This year marks the 50th anniversary of the world’s first commercial computer game. Computer Space, created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney for Nutting Associates, first appeared at the Music Operators of America show in October 1971.

Before Computer Space appeared, coin-operated arcade machines existed only in so-called electro-mechanical formats. Made out of simple circuits and mechanical controls, you could insert a coin to play driving games, submarine simulators, hunting games, or the ubiquitous pinball machines. Computer Space though was the first game to be controlled by a microchip and to send its output directly to a Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) for display.

The design of Computer Space originates with Spacewar!, a game created for the PDP-1 in 1962 to test the limits of the hardware and to demonstrate the computer’s new, almost magical, CRT display technology. In Spacewar! two spaceships, each controlled by a player, moved around a starfield firing missiles at each other. Bushnell had played Spacewar! at university, and dreamed of making money from it by putting a coin slot on it in the same manner as an electro-mechanical machine.

However, programmable computers were expensive at the time. The PDP-1 sold for the equivalent of about one million dollars in today’s money and the only mini-computer affordable at the time was too slow to run the game. Instead, Bushnell and Dabney designed a variant game that could run directly on easily-available hardware. Rather than having two people play against each other, this new game would pit the player against two flying saucers controlled by the machine.

The games were installed in a beautiful cabinet which, looks so futuristic that one appears in the 1973 film Soylent Green as an example of the type of entertainment system that might be found in a rich person’s home in the far-off future of 2022. While Computer Space was a modest success, selling somewhere between five hundred to a thousand units – the exact number is unknown – it launched the video game industry as we know it today. 

Bushnell and Dabney left Nutting Associates to set up a new company named after the equivalent call to “Check” in Chess for Bushnell’s favourite game, Go. The new company, Atari, launched their first game Pong in 1972 with a machine at Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale, CA. Two weeks after installation, the game had developed a problem. When the game’s engineer Al Alcorn went to the bar to troubleshoot, he found that it had stopped working because the coin box was filled completely to the brim with quarters. 

8,000 Pong arcade machines were created and sold – but the central display screen for the game was no more or less than a standard television. A version of the game was soon licenced in an exclusive deal with Sears into a console that could be hooked up to your home television set. 150,000 units of this machine were sold over Christmas 1975.

These early games had a few variant options available by changing switches in the console, but the next technological leap was to create machines that could play games other than the ones built directly into the hardware. 

Enter the cartridge system, where simply inserting a new cartridge would allow you to play a different game. The first cartridge system was the Fairchild Channel F, co-created by Jerry Lawson, an African-American engineer, and the first video game that Jerry Lawson ever saw was Computer Space.

While the Fairchild Channel F innovated the use of cartridges to store games on, it was the Atari VCS (latterly known as the Atari 2600) that hit mass-market popularity. Over its 15-year reign from 1977 to 1992, over 30 million were sold, and a total of almost 600 games were released for the platform.

When the CD was introduced to the world, with its ability to store digital data at high bandwidth, the cartridge format fell out of favour and instead games were shipped on CDs. Later, the introduction of cheap hard drives allowed games to be stored directly in the console. Then, the introduction of high-bandwidth internet connectivity brings us to where we are today with many of the latest consoles no longer even having the ability to add games to the machine physically. Instead, new games are purchased and downloaded from the internet or even delivered by a subscription model such as the Xbox Game Pass.

But all of these games can trace their ancestry back to the original Computer Space – the first fully-electronic arcade game, and the first commercial computer game.