Now its getting complicated.

So not long before the Magnavox Odyssey was launched an intrepid engineer named Nolan Bushnell had a few ideas of his own about where video games were going to go. Mr. Bushnell was thinking that no one was going to play games on their stupid TVs. You had to connect it up, they didn't have sound anyways and whats with those weird stick on backgrounds? He figured pool halls and dives was a much better place to learn your video game chops. Pinball arcades, long the haunt of rebellious youth, were a perfect spot to set one of these bad boys up.

After seeing a demonstration of Spacewar! in 1970 he built a hand wired arcade machine to play a version of it called Computer Space. Bushnell, along with his partner Ted Dabney, moved pretty quick in getting Computer Space to market. They had also seen a demonstration of the Magnavox Odyssey and were concerned in getting out of the gate first. Now technically, the Odyssey is considered first but only really if you count the fact that it was a "take home" game. Computer Space, released 6 months before Odyssey, was the first commercially available computer game, though designed to go as a stand alone machine in arcades.

The actual machine is quite cool looking, even if its almost 40. With its moulded sparkle blue cabinet and deeply recessed screen giving the player a real sense of immersion. The game electronics are absurdly basic. It didn't use a computer chip or IC's for that matter. Just hard wired components. Output was to a 15" B/W picture tube from a General Electric portable television.


Bushnell and Dabney moved on from Computer Space (it wasn't a huge hit) and formed Atari, who gave us Pong, which was a huge hit.