Steve "Slug" Russell, Martin "Shag" Graetz and Wayne Wiitanen of the fictitious "Hingham Institute" conceived of the game in 1961, with the intent of implementing it on a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-1 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After Alan Kotok obtained some sine and cosine routines from Digital Equipment Corporation, Russell began coding, and by February 1962 had produced his first version. It took approximately 200 hours of work to create the initial version. Additional features were developed by Dan Edwards, Peter Samson, and Graetz.