units but was not the runaway success
Syzygy was hoping for. After a couple of
variants were released, Syzygy closed in
1976, shortly after being reborn as Atari.
Baer’s Magnavox Odyssey had gone on
sale shortly after Computer Space’s release,
and computing as entertainment was now
entering the mainstream.
New Atari hire Allan Alcorn was given
a ‘warm-up’ exercise by Bushnell. He was
asked to create a two-player table tennis
game featuring two paddles and a moving
‘ball’, viewed from a top-down perspective.
The inspiration probably came from the
game Tennis for the Magnavox Odyssey;
indeed, the similarity between the two
eventually resulted in Magnavox filing
a lawsuit against Atari. Bushnell
denied that he was inspired by Tennis
on the Odyssey, and said that Pong
was similar to a game on the PDP-1.
(The case was eventually settled out
of court.)
After designing the custom circuitry
and making significant improvements
to the original specification in order
to make the game harder to play,
Alcorn’s machine was fitted with
a pinball-style coin slot with an
improvised holder made from a
milk jug. The prototype Pong arcade
machine was installed in Andy
Capp’s Tavern in August 1972. A few
days later came that fateful call from
the bar’s owner – and with that, a
legend was born.game is not only significant because of
its influence, but also for the attitudes it
fostered towards software development.
Spacewar!’s father was Stephen Russell,
a member of the Tech Model Railroad
Club (TMRC), a group that met at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT). TMRC had a philosophy of
openness and experimentation, and are
often described as the first true ‘hacker’
group. Their policies of openness and
collaboration influence the open-source
movement to this day. Russell, along with
his fellow TMRC members, had become
transfixed with MIT’s new PDP-1 computer.
Although several demonstrations
existed to show off the power of the
machine, none were truly interactive or
demonstrated all its capabilities at once.
Spacewar! was designed to do just that, a
fun experience that pushed the PDP-1 to
the limit. The screen showed two ships
that could move and fire at each other.
News of the game quickly spread across
American universities. Improvements were
made, such as hyperspace mode (sound
familiar, Asteroids fans?), and ports were
made to more powerful computers. It
was during this period that the game was
demonstrated to Nolan Bushnell, although
the exact dates are disputed.
BIRTH OF A LEGEND
By the 1970s, reduced component costs
and increasing computation power made
computer games accessible to the general
public for the first time. Nolan Bushnell
had formed Syzygy Engineering with Ted
Dabney in order to produce a derivative of
Spacewar! that could be played in penny
arcades and bars. They saved money by
designing purpose-built logic circuits, an
approach that would be common in the
early days of arcade machines.
The resulting Computer Space (1971),
in its futuristic cabinet, sold over 1000
THE ‘BROWN BOX’
As computers started to spill out of universities into businesses, and the cost of electronics
continued to fall, Ralph Baer continued to develop his idea for playing games on a television.
He was convinced that TVs could be used for games as well as watching programmes. By
1967, his ‘Brown Box’ prototype proved it was feasible. Magnavox licensed the technology
and developed it into the ‘Odyssey’, released in 1972. Baer is often referred to as the ‘father
of video games’.“Douglas created a noughts
and crosses board and in turn a
playable video game, OXO”
A rare photo of Nimrod at the
Festival of Britain. The player sat
at the desk with the ‘board’ and
Nimrod’s moves were shown on
the panel of light bulbs.
A publicity shot for Computer
Space. The radical design was
intended to make it stand out
from the regular pinball tables.In The Beginning: exploring the earliest video gamesInterface
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