 Although the market for commercial games — and software in general — was small , due to the cost of computers limiting their spread to research institutions and large corporations , several were still created by programmers and distributed by the computer manufacturers . A number of games could be found in an April 1962 IBM program catalog . These included board games , " BBC Vik The Baseball <unk> " , and " Three Dimensional Tic @-@ Tack @-@ Toe " . Following the spread of Spacewar , further computer games developed by programmers at universities were also developed and distributed over the next few years . These included the Socratic System , a question and answer game designed to teach medical students how to diagnose patients by Wallace <unk> in 1962 , and a dice game by Edward Steinberger in 1965 . 
