Computer Space

In Computer Space, the player controls a rocket as it attempts to shoot a pair of flying saucers while avoiding their fire. The game has the three ships flying on a two-dimensional plane set against the backdrop of a starfield. Missiles are fired one at a time, and there is a cooldown period between launches. The player's rocket remains in motion even when the player is not accelerating, and rotating the ship does not change the direction of its motion, though it can rotate at a constant rate.

The flying saucers stay in place or glide in a zig-zag pattern around the screen in tandem, with one staying a constant distance directly below the other. If a ship or missile moves past one edge of the screen, it reappears on the other side in a wraparound effect. While the missile is in flight, the player can turn it left or right by turning their rocket.

While studying at the University of Utah, electrical engineering student Nolan Bushnell had a part-time job at an amusement arcade, where he became familiar with arcade electro-mechanical games such as Chicago Coin's racing game Speedway (1969), watching customers play and helping to maintain the machinery, while learning how it worked and developing his understanding of how the game business operates. In 1969, after graduating from college, Bushnell worked as an engineer in California for Ampex, an electronics company that worked in audio and video recording technology.

While at a club for playing the board game Go, Bushnell met researcher Jim Stein, who worked for Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Project; Bushnell learned from him that Spacewar! was running on the laboratory's PDP-6, and played the game against him there when visiting. Bushnell had previously worked during the summer at Lagoon Amusement Park in Utah as a manager of the games department overseeing the arcade games, and when he saw Spacewar! he believed that an arcade game version of the game would be very popular.

Nutting ordered an initial production run of 1,500 units of Computer Space, an optimistic decision given that a hit arcade game at the time would sell around 2,000 units, though a handful had reached 10,000. Reception to the game from distributors was mixed. While some were excited by the game, others felt it confusing and would amount to nothing more than a passing fad at best. By spring 1972 the game had sold over 1,000 units, and according to Bushnell in 1976 ended up selling between 1,300 and 1,500 units. While this was a commercial success, making over US$1,000,000 (equivalent to about $7,697,000 in 2025), it was a disappointment to Nutting, which had been hoping for a large-scale success like Computer Quiz.

The game's relative lack of success was attributed to the complexity of its controls and a steep learning curve, which pushed away customers used to less complex games. Bushnell noted that the locations in which the game did well, like the Dutch Goose playtest location, were generally located near university campuses; the general market for coin-operated games, however, was in working-class bars, where the patrons were less interested in deciphering a complicated game. In the documentary Video Game Invasion: The History of a Global Obsession, Bushnell explained, "Sure, I loved it, and all my friends loved it, but all my friends were engineers. It was a little too complicated for the guy with the beer in the bar."