Long before smartwatches and streaming services, astronauts and cosmonauts were sneaking video games into space. From a Nintendo Game Boy tucked inside the Mir space station to augmented reality headsets aboard the ISS, the history of space gaming is both surprising and deeply human.
According to a report by Space.com, the first documented instance of video gaming in space dates to 1993, when Soviet cosmonaut Aleksandr Serebrov brought a Nintendo Game Boy and a copy of Tetris on his 196-day mission to the Mir space station. Serebrov, who also set a world record for spacewalks during that same mission, later recalled: “During flight, in rare minutes of leisure, I enjoyed playing Game Boy.” His Game Boy and Tetris cartridge sold at auction in New York for $1,220 in 2011.
Five years later, American astronaut Andy Thomas carried a very different title to Mir: Monty Python’s Complete Waste of Time, an FMV mini-game collection for PC, during the STS-89 mission in 1998. The following year, astronaut Daniel Barry flew on STS-96, the first crewed mission to dock with the International Space Station, with a copy of Blizzard’s real-time strategy game StarCraft. Though his packed schedule left no time to actually play, Barry had used the game to bond with his partner and daughter on Earth, regularly Zerg-rushing them before launch. That copy of StarCraft now resides at Blizzard’s headquarters.
In 2005, ISS astronaut John L. Phillips quietly brought along undisclosed PC games for off-duty hours during his six-month mission. The detail only surfaced four years later, during a 2009 call between the ISS crew and President Barack Obama alongside school children.
The most technologically advanced entry came in 2016, when NASA’s Project Sidekick equipped astronauts Scott Kelly and Tim Peake with Microsoft HoloLens augmented reality goggles aboard the ISS. Among the applications was RoboRaid, a game in which players defend against virtual invading aliens by pinching their fingers to fire lasers. Kelly tweeted a photo wearing the headset, summing up the experience as “Space invaders, in space.”
The five episodes span three decades and reflect both the evolution of gaming technology and the enduring need for astronauts to decompress and stay connected with home during months of isolation far above Earth.
