Why Computer Space is the most influential video game you’ve never heard of
This 50-year-old game revolutionized the video game industry, so why have we never heard of it
Failure to launch
Computer Space was an attempt to commercialize the first popular video game. In February 1962, a group of MIT engineers createdSpacewar!, a game that was free to play for those lucky enough to have access to the few bulky, expensive computers of the day.
The initial design was two ships against a star-field background, shooting at each other. It was a technical marvel, but unrewarding to play until the addition in April ofgravity and a large starin the middle of the play area.
At about the same time Computer Space debuted, Stanford University students were waiting in line for hours in the student union to play another version of Spacewar!,The Galaxy Game, which was a hit as a one-off coin-operated installation just down the street from where Bushnell and his collaborators worked.
So was the difference in success between The Galaxy Game and Computer Space a matter of college students versus the average Joe? Was a reproduction of Spacewar!, an engaging game with a theme perfect for the era, really too complex for a public that filled out tax forms without software and found library books using paper index cards?
Key evidence that complexity was not the issue comes in the form ofSpace Wars, another take on Spacewar! that was a successful arcade video game released in 1977.In researching my most recent book, “How Pac-Man Eats,” I became convinced that it wasn’t. That, instead, the common story of the genesis of the commercial game industry is wrong.
Lacking gravity
Why were The Galaxy Game and Space Wars successful at finding an enthusiastic audience while Computer Space was not? The answer is that Computer Space lacked a critical ingredient that the other two possessed: gravity.
The star in Spacewar!produced a gravity wellthat gave shape to the field of play by pulling the ships toward the star with intensity that varied by distance. This made it possible for players to use strategy – for example, allowing players to whip their ships around the star.
Why didn’t Computer Space have gravity? Because the first commercial video games weremade using television technologyrather than general-purpose computers. This technology couldn’t do the gravity calculations. The Galaxy Game was able to include gravity because it was based on a general-purpose computer, but this made it too expensive to put into production as an arcade game. The makers of Space Wars eventually got around this problem by adding a custom computer processor to its cabinets.
Without gravity, Computer Space was using a design that the creators of Spacewar! already knew didn’t work. Bushnell’s story of the game play being too complicated for the public is still the one most often repeated, but as former Atari employeeJerry Jessop told The New York Timesabout Computer Space, “The game play was horrible.”
Article byNoah Wardrip-Fruin, Professor of Computational Media,University of California, Santa Cruz
This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.
Story byThe Conversation
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