbox thanks to the efforts of someone known only as Benedict, who modified the original code to run on the emulator. Benedict also made sure the source code documentation was included, so you can see just how World Series was designed. From a historical standpoint, World Series is really exciting, especially since we have the actual source code. At this point in history old mainframes like the PDP-10 are museum pieces that are generally out of the reach of the normal user, so the type of preservation work people like Benedict carry out is really helpful. Hopefully a few more of these games will surface.
Is PDP-10 Timesharing World Series worth playing?
I purposely refrained from giving this game the usual “X out of 10” rating I assign in my reviews. How do you score what may have very well been the first sports game ever made? That said, World Series probably isn’t something most people would care about let alone try. If you are reading this review, you likely have a lot of interest in gaming history, in that case World Series is very much worth playing even if only for a few minutes. Sure, it’s nowhere near the level of even an Atari 2600 game, but there’s something magical about seeing a relic from the past come to life.
Once again, Benedict from MyAbandonware deserves credit for making World Series available on DOSbox. If you want to play this game, you can find it via the link below.
https://www.myabandonware.com/game/the-pdp-10-timesharing-world-series-pnl
There’s also an entire archive of old software, which is where World Series was found:
http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de//bits/
Thanks for checking out my review of PDP-10 Timesharing World Series!