The following year, Bushnell and Dabney went on to found Atari and sell the smash-hit arcade title Pong. The game shipped in a striking fiberglass body in several colors, usually with a sparkle finish. On October 15, 1971, Computer Space made its public debut at the Music Operators of America show in Chicago. He wanted to make an arcade version of Space War!, but computers proved too expensive to use in 1970.
In creating Computer Space, Bushnell took primary inspiration from Space War!, a pioneering action computer game that ran on expensive mainframe computers in the 1960s.
Two men, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, created Computer Space and licensed the design to amusements manufacturer Nutting Associates of California.
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Instead of a software program running on a computer, the game exists entirely as a hardware implementation of moving spots around on a TV screen (in the form of a finite state machine), which is almost mind-boggling to consider in our software-dominated era. Instead, Computer Space uses TTL logic chips to control gameplay. If you’re familiar with Asteroids, it’s similar, but without any space rocks.ĭespite having the name “ Computer Space,” no computer is actually involved in the circuitry of the game.
In Computer Space, you play as a rocket ship flying around a starfield while hunting flying saucers.