Computer Space is a 1971 space combat arcade video game. Created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney in partnership as Syzygy Engineering, it was the first arcade video game as well as the first commercially available video game. Computer Space is a derivative of the 1962 computer game Spacewar!, which is possibly the first video game to spread to multiple computer installations. It features a rocket controlled by the player engaged in a missile battle with a pair of hardware-controlled flying saucers set against a starfield background. The goal is to score more hits than the enemy spaceships within a set time period, which awards a free round of gameplay. The game is enclosed in a custom fiberglass cabinet, which Bushnell designed to look futuristic.
Bushnell and Dabney designed the game in 1970–71 to be a coin-operated version of Spacewar!. After the pair were unable to find a way to economically run the game on a minicomputer such as the Data General Nova, they hit upon the idea of instead replacing the central computer with custom-designed hardware created to run just that game. While they were working on an early proof of concept, Bushnell found a manufacturer for the game in Nutting Associates. Working in partnership with Nutting, the pair completed the game and ran their first location test in August 1971, a few months prior to the display of a similar prototype called Galaxy Game, also based on Spacewar!. It was first shown to industry press and distributors at the annual Music Operators of America (MOA) Expo in October. With encouraging initial interest, though mixed responses from distributors, Nutting ordered an initial production run of 1,500 units, anticipating a hit game.
While the game was successful and validated Syzygy's belief in the future of arcade video games, selling over 1,000 cabinets by mid-1972 and ultimately 1,300–1,500 units, it was not the runaway success that Nutting had hoped for. The game spawned one clone game, Star Trek (1972), and Nutting produced a two-player version of Computer Space in 1973 without involvement from Bushnell and Dabney. The pair left Nutting in June 1972 and incorporated Syzygy as Atari, launching the successful Pong (1972) as their next arcade game. Computer Spaces release marked the ending of the early history of video games and the start of the commercial video game industry.
Background At the beginning of the 1970s, video games existed almost entirely as novelties passed around by programmers and technicians with access to computers, primarily at research institutions and large companies. One of these games was Spacewar!, created in 1962 for the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-1 by Steve Russell and others in the programming community at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This two-player game has the players engage in a dogfight between two spaceships while maneuvering on a two-dimensional plane in the gravity well of a star, set against the backdrop of a starfield. The game was copied to several of the early computer installations in American academic institutions after its initial release, making it probably the first video game to be available outside a single research institute.
Spacewar! was extremely popular in the small programming community in the 1960s and was widely recreated on other minicomputer and mainframe computers of the time, later migrating to early microcomputer systems. Early computer scientist Alan Kay noted in 1972 that "the game of Spacewar! blossoms spontaneously wherever there is a graphics display connected to a computer," and contributor Martin Graetz recalled in 1981 that as the game initially spread it could be found on "just about any research computer that had a programmable CRT". Although the game was widespread for the era, it was still very limited in its direct reach: the PDP-1 was priced at and only 53 were ever sold, most without a monitor, which prohibited the original Spacewar! or any game of the time from reaching beyond a narrow, academic audience. The original developers of Spacewar! considered ways to monetize the game, but saw no options given the high price of the computer on which it ran. Computer Space, which would not be released until 1971, was the first commercial video game based on Spacewar!.
Gameplay
In Computer Space, the player controls a rocket as it attempts to shoot a pair of flying saucers while avoiding their fire. The game has the three ships flying on a two-dimensional plane set against the backdrop of a starfield. Missiles are fired one at a time, and there is a cooldown period between launches. The player's rocket remains in motion even when the player is not accelerating, and rotating the ship does not change the direction of its motion, though it can rotate at a constant rate. The flying saucers stay in place or glide in a zig-zag pattern around the screen in tandem, with one staying a constant distance directly below the other. If a ship or missile moves past one edge of the screen, it reappears on the other side in a wraparound effect. While the missile is in flight, the player can turn it left or right by turning their rocket.
