Everything in the archive on one continuous line, oldest first. Narrow it by period, platform, company,
region or category, or search for a word that appears anywhere in an entry.
Nutting Associates manufactured Computer Space from a design by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, making it the first coin-operated video game produced for sale. Roughly fifteen hundred cabinets were built, and returns disappointed everyone involved.
Whatever its commercial fate, the machine established that a video game could be built from inexpensive components and sold as a piece of furniture, without a computer, a laboratory or a research budget. Every arcade cabinet for the next four years used that approach, and its designers' frustration with the deal produced the company that dominated the decade.
Rather than hand another design to an outside manufacturer, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney set up their own company in California to engineer, build and sell coin-operated games. Its name came from the board game Go.
This was the first company whose entire purpose was making video games, and it set the shape of the business: engineering and manufacturing under one roof, cabinets sold through amusement distributors, consumer products sold at retail. Its founders' habits, good and bad, were copied by an industry with no other model to look at.
