"A simulated space battle that pits computer-guided saucers against a rocketship that you control."

These immortal words glow below the vast darkness of space. Silently, two flying saucers hover and coast across the stars, waiting for their next victim. Plunk in a quarter and you are pitted against these villains in the very first installment of a long saga of space combat games that have filled every bar, bowling alley, and video arcade across North America for the past three decades.

The game is Computer Space, the very first arcade video game.

Now, to clarify, Computer Space was not the first video game ever. A couple of machines are vying for that title and there seems to be much speculation and disagreement on the Net as to which machine can stake that claim. More on that later.

Computer Space, however, was definitely the first commercial arcade video game, the predecessor to Donkey Kong, Pacman, Q*Bert, and all other games fondly remembered by my generation.

The first thing that grabs you about this machine is its funky cabinet design. Very few other arcade games ever adopted such a novel shape, the majority of them consisting of much heavier wooden construction with flat sides. No doubt this terminal look of later generation machines was to make them more durable to typical arcade wear and tear as well as slide into place side-by-side. But Computer Space is much more elegant, its lightweight fiberglass body being truly a work of art.

The game itself runs very similar to Atari’s Asteroids game from 1979 though with only two flying saucers instead of chunks of rock for your rocketship to destroy. But to draw a parallel between Computer Space and Asteroids is incorrect. There is an interesting history to this game that really needs to be detailed in order to understand the machine.

In 1952, A. S. Douglas was working on the EDSAC computer in Cambridge University writing about the interaction between Humans and computers. He invented what could be seen as the very first video game, Noughts And Crosses. This Tic-Tac-Toe game displayed a grid of nine boxes on the EDSAC matrix display and players input which box to place their X or O by use of a device somewhat similar to a telephone dial. Unfortunately the EDSAC was necessary in order to play this game and so Noughts And Crosses did not prosper beyond Cambridge.

 animated gif of EDSAC Noughts and Crosses game originally sourced from http://www.pong-story.com

Then in 1958, William A. Higinbotham, a physicist working at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, decided to make something to entertain visitors to the lab. Every autumn, an open house was held at the lab to invite the public in to see what kind of work was being done. Higinbotham noticed that most of the public were not impressed with the photographs and flowcharts displayed for their benefit. Higinbotham decided to rig up a little fun circuit on his oscilloscope to engage people and let them play a little game, much like the pinball machines he himself enjoyed. The game was dubbed “Tennis for Two” and consisted of a white ball bouncing over a net in the center of the screen and two boxes on either side of the scope that people could control. Unlike other tennis-style games that would follow, this game was a side view perspective, and it was very basic; no score, and displayed on a tiny 5” oscilloscope display, yet it proved to be immensely popular. People lined up outside the lab in order to play it.

Since the general purpose of Tennis for Two was to entertain the public coming in to view the lab, Higinbotham never considered patenting or licensing the circuit. Tennis for Two was disassembled and forgotten.

Click here to see some footage of Tennis For Two in action. Apparantly this is a mock up of the actual game, and not the true circuit being demonstrated. If you go to the following link, you can see actual footage of a real Tennis For Two circuit being played (including close ups of the relays as they click) though the format of the video is only in Real Media. Those who do not wish to download Real Media Player can be assured the actual footage of Tennis for Two is almost exactly the same as the mock up (including the lack of any boxes on the sides of the screen representing the players).  

In 1961, a group of engineering students at MIT called the Tech Model Railroad Club were introduced to the Institute’s new mainframe computer, the PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processor) and one of their members, a self confessed computer nerd called Steve Russell, decided to make a game similar to others he had previously designed, but one which would take advantage of the PDP-1’s increased processor speed and large round display. Being big science fiction buffs, Russell and the Club developed a space game where two starships faced off against each other in a game they would title “Space War.” This was a hugely successful game, students would wait eagerly to play and so Russell developed a system of points that would determine how long one could play for.

Click here to see the PDP-1 counting in binary. Click here to see the starting position of Space War, unfortunately no one is playing the game so the ships merely drift into the star at the center of the screen but you do get a hint of what the game ran like.

(Footage taken from this site regarding theTV Game and Digital science exhibit of July 2004 at the National Science Museum of Tokyo)

June 5. 2006: It is with sadness that the news must be reported of the passing of one of Space War's creators, Alan Kotok. Alan was instrumental in the completion of Space War's code and was also credited with developing the gaming joystick. Full details can be found here.

Unfortunately, Space War also required a massive machine in order to be played and so no effort was made to license the game outside of MIT. Space War was capable of being downloaded into other massive computers in a handful of universities across the country and one day a young engineering student at the University of Utah played it and was hooked, his name was Nolan Bushnell.

