Two ships are locked in deadly deep-space combat, firing interplanetary ordnance at each other. Whoever survives the most confrontations within a set amount of time is the victor. In the game’s one-player variation, the machine controls one ship, and a two-player version was also made.

Memories: To go all the way back to the beginning of video games in the arcade is to go back to Computer Space – which is also arguably the first arcade flop.

The idea behind the game wasn’t exactly new – it was almost a decade old, in fact. Steve Russell’s college mainframe favorite Spacewar! had captured the attention of a college student named Nolan Bushnell. Having served his own apprenticeship as a carnival barker in his younger years, Bushnell was sure he could sell anyone on entertainment, and he knew a potentially exciting new medium for that entertainment when he saw one.

Soylent Green scenes ©1972 MGM

Bushnell was just short of prophetic, and thrifty as well – he abandoned his early idea, to bring the excitement of Spacewar! on the then-enormously-expensive PDP-11 mainframe, in favor of simplicity and lower cost. He implemented a somewhat stripped-down Spacewar! entirely in solid-state logic circuitry, with no central processor governing the proceedings. An ordinary B&W TV provided the display. The controls were a bit complicated as well – left, right, thrust and fire each had their own button.

Computer Space did, however, set many things in motion: it virtually set the mold for the upright arcade game, for one. Its hooded monitor, backlit marquee and control panel configuration has stuck around to this very day, though one would be hard-pressed to find much resemblance between modern games and the avant-garde sculpted fiberglass casing of Computer Space. There’s never quite been anything like it since.

And there certainly wouldn’t be again where this game’s manufacturer was concerned. When all was said and done, the cost of manufacturing Computer Space outweighed the profits. Nutting & Associates decided to back out of the nascent arcade business, and parted ways with Nolan Bushnell. He didn’t lose his fascination with putting computer games in the arcade, though, and his next creation – this time manufactured by a company he founded with a couple of friends on an initial investment of $250 each – would fare better. It was called Pong.

In the interest of fairness, I’m not rating this game – unlike almost everything I’ve reviewed to date, I haven’t played it in person. The very first production model is owned by video game industry veteran Jerry Jessop, and made a rare appearance at Classic Gaming Expo 2004 in San Jose, but in case you missed that event, there’s still one place where you can see a pristine specimen of Computer Space: in one of the opening scenes of the movie Soylent Green, a completely unaltered Computer Space cabinet is played briefly near the beginning of the movie, and appears later in the background behind Charlton Heston’s character. The movie is set in 2022, but it’s hard enough to find a working Computer Space arcade game in 2004 outside of the above frames from the movie.

However, the story doesn’t end there – a collector claiming to have the original Soylent Green Computer Space machine, the only one Nutting & Associates made with a white casing (specifically at the request of the movie’s producers), surfaced in 2007. Was it the real deal? Look at the pictures for yourself and decide.

(No, really!) (Atari, 1972)

Memories: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? And who hatched that egg (or fried that chicken) first – Atari founder Nolan Bushnell or inventor Ralph Baer, who licensed to Magnavox his concept for a dedicated video tennis game that could be hooked up to a TV set?

Actually, the answer could be neither – a Brookhaven National Laboratory researcher named Willy Higginbotham may have beaten both of them to the punch with a primitive, Pong-style demo created in the MIT labs and using an oscilloscope as a display. Higginbotham created Tennis For Two in 1958 – fourteen years before either Bushnell or Baer founded, respectively, the coin-operated arcade and home video game industries – though it was more of a tech demonstration and less of a game.

Be that as it may, Bushnell and Baer both still fire shots across each other’s bows to this day when the question arises of who created Pong. Pong hit the arcades in 1972, the same year as the first ever home video game, a dedicated TV tennis console called the Magnavox Odyssey. They both made a lot of money – and inspired a great many unlicensed imitators. Which brings us back to the chicken and the egg.

Regardless of who was the first to come up with the concept, both men can at least claim to have ignited industries based on the results.

