Beyond “Spacewars!” - The History of the First Arcade Video Game
In our previous article “History of Video Games - The First Video Game?…” we talked about a small group of games that are considered as the pioneers of the video gaming industry, which after 4-5 decades has become a multi-billionaire industry (ranked as the #1 entertainment industry, side-by-side with the filmmaking industry.
In this article I will go a step ahead and write about how arcade video games were created. The whole idea of the first arcade video game came from “Spacewar!” (in case you haven’t read my previous article, “Spacewar!” is a video game programmed for a DEC PDP-1 computer by a group of students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Although “Spacewar!” was a “not for profit” video game (it was created with the main purpose of showing PDP-1 computer graphics capabilities), it became very popular at the MIT campus.
Not so long after that, this group of MIT students (or at least some of them) went to Standford University. And as you can expect, they took with them their most beloved “creation”. When “Spacewar!” video game was presented to this whole new audience at Stanford University, it was no surprise that it was very welcomed by students and programmers of this campus. The video game program was ported to a DEC PDP-10 computer and had many updates and changes. As in MIT, it was pretty obvious that “Spacewar!” was a sure-hit in Stanford University (and with so many updates, “Spacewar!” was becoming a state-of-the-art piece of software). It was just a matter of time for somebody to figure out that “you could make some money with this thing”.
So, it happened. In 1971 Bill Pitts (a recent Stanford University AI graduate) and Hugh Tuck (a mechanical engineer and also Bill’s long time friend) formed “Computer Recreations, Inc.” with the idea of manufacturing and marketing the first arcade video game. Bill worked on the programming and electrical connections, while Hugh worked on the arcade enclosures. It consisted of a DEC PDP-11 minicomputer (a new cheaper version from DEC PDP computer series, but powerful enough to run “Spacewar!”) and an HP 1300A Electrostatic Display, all packaged in a walnut veneered enclosure. The first prototype was finished three and a half months later, with an approximate cost of $20,000. They wanted to call their version of the video game “Galaxy War”, but in 1971 (with Vietnam’s war on its peak) the word “war” wasn’t kindly welcomed at Stanford University campus. Because of this, they took the “marketing decision” of calling it “Galaxy Game”.
“Galaxy Game” arcade prototype was installed in Stanford Student Union Coffee Shop for “market testing” purposes. It was priced at 10 cents per game, or 3 games for 25 cents (plus if at the end of the game your spaceship survived, a free game was granted). The game, as expected, was extremely well received by campus students (sometimes players had to wait over an hour with dimes in hand in order to play the game). However, at ten cents per play it would take forever to recover the $20,000 invested. So by 1972 they created a second prototype with a more powerful display interface, which allowed them to use a single PDP-11 computer to control four different arcades (thus spreading the costs in four consoles instead of one and bringing costs per unit down). They made some fancy fiberglass enclosures for each arcade machine and installed them at the coffee shop. As the original single arcade, these ones were heavily played for many years, until 1979 (7-8 years later) when the arcade units were finally removed from the coffee shop due to a hardware failure. So this was the end of an era… and the beginning of another (that we will write about in detail in future articles)…
While all this was happening in Stanford, something very similar was going on at the University of Utah. A young engineer named Nolan Bushnell played “Spacewar!”, and immediately saw a business opportunity there. He used to work at a Pinball Arcade, so he had the idea of a coin-operated version of “Spacewar!” video game to be placed and played side by side with pinball machines (in places like bars, coffee shops, diners, pinball arcades, and so on). But unlike Pitts and Tuck, he had the idea of manufacturing arcade machines for resale instead of keeping them and making profit of arcade players. Together with Ted Dabney (a co-worker at a company named “Ampex”) they started working on this idea together as partners. This was another important point in the history of video games, since it was the first steps of a partnership later to become Atari, the biggest video game company of its era. But I will write more on this subject in the next article.
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