Player controls are clockwise and counterclockwise rotation, forward thrust, and firing missiles. Whenever the player is hit by a missile or flying saucer, the screen flashes and the player's rocket spins rapidly and disappears before reappearing in the same location. If a flying saucer is hit by a missile, the screen flashes, and the saucer briefly disappears. Counters on the right side of the screen track the number of times both the player's rocket and the saucers have been destroyed, as well as how long that round of gameplay has lasted. A round has a time limit—adjustable by the operator—of 60 to 150 seconds, with a default of 90; when the time limit is reached, the game ends if the player's score is lower than the computer's. If it is higher, the black and white colors invert in a "hyperspace" feature, and another round begins for free; the game continues on to new rounds with the display colors inverting indefinitely if the player continues to win. One round costs a quarter, or two quarters if the machine is adjusted against the instruction manual's recommendations for optimal pricing. The game displays distorted characters if the player or computer scores pass 9, and each score independently resets to 0 for both visual and gameplay purposes if it reaches 9 for the computer or 16 for the player.
In the two-player version of the game, a second game mode is added featuring two player-controlled rockets fighting each other instead of computer-controlled ships. The modified control panel contains two sets of controls, with joysticks replacing the movement buttons on some machines.
Development
While studying at the University of Utah, electrical engineering student Nolan Bushnell had a part-time job at an amusement arcade, where he became familiar with arcade electro-mechanical games such as Chicago Coin's racing game Speedway (1969), watching customers play and helping to maintain the machinery, while learning how it worked and developing his understanding of how the game business operates. In 1969, after graduating from college, Bushnell worked as an engineer in California for Ampex, an electronics company that worked in audio and video recording technology.
While at a club for playing the board game Go, Bushnell met researcher Jim Stein, who worked for Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Project; Bushnell learned from him that Spacewar! was running on the laboratory's PDP-6, and played the game against him there when visiting. Bushnell had previously worked during the summer at Lagoon Amusement Park in Utah as a manager of the games department overseeing the arcade games, and when he saw Spacewar! he believed that an arcade game version of the game would be very popular. The high price of computers capable of running the game, however, meant that any such arcade game would not be economically feasible. In the spring of 1970, however, he saw an ad for the Data General Nova computer, which cost only , and thought again about his Spacewar! arcade game idea. He believed that at that price the game would be economically viable if he were able to connect four monitors and coin slots to allow multiple games to run simultaneously. He showed his office mate and fellow Ampex engineer Ted Dabney Spacewar! at the Stanford laboratory, and the two agreed to work together to try and design a prototype of the game. Bushnell had some experience with computers and digital engineering but not enough to create the game on his own, while the older Dabney was more experienced with analog and hardware engineering, as he had designed video processing and control circuits and power supplies.
After agreeing on an initial idea, Bushnell and Dabney began designing a prototype based on a Nova. Over the summer they made plans for developing the game, and in the early fall they were joined by Larry Bryan, a computer programmer who also worked at Ampex. Bushnell and Dabney put US$100 each into a partnership, named Syzygy by Bryan, in order to purchase components. They soon ran into difficulties with their planned design: the computer was not powerful enough to run multiple simultaneous games and refresh the monitors as fast as was needed to make the games playable. Bryan realized this soon after starting work on the project in August 1970 while trying to design the code needed to run the games, and he left the project before Syzygy was officially formed without ever contributing any money. Bushnell and Dabney continued working on the design for several more months.
The pair attempted to reduce the load on the computer by replacing subroutines—such as displaying the background stars—with specialized hardware, but it proved insufficient; even reducing the number of monitors was not enough. By the end of November 1970, Bushnell decided to abandon the project as untenable; Dabney had stopped working on the design a while before. It is unclear if the pair were aware that Data General had demonstrated a more powerful variant of the Nova, sold for US$8,000, running a single game of Spacewar! at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in December 1968, though that solution would have been too expensive for an arcade game, which typically cost US$1,000 at the time. Unable to put the game idea out of his mind, however, Bushnell soon thought of a way to manipulate the video signal on the screen with hardware without a computer having to control it, and from there the pair came up with the idea of building hardware components to handle parts of the game on behalf of the computer.