History
Previous efforts in bringing the experience of Spacewar! to a mass market were centered on the minicomputer paradigm of the college campuses where it originated - that of a central computer distributing software to various remote terminals. Computer Space was innovative for establishing the basic form of all arcade games to come - that of a dedicated computing device built to play only that one game.
Computer Space was the first widely available video and arcade game, although it was not a success. For many, the gameplay was too complicated to grasp quickly. While it fared well on college campuses, it was not very popular in bars and other venues. Bushnell later recruited Al Alcorn and created a sensation with the much easier to grasp Pong arcade game modeled on Ralph Baer's Magnavox Odyssey home system's Tennis game.
Fiberglass cabinets were produced for single-player games in the colors blue metalflake, red metalflake, white, and yellow. The two-player cabinet was only available in a slightly different green metalflake fiberglass cabinet with a wider control panel.
Read more about this topic: Computer Space
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (18911960)
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of Gods property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted, but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)