Stephen Russell (born 1937),[1] also nicknamed "Slug",[1] is an American computer scientist most famous for creating Spacewar!, well known for being the first widely distributed video game.

[2] He invented the continuation to solve a double recursion problem for one of the users of his Lisp implementation.

[3] In 1962, Russell created and designed Spacewar!, with the fellow members of the Tech Model Railroad Club at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), working on a Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-1 minicomputer.

[9] He later served as an executive of Computer Center Corporation (nicknamed C-Cubed), a small time-sharing company in Washington (state).

In 1968, he mentored Bill Gates and Paul Allen on the use of the DEC PDP-10 mainframe, while they were part of the programming group of Lakeside School (Seattle).