Things got even more confused in the home video game arena after Bushnell introduced the home Pong unit, produced with a hefty cash infusion (and a new marketing partnership that would last into the 1980s) from Sears. Magnavox made a fatal miscalculation by trying to use the Odyssey to pimp its line of TV sets; when the advertisements implied that the unit would only work with a Magnavox TV, owners of every other brand passed on the Odyssey. Magnavox later dropped that marketing tactic with dedicated consoles like the Odyssey 500, but it was too late – Atari had taken the lead with its own machines such as Pong Sports IV. Magnavox started to develop a hefty console called the Odyssey 5000, which would’ve played much more than just tennis, but abandoned the project in favor of a machine in an almost identically-shaped casing, which could play even more games thanks to interchangeable ROM cartridges. That machine too was almost cancelled until Ralph Baer interceded, and the Odyssey2 was born.

Ironically, Magnavox never made a tennis game for the Odyssey2, while Atari was quick to continue the legacy of Pong with a very early Atari VCS cartridge, Video Olympics.

Pong actually wasn’t the first coin-operated video game; that honor goes to Computer Space (itself later committed to Atari 2600 silicon under the title of Space War), which Bushnell adapted for Nutting & Associates from an MIT mainframe game (which was, again, created by someone else). But Computer Space, as artsy as the art deco lines of its fiberglass cabinet were, didn’t hit the kind of critical mass of popularity (or money) that Pong did. Bushnell field tested his arcade games in bars, and the complexity of Computer Space didn’t mix well with beer – even in space, you can’t drink and drive. Pong’s simplicity was just the ticket. The first Pong machine was tested at a bar called Andy Capp’s, and a few nights after placing it, Bushnell got a worried phone call from the bar’s owner because the machine had stopped working. The problem? Its makeshift coinbox, fashioned out of a milk carton, had overflowed – and as such, it was no longer registering coin drops and wouldn’t allow anyone to start a new game.

The game was transformed into myriad variations, each for a quarter per game, ranging from four-player QuadraPong to a bizarre doghouse-shaped kiddie variation, intended for the waiting rooms of doctors’ and dentists’ offices, called Puppy Pong.

Pong survives to this day, whether in retro collections such as Atari Anniversary Edition, or in bizarrely modernized 3-D form such as 1999’s Pong for the Playstation and other consoles. Nolan Bushnell himself launched an online version of the game through his internet entertainment venture uWink, and a constantly-running game of Pong was the public’s first glimpse of the video game-oriented G4 cable network in April 2002.

To this day, for many people, despite all the advancements and texture mapping and 128-bit systems, video games are still synonymous with Atari’s Pong.

paddles situated on either side of a dotted-line “net.” The ball drops out of mid-air toward one player or the other, who must move into place to (hopefully) bounce the ball into the right direction. It may take a couple of tries to get the ball over the net, but don’t let it take three bounces or you forfeit a turn (and a point).

Memories: Created on a hardware with a very similar architecture to that of Pong, Rebound was Atari’s first attempt to think outside the Pong box. Obviously, there are similarities: Pong paddles stand in for volleyball players, and the ball and “net” graphics are familiar enough to anyone who’s ever laid eyes on Pong. But where Pong only needed to simulate artificial action and reaction, Rebound actually has a tougher job: simulating real live gravity. But Rebound’s gravity is a bit unpredictable and not quite authentic. Sure, volleyballs have been known to go astray, but Sir Isaac Newton would be left reeling by Rebound’s first-ever video game simulation of real physical laws.

Put simply, Rebound is a gravitational crap shoot. You have as good a chance of knocking the ball further back into your own territory as you do of getting it across the net – perhaps even better. Ironically, this problem with Rebound was recognized and resolved, but not by Atari…at least not officially. Rebound was sold at the time that Atari was attempting to upstage its own competition by releasing its own clone games as Kee Games, partly to circumvent a distribution system that favored some manufacturers over others, but also partly to steal the thunder of numerous companies – some of them fly-by-night, others quite reputable future players in the video game industry – who had relentlessly cloned Pong for their own gain. By controlling both the Atari originals and the Kee Games “knockoffs,” Atari founder Nolan Bushnell was playing both sides against the middle.