Bushnell worked in a pinball arcade and noticed that gaming machines were making a great deal of money. He realized there was an untapped resource in creating a computer game from his experiences of playing Space War and set about designing a way such a game could be manufactured (and licensed) to put into arcades alongside pinball machines.

The first issue was the cost. The PDP-1 was $120,000 (in 1960 dollars) and took up about as much room as an automobile. Also, the vector display it used was similarly expensive (something on the order of $15,000). Bushnell decided the best solution would be to use a television set since those were much cheaper and to use an inexpensive computer processor.

Unfortunately, the cheapest processor chip was still about $10,000, far too expensive to use in a single game. Bushnell then entertained the idea of hooking up multiple game terminals to one central computer (not unlike modern data terminals hooked up in a network) but unfortunately the more stations that were hooked up, the less processor cycles could be accessed by each and when his plans reduced down to a maximum of three games connected to one processor, Bushnell gave up because such an arrangement simply could not make the money needed to pay for the computer.

Then Bushnell hit upon the solution: don’t use a processor at all. With a basic enough game, all the action could be handled with discreet components. He drew up plans for a game that ran simply on transistors and diodes. Connect such a game to a television, house it in a space-age cabinet, and you have a cost-effective video game system. You have Computer Space.

And so the game was born. Bushnell and his partner Ted Dabney engineered the game circuits but needed a manufacturer to construct the cabinet, circuit boards and control panels. They formed a company name for themselves, Syzygy Engineering, and approached Bill Nutting of Nutting Associates to manufacture the game. Looking closely at the control panel of any Computer Space, you can clearly see the two company names proudly displayed on their joint venture. Nutting was so impressed with the final product, he wanted to own the game outright. Bushnell retained his ownership of the Computer Space design and the two companies tried to work out a deal. It was agreed that a second game would be made, one that Bushnell had less to do with. The two-player version of Computer Space was made.

Unfortunately, Computer Space was not very successful as a game. The controls were too difficult for the average bar patron, the idea of what you were supposed to do was not intuitive to people who were at that time only accustomed to pinball machines. The gameplay sucked. Bushnell only made $250 off the proceeds of computer Space.

Hence there are so few of these machines out there. It was not a success. But such is the story of Computer Space.

What happened next is the subject of a lot of conjecture and I do not claim to have any deeper insight than can be gleaned from other websites. Herewith I submit the next chapter in the story as best as I can relate (feel free to email me for corrections).

Bushnell and Dabney decided to try again, this time being the sole designer and manufacturer of their game. They left Nutting with the two-player version of Computer Space and embarked on a new project. But in order to do so, they decided on a new name for their company. "Syzygy" (the alignment of at least three astronomical bodies, for example the Sun, Moon, and Earth) was a nice space-age sounding name but it was hard to pronounce and, as it turned out, a candle maker had already incorporated that name. Bushnell turned to a Japanese term used in his favorite board game, Go that served as a warning that you were about to lose a number of your pieces. The phrase was “Atari.”

The Atari Company was formed on June 27 th, 1972. Bushnell hired an engineer, Al Alcorn, to start work on a new game. The game had to be simple. Computer Space had proven that complex games would not be successful, Bushnell emphasized that the first Atari game would need to be accessible to the average person. Keep it simple.

Now it is necessary to switch tracks in the story and go back a few years and follow another designer of another video game.

Ralph Baer was an electrical engineer working for the Loral Electonics company in the 1950's. He was tasked with designing a television set and he took it upon himself to add a little spice to the TV receiver by deciding to add games to it. His idea, however, was not met with much enthusiasm by Loral and the notion sat unfulfilled for several more years.

It was in 1966, when Baer began working for Sander Associates, a military contractor company, that he redressed the idea. He jotted down four pages of notes on what kind of device could hold the games, how it would interact with the television set, and how it would be a separate unit from the TV entirely. He designed what would become known as the "brown box" (named so for the faux wood adhesive panelling surrounding the case).

Baer's machine was able to place white squares on a black background on the screen and the initial game design he and his partner Bill Harrison come up with consisted of a simple "tag" idea with two spots chasing each other, if one spot was caught by the other, it was wiped out.

In 1967, another technician joined them, Bill Rusch. He came up with a similar game idea to the chase notion except this time, the game was made of two large squares that bounced a smaller square back and forth. If a player lined up the large square in time, he could catch the "ball." Rusch and Harrison further alter the idea to change it from being a game of catching the ball, to bounding it off each controller, making it a game of tennis instead. Ralph Baer patented this ping-pong / tennis for two game in 1968. He took the brown box, with all its games to a presentation for Sander Associates, but the electronics firm was designing equipment for the early space program at this point and were not interested in manufacturing game systems.

