9 Pioneering Video Games EVERYONE Forgets
2. Computer Space
In their most basic and tenuous forms, video games have existed since the late 1940s; yet, they didn’t actually become viably marketable and desirable to the general public until the early 1970s.
Although 1972’s Pong is often seen as initiating the arcade boom of the era – and rightly so – it’s Computer Space (from 1971) that earns distinction as the "first commercially sold coin-operated video game" and the first commercially available video game.
Made by Syzygy Engineering and published by Nutting Associates, it drew inspiration from 1962’s Spacewar! and revolved around a rocket ship (you) engaged in dogfights with adversarial flying saucers in a understandably simplistic cosmic location. Also, there’s a set time limit to each round, with the main objective being to land more hits than the enemies.
Directly or indirectly, Cosmic Space spawned several IPs (for example, Asteroids and Space Invaders), not to mention every arcade video game that came after it.
That’s doubly true because its eye-catchingly curvy fiberglass cabinet set a standard for how to draw a crowd.