But with Kee’s version of Rebound, called Spike, Bushnell’s game was almost too clever for Atari’s own good. Spike added a “spike” button which would make a player’s paddle “jump,” effectively spiking the ball over the net in volleyball terms. Spike improved on its “inspiration,” giving Kee Games a leg up. And to add insult to injury, Kee’s next major coin-op would be an original that threatened to upstage Atari’s output entirely, forcing Bushnell to call his own bluff and bring Kee back under Atari’s umbrella…where it had, in fact, been all along.

Considering that the entire coin-op landscape at the time consisted of pinball, Computer Space and Pong (and several unauthorized clones thereof), Rebound was a bold move to get off the video ping-pong table and into a new kind of game, and it may even be considered among the very first (albeit only mildly successful) attempt to model real-world physics in a video game (Pong and Odyssey’s dreamily floating tennis balls and Computer Space’s not-quite-accurate depiction of zero gravity may or may not count here)…but on its own merits it was no threat to Pong’s dominance. Which may be just as well, because the other companies who were relentlessly issuing Pong knockoffs started doing the same with Rebound too.

Two players – one represented by a roving square and the other by a plus sign – roam the ever-changing halls of a maze. The object of the game is for one player to catch the other before time runs out; however, the maze’s ability to constantly reconfigure itself isn’t going to make that easy.

Memories: Among Atari’s first major forays outside of Pong and its endless variations on Pong was Gotcha, a coin-op which can boast the historical first of being the first video maze game. But Gotcha also got stuck with what may be one of the weirdest control schemes ever devised, possibly purely for marketing considerations…and one still wonders what the thought process was behind it.

In practical terms, there’s nothing unusual about Gotcha’s controls; each player can move horizontally and vertically, and to facilitate that movement, Gotcha gave each player a joystick – one of the first arcade games to do so. But the mystifying part is this – at what point did someone (and why does one have a feeling that it was probably freewheeling Atari founder Nolan Bushnell) decide that the best thing for Gotcha would be to cover each joystick with a pink rubber…well…boob?

But indeed that’s exactly what was done with Gotcha. Each joystick was covered in a fleshy pink rubber “mound” (I’m not trying to make this review PG-13 material, but there’s just no way around it), glued to the control panel and giving it the appearance of…well… boobs. The key to the thinking here probably lies in the marketing sell sheet for Gotcha, showing a man groping a young lady from behind, while neither of them seems to be conspicuously depicted as playing the cabinet shown behind them. If Pong has made its mark as the first game that buddies could play in a bar, then Atari was trying to position Gotcha as a game for couples. Or something like that. Because nothing seals the success of a date like grabbing some machine mammaries.

In the end, Gotcha faded into relative obscurity, and perhaps one needs to look past the boobs and go to the root of the game to figure out why: Pong was a simulation of tennis, a game that not everyone is good at. em>Gotcha, on the other hand, is a simulation of “tag, you’re it,” with the ever-morphing maze serving as the only element that couldn’t exist in the real world. And if Atari was trying to make Gotcha out to be a game of video tag for lovers, they should’ve known better: that kind of game of tag is always played better in person rather than on a screen. Anyone who thought, back in 1974, that groping Gotcha’s creepy mechanical boobs was superior obviously needed a date.

Gotcha! scores a couple of important historical firsts with its use of mazes and joysticks, but both of those elements were still several years away from breaking arcade gaming wide open into mainstream pop culture.

Memories: In the early 1970s, arcade distribution was a closely-guarded, exclusive thing. And to an ambitious guy like Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, this represented a problem. Atari wasn’t an old-school pinball outfit like D. Gottlieb & Co. or Bally, and was bucking the system just to land a deal with regional distributors across the country anyway. The distribution system – which allowed one distributor to represent Gottlieb games exclusively in his area, while a competitor would be the only game in town for Bally/Midway fare, for example – was created in the pinball era; many arcade operators would deal exclusively with a single distributor, and of course there were franchise arcades owned by companies like Bally, such as Aladdin’s Castle. It was entirely possible, and not uncommon, to see some manufacturers represented only at one or two arcades in a given area, and their rivals represented only at others. Which was fine with pinball manufacturers, but Bushnell wanted to place Atari’s video games everywhere.