However, Bill Benders saw the demonstration and took it to Magnavox. In 1972, Magnavox released the very first home gaming console to the public, the Odyssey Model 1TL200.

The phenomenal TV show Icons did an episode regarding Ralph Baer recently and showed him playing several of the games of the Odyssey as well as the Brown Box. See for yourself the original tennis game. Click on the picture for a preview of the episode (approximately 10 megabyte video file to load).

Recently discovered archival footage of Ralph from back in the 60's while at Sander Associates proposing his Brown Box and how it would play. This is a fantastic glimpse of the creator of home video gaming being thrilled with his own invention. This video is in Mac-specific .mp4 format so if you are using a Windows PC, the best way to view the file is not to right click and save it but rather to left click it and allow the 11 megabyte file to load in a new window (either that or specify that the file you downloaded is to be opened in Internet Explorer).

Ralph and assistant playing Ping Pong on the Brown Box

In addition, here are two other videos from the same archive. Clearly Ralph was doing this as part of some proposal to investors which Ralph referred to as Participatory Cable Access Television, or PCATV for short.

An overview of how PCATV would work.

Ralph speculating on the concept of "Impulse Buying" using the PCATV system. This is an amazing video given that it was created in the late 1960's and yet forshadowed the notion of on-line shopping which would not be developed for another thirty years. Ralph Baer was truly a visionary.

Videos originally located at this site, the blog of Chris Melissinos.

The Odyssey proved to be a huge success, despite its rather hefty price tag of around $100. For some of the more complicated games, colored mylar sheets were provided for the user to tape to their TV screen (it was not yet possible to add colored elements into the system).

Unfortunately, there were some minor issues with sales for the Odyssey. Due to bad communication in the sales campaign, it was believed consumers required a Magnavox TV set in order for the Odyssey to work. Additionally, only Magnavox dealers sold the game system, thus further reducing the potential customer base. Add into that the fact that most television salesmen were not trained at pushing a game system, and in time the Odyssey's sales began to fall. However, the home video game console industry was born.

 Odyssey image originally sourced from http://www.pong-story.com

Now, it is about this time that our two stories merge.

On May 29th, 1972 Magnavox held a presentation at "The Magnavox Profit Caravan" at the Airport Marina Hotel in Burlington, CA showing the Odyssey to a collection of industry entrepenuers and engineers. Among the guests was a designer sent by Nutting Associates, Nolan Bushnell. Apparantly, Bushnell reported back that the Odyssey was not very interesting and did not pose any competition to Computer Space. This seems a valid point, since the Odyssey was aimed at home use and Computer Space was aimed at pinball arcades. One machine cost $100 to take home, the other cost a quarter to play.

However, since Bushnell was now forming the Atari company, it is interesting to note that the first arcade game released by Atari was Pong.

Admittedly, Pong was a nice simple game, contrary to Computer Space, which was what Bushnell was aiming at with his new company, but this ping-pong / tennis for two game did cause some eyebrows to raise over at Magnavox. They saw his name on the guestbook of the Odyssey presentation during the Burlington show. Then they saw Atari release Pong to the arcades and make a fortune. Magnavox sued and the case was settled out of court with Atari agreeing to pay a licensing fee.

In the early 1980's, lawyers tried to break this patent and tracked down William Higinbotham. Higinbotham brought his schematics, and gave his part of the story. Once again, the case was settled out of court.

William Higinbotham passed away November 10th, 1995.

After a long search, the actual schematic for Tennis For Two is finally available, clear enough to make out every component. Click on the image on the right to get both pages (it is a two-page schematic). There is an excellent Acrobat pdf. containing part of this schematic. This document is a collection of scanned pages from a book, "The Game People Played" and it goes into some nice detail about ancient games (including the Egyptian Senet game which happens to be one of my favorites) plus the emergence of modern gaming companies and finally computer games. Much of what has already been described on this website is there in further detail.

I have gathered the information above from a number of websites, most of which are detailed in my Links section. If anyone has further information, please send it my way and I will gladly modify my details.

UPDATE: In May of 2007, the video game podcast Retronauts had a discussion on the early history of video games, given that a recent article has announced that 2007 is their 40th year of existence (assuming Ralph Baer's patent from 1967 is to be interpretted as the birth of video games). It is a good, light hearted discussion from today's gamer's point of view. The entire episode can be found on the Retronauts page (look for Episode 24 - 05/17/2007) but if you wish to hear the 12 minute exerpt that contains the early video game talk, it can be downloaded here. WARNING: some foul language is used.