History page 5

One would assume at this point that the crazy notion of playing video games was finally put to rest, and it very nearly was. What turned things around? How did the multi-million dollar industry we know today surface from such flawed beginnings? And how did it involve Computer Space?

Enter Nolan Bushnell, an electrical engineering student at the University of Utah. Bushnell was one of the students lined up at the PDP in his university to play Steve Russell’s Space War and he loved it. He was also very impressed at the frenzy Space War caused with his fellow students, watching them skip classes and wait for hours just for the chance to play the game. Speaking of games, Bushnell was partly funding his college tuition by working at Lagoon Amusement Park in Farmington, Utah and he noticed that coin operating gaming machines where making a lot of money. He thought if he could create something like Space War and stick it in a bar or pool hall, he could start up a new kind of business. But how could it be accomplished?

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 then 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 (similar to modern data terminals hooked up in a network) but unfortunately the more stations that were hooked up, the fewer processor cycles could be accessed by each terminal 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 discrete components. He drew up plans for a game that ran simply on transistors and diodes, with no CPU at all. Connect such a game to a television set, 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 logic (click here to see the rocket logic) 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.

Look closely at the control panel of any Computer Space and you can clearly see the two company names proudly displayed. 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. Eventually 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 appears to be the result of that negotiation.

“Appears to be” is definitely the correct term for this result as there is an uncertainty about the exact origins of the 2 player unit. Deep research unveils a lot of inconsistencies about the machine. Click here for a more in depth investigation one visitor has taken upon himself; the results make for a curious read.

Unfortunately, Computer Space was not very successful as a game. The controls were too difficult for the average bar patron to figure out, 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 made only $250 off the proceeds of Computer Space.

Hence there are so few of these machines in existence. It was not a success. In time the project was left with Nutting Associates but even they stopped production of the machine.

What happened next, particularly with regards to the origins of the next game, is something of a legend in the annals of video game history.