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:
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises”Mof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no “crisis,” there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)