IT’S hard to imagine now but the first video games were developed on stolen time.

They were curiosities, programmed by “hackers,” works of idle play that have reached us in something like a fennel stalk — concealing a gift of fire that has set the entertainment industry ablaze.

Today, the US military-industrial complex would rather we forgot such awkward truths. Awkward, because they unwittingly bankrolled them.

These Olympian gods, having clamped a modern Prometheus in chains, would rather we acknowledge a neoliberal narrative — dislocated from material contexts and rooted in myths of entrepreneurial creativity.

That video games were designed for war and fulfil a role in the militarisation of society is something better left unsaid.

Few in such circles recognise the fact that gaming, like literature and film before it, has become a new arena for class struggle.

Indeed, all contenders for the title of “first video game” have something in common: a paper-trail, leading to the US Department of Defence.

In 1962, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, expectations were fixed on missile targeting systems capable of countering a Soviet first strike.

Instead, the Kennedy administration got Spacewar!, a two-player game conceived by Steve Russell.

Designed on a PDP-1, Russell and his colleagues were able to secure expensive development time, using a mix of pretences to build an interactive experience where spacecraft fired torpedoes at one another around a gravity well.

Needless to say, it was a far cry from contemporary video games. The display resembled a sonar panel, with neon green blips, rendered without sound against a black, starless void.

The controls were wooden boxes, capped with  switches that players could flick to fire and move. And yet, it worked.

Before long, Spacewar! swept across the military’s Arpanet as an early instance of open-source freeware.

A decade later, a tournament was even held at Stanford University, in a room plastered with posters decrying Nixon and the Vietnam war.

All this, from students, supposedly working on solutions to electronic battlefield projects.

Incredibly, SpaceWar! was not the first attempt to repurpose military funds from within.

In 1958, William Higginbotham, a physicist who worked on the atomic bomb, devised Tennis for Two — a sports simulation, designed on computers intended for calculating ballistics.

One can only imagine the response of his superiors when it was unveiled at his laboratory’s annual visitors’ day.

Another story relates to Ralph Baer, an engineer who redirected the resources of his 500-man team to build a console that could be connected to a television set.

Filing out patents under the name of his employers at Sanders Associates, a company supplying the US military with sophisticated technologies, Baer told his managers nothing and during the summer of 1966, laid the groundwork for the Magnavox Odyssey, which made history in 1972 as a commercial gaming platform.

The origin of video games then, stems from Washington’s attempts to control an emerging technoscientific cognitariat with the help of multibillion-dollar defence corporations.

Through channels like the Advanced Research Projects Agency, government money entered research centres in a bid to steer the first mass draft of immaterial labour in the US towards preparations for a conflict with the Soviet Union.

And yet, owing to the efforts of an imaginative counterculture, a digital, ludocentric form of art appeared, kick-starting a global phenomenon worth today £102 billion.

There is, of course, a bitter irony in all this. The hacker ethics that liberated computers and games from the Pentagon has been subsumed for profit under capitalism.

As Karl Marx observed: “The ruling ideas of every age are the ideas of the ruling class.”

Around the world, gaming studios are falling foul of the military-industrial complex, shipping titles that are really just recruitment drives, championing imperialist agendas.

Elsewhere, developers are coerced to peddle neoliberal fantasies — releasing games that consistently fail to address the plight of ordinary people.

Often these same developers are underpaid, exploited and forced to “crunch,” working overtime for long periods without sleep until a product is in a sellable, or near-sellable state.

Arguably, a stage is being set, with opportunities for the left. If only we can challenge player expectations and provide critical perspectives, it might not be game over yet.