Computer Space

Computer Space is a 1971 arcade machine and is known for being the first commercially made video game, predating Pong and the Magnavox Odyssey by one year. It is an adaption of the video game SpaceWar! which was prevalent in most university campuses in the 1960s.

History
The game was developed by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. Bushnell, who fell in love with the game Space War! sought to adapt it in a coin operated cabinet. While there were computers to develop the game on from the start, it would've been expensive and highly uneconomical to release it in arcade form. They eventually gave up on the project for a few months, but Bushnell couldn't get the idea off his mind and instead he and Dabney worked on developing their own custom hardware to make it much more affordable. After testing it on an expensive Nova computer, they found even the powerful computer couldn't run the game properly, so they made their own entire computing system which paid off. They initially developed it as a two player game, but it couldn't run on the circuits they made so they cut it down to single player. They founded Syzygy (a precursor to Atari) as a development company and pitched the game to a few local manufacturers but got no interest, and the big arcade and pinball manufacturers were too far away from them to demonstrate. Bushnell eventually met with a sales representative for Nutting, and after a meeting with the company they agreed to manufacture the game and made Bushnell and later Dabney chief engineers for the company. Two rivals emerged named Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck, who also sought to make a coin operated cabinet adaption of Space War. Pitts and Tucker ended up creating the similar Galaxy Game and placed their cabinet at the Tressider Union at Stanford University a few months after Computer Space was released to the Dutch Goose bar near Stanford University. Computer Space had the wider audience since the bar was open to the public, and the video game craze was born.

Why It Rocks

 * 1) Simple to learn, but impossible to master.
 * 2) Simple gameplay mechanics.
 * 3) No game over, but the objective makes it competitive.
 * 4) At the time one game cost 10 cents and 25 cents for three games.
 * 5) The FIRST COMMERCIALLY ACCESSIBLE VIDEO GAME PERIOD!!!!
 * 6) While video games had existed even before this, they were most kept in university campuses, the release of the Computer Space exposed video gaming to the world.
 * 7) Influenced a few similar games, most notably Asteroids.
 * 8) Unique design of the arcade cabinet.

Trivia

 * There's a website called Computer Space Fan that's dedicated to this game and lists surviving units and cabinets in detail.
 * It is the first video game mentioned in the book An Illustrated History of 151 Video Games.
 * The arcade cabinets are made out of fiberglass and came in different colors including blue, red, green, several rare yellow cabinets and a one off white cabinet.
 * These are highly sought after by video game and arcade collectors and fetch prices from $1,000 to $10,000 in the US.