Boasting a curved, futuristic fiberglass cabinet that truly looks like an alien art object, Nutting Associates’ arcade video game Computer Space hits an amusement market dominated by pinball machines and jukeboxes. Devised by Nolan Bushnell, Computer Space is a coin-operated homage to the mainframe game Spacewar, complete with complicated controls, and fails to sell well. Bushnell later has a revelation: arcade games will need to be easy to learn (but not easy to beat) in order to catch on. 
Two recent college graduates in California install a two-player computerized arcade game called Galaxy Game, a modified version of Spacewar! running on a DEC PCP-11 minicomputer, on the Stanford campus, with the machine charging ten cents to play. Whether it is the first coin-operated video game is debated for years, though it can stake the claim of being the earliest computer-controlled coin-op (though the honor of being the first computer-controlled mass-produced arcade game will eventually rest with 1975’s Gun Fight). Galaxy Game remains on the Stanford campus through 1979. (As of the 21st century, it is on display at the Computer History Museum.)