Computer Space becomes the first arcade video game made for sale

What happened

No computer sat inside the cabinet. Bushnell had wanted to sell Spacewar to arcades, found the hardware impossibly expensive, and with Dabney worked out how to produce the same motion from ordinary logic chips wired to do one job. A rocket rotated and thrust against two flying saucers, with momentum carrying it after the thrust stopped. Nutting Associates, a small firm selling quiz machines, agreed to build it and wrapped the electronics in swooping fiberglass that looked like nothing else on an arcade floor.

Placed in bars next to pinball tables, the machine puzzled its customers. Four buttons controlled rotation, thrust and firing, inertia never let go, and there were no instructions a drinker could absorb in ten seconds. Bushnell argued afterward that the game did well in places full of students and poorly everywhere else, an explanation that fits the sales pattern reasonably well. Around fifteen hundred units was respectable for Nutting and disappointing for its designers, who concluded that the money lay in manufacturing and distributing their own work.

The world at the time

Coin-operated amusement in 1971 was a mature trade with its own conventions: manufacturers in Chicago and Japan, regional distributors holding territorial rights, and operators who judged a machine purely by weekly collections. Novelty sold, but only novelty a stranger could understand while standing up. Electro-mechanical guns, driving games and pinball filled the locations, and nobody had a category for a screen.

What it changed

Bushnell and Dabney left within months to build their own cabinets, carrying the crucial lesson that simplicity rather than sophistication sold coin-operated games. Nutting never had another hit. The discrete-logic method the two had improvised became standard practice across the young arcade industry until programmable chips replaced it in the middle of the decade.