The First Ever Coin-Operated Arcade Games

The very first coin-operated videogame was called Galaxy Game and it was developed by two students at Stanford University. It was 1971 when Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck made their one and only unit of Galaxy Game. Sadly for them just two months later the founders of Atari, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney released their coin-operated videogame Computer Space. Both games were based on the vector display title Spacewar from 1961 but the difference was Bushnell and Dabney used an actual television set in their cabinet to display the game and they were quick to offer cabinets for commercial sale.

Funding the development by repairing broken pinball machines Bushnell and Dabney formed a company called Syzygy and struck an agreement with Nutting Associates to produce a fibreglass cabinet and distribute the game. They actually sold over $3 million worth of the machines but the venture was still a commercial failure with the game-play proving too tricky for most casual gamers.

The player had to pilot a rocket ship and could rotate their craft with two buttons while using a thruster to move. They had to try and avoid the fire from enemy flying saucers. Then they could shoot back and try to hit the flying saucers to score. If their score was higher than the alien score after 90 seconds the color of the screen would reverse and the process would repeat. This could go on infinitely because the game had no natural end point.

Despite the fact the game didn’t really catch on they did patent the technology which ran the machine and it served in all arcade videogames until the advent of the microprocessor in 1975. By that time Bushnell and Dabney had founded Atari and released the smash hit Pong.