The solution was sneaky, and something that almost certainly couldn’t be done with the level of scrutiny on corporate America today. Bushnell set up a competitor for Atari called Kee Games, headed by his friend and neighbor Joe Keenan. If anyone had bothered to do their homework, it was no secret that Bushnell and Atari engineer Al Alcorn sat on Kee’s board of directors – that sort of thing had to be disclosed, at least on paper. But Bushnell, master showman that he was, created a smokescreen by making a public fuss about the “defection” of several key Atari engineers and programmers to Kee, raising hell about their departure and denouncing Atari’s new crosstown “rival.” Whichever distributors were not carrying Atari, Kee approached and gained access to their market.

As was the case so much of the time in the formative days of the video arcade industry, the games released by Atari and Kee Games were essentially the same, with different artwork and different names, so that in itself wasn’t exactly a dead giveaway. There were already plenty of Pong clones on the market, and Kee was a way for Bushnell to control some of that market while also skirting the distribution system. One planned game, Xs and Os Football, was put on the back burner, and instead Kee’s engineers focused on a new game, Tank! (The postponed football game would later emerge under Atari’s banner, of which more in a moment.) Simple and yet compelling, Tank!’s double joystick controls and monochrome graphics offered gamers their first taste of modern-day combat simulation (prior to this, the arcade was filled either with Pong clones or volleyball-like variations on the Pong theme, or the abstract space combat of Computer Space). Arcade goers flocked to Tank! and Kee Games had a hit on its hands.

In the months ahead, Kee Games actually pulled ahead of Atari; Keenan’s business experience saw him managing things at Kee a little more tightly than Bushnell was handling Atari. Ultimately, Bushnell exercised an option to bring Kee under Atari’s umbrella (as if it wasn’t already) with a public announcement of a “merger” that would make Kee a “wholly owned subsidiary” (which, of course, it already was). Keenan was appointed the CEO of Atari, and the merger made redundant the rivalry of the distribution system established in the heyday of pinball; many distributors abandoned any attempts at exclusivity, and the decks were cleared for the next round of arcade hits.

(images shown are from Ultra Tank; images from the original Tank! game are unavailable at this time.)

Memories: Originated in Japan as Gunman, Gun Fight holds a very special place in video game history – it’s the first arcade game with a microprocessor chip at its core. But that innovation didn’t start in Japan – it started when Dave Nutting, the brother of Bill Nutting (whose Nutting & Associates took one failed shot at arcade success with the first coin-op, Computer Space, in 1971), licensed Gunman from Taito. When originally manufactured by Taito, Gunman’s guts were strictly analog, just like every arcade game that had come before in either country. Nutting had already been experimenting with implementing a game program through microprocessors, and decided to completely remake Gunman from the ground up.

Dave Nutting had a consulting deal at the time with Midway, and licensed Gun Fight to that company for manufacturing and distribution. Legend has it that when Taito’s engineers got their first glimpse of the American version of their game, they went back to the drawing board, reverse-engineering Nutting’s digital architecture to create the hardware platform for their next game, a little thing we now know as Space Invaders (though, in the interest of fairness, that story is also considered by some to be an urban legend). Its display covered with a transparent yellowish overlay, and with a rootin’-tootin’ red cabinet wrapped around it, Gun Fight and its epoch-making microchip took competitive two-player games to a new level – even if it wasn’t really much more than a version of Pong in which players are meant to miss the ball.

A simple version of video ping-pong; players use three knobs, one to control horizontal movement, one to control vertical movement, and a third to control the “English” or spin of the ball.

Memories: Caught flat-footed by the success of Atari’s Pong home console, Magnavox found itself struggling to hang onto the very market that Ralph Baer’s original Odyssey console had created in the first place. Perhaps not surprisingly, Magnavox turned back to the Odyssey, not just for inspiration but to – at least in a limited fashion – put the machine back on the market.

