COMPUTER SPACE
■ Prior to 1971, the public was wholly unaware of videogames. That’s not to say that they didn’t exist, mind – they just existed behind closed doors, accessible only to those fortunate few at universities that hosted enormously expensive home computers. The most popular of these early games was Spacewar!, a competitive shooting game that spread from institution to institution throughout the Sixties. This was the starting point for Syzygy, an engineering company founded by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney.
“I was emulating the game Space War that I had played in college on a PDP1,” Nolan recalls, half a century on from the release of the game. “My objective was to create the first coin-operated videogame. I knew the economics of that business from my experience as manager of the games department at an amusement park where I worked while in college. The cost of integrated circuits had dropped precipitously and I felt confident that I could make the economics work,” he explains.
Indeed, those looking for thrills had access to electromechanical amusements and pinball machines, so the business model was well established – it was only the technology that was particularly novel. The game set the player’s spaceship against two computercontrolled UFOS, in a competition to score more hits than the enemy – a popular theme, given the Cold War competition between the USA and the Soviet Union. A brightly coloured plastic cabinet evoked the futurism of the era, and looked considerably fancier than the wooden cabinets that became commonplace as the arcade business grew. “Many decisions that I made were a combination of young exuberance and passion for the subject,” Nolan recalls “I thought a sleek, space-aged looking cabinet, which had never been done before, would be proper housing for the game.”
“I was confident from the start. The game was so revolutionary for the coin-op market and the state of games at that point,” Nolan recalls. It was a modest success for its manufacturer Nutting Associates, but the spaceship proved difficult for players to control. “Although it turned out to be too complex to be a massive success, I was happy with the few million sales it did make. Subsequently we simplified the gameplay with Pong, which was a tremendous success,” Nolan continues. Indeed, Computer Space was not the biggest videogame in the world – but it was the very first one you could put a coin in and play.