The Odyssey 100 was essentially the bare basic guts of the original Odyssey, simplified drastically. Where the Odyssey was at least able to present the illusion of programmability via its interchangeable circuit cards, Odyssey 100 was hard-wired to play card #1 – the basic Pong-like Tennis game. The functions of the three-knob hand controllers were duplicated with a cluster of three knobs for each player, though they were found on the console itself: players had to basically sit right at the console to play, and the funky “English” effect was still present. And like the original Odyssey, there was no on-screen scoring – players had to abide by the honor system and use plastic “sliders” on the console to keep count.

The only real innovation, in fact, was sound – simple, cricket-like chirps for the impact of the ball. This in itself was hardly an innovation; Odyssey designer Ralph Baer had made provisions for very simple sound effects on the Odyssey, but that part of the design had been omitted when Magnavox mass-produced the machine. Odyssey 100’s sound came from a simple speaker within the console itself. It’s also worth noting that, in its desperate grab for consumers’ attention (and dollars), the Odyssey 100 was – in case you’d somehow managed to miss it in the photo above – molded in bright orange plastic. So much for the relative austerity of the original Odyssey.

Intended to be a comeback for the Odyssey, Odyssey 100 was instead a mere also-ran in the race to get Pong or Pong-like consoles on the market. Just as the arcade Pong had succeeded in popularizing video games in a way that the first arcade game, Computer Space, didn’t manage to do, Atari’s Pong console superceded Odyssey as the major player in the first-generation home console wars. And despite the Johnny-come-lately effort to do what Ralph Baer had always envisioned – put the Odyssey in stores minus the extraneous playing cards, poker chips and odds and ends, at a lower price point – the Odyssey 100 wasn’t about to put Magnavox back on top.

Other than that, the Odyssey 200 is much the same as its immediate predecessor: black and white graphics, sound provided by the console itself and not the TV, and scoring kept with two sliders on the console itself…though the days of trusting the honor system to track video game scoring would end – at least temporarily – as the next console to bear the Odyssey name would start to take the first major steps away from the original Ralph Baer Brown Box design in the Odyssey series.

Above: Smash and Hockey on the Odyssey 200.

The secret behind this quantum leap forward in the series of dedicated Odyssey consoles was the General Instruments AY-3-8500 chip – a single chip designed from the ground up to play Pong and several similar games. This made the Odyssey 300 the first Magnavox video game to feature on-screen digital scoring and the simplified control scheme.

But for some reason, the next game in the series took a technological step backward.

Above: Hockey and Smash on the Odyssey 300.

You control a dot making its way through a twisty maze with two exits – one right behind you and one across the screen from you. The computer also controls a dot which immediately begins working its way toward the exit behind you. The game is simple: you have to guide your dot through the maze to the opposite exit before the computer does the same. If the computer wins twice, the game is over.

Memories: Not, strictly speaking, the first maze game, Midway’s early B&W arcade entry The Amazing Maze Game bears a strong resemblence to that first game, which was Atari’s Gotcha. Gotcha was almost identical, except that its joystick controllers were topped by pink rubber domes, leading to Gotcha being nicknamed “the boob game.” Amazing Maze was just a little bit more austere by comparison.

While it’s not exactly thrilling, The Amazing Maze Game is at least entertaining, and it’s an interesting look back in time; now that Pong and Tank! and Gun Fight had been accomplished, what else could be done with the medium of the video game? Amazing Maze was clearly an attempt to retrofit a classic paper-and-pencil maze game and bring it into the electronic medium, but without the kind of processor power needed to turn the squares and lines into something a little more distinctive, it didn’t really represent much of a step up from the pencil and paper maze. (As an executive in Atari’s Europe office commented years later, in the throes of the industry crash, why bother to make a Rubik’s Cube game to sell for upward of $30 when the actual $5 toy is far more interesting?)

But this was far from the last maze game that would appear in the arcades – in fact, just a few years later, Midway would import a Japanese maze game to America that would change the whole industry. In the meantime, The Amazing Maze Game was a tantalizing taster of things to come.