1971 - Computer Space, also the project in general

I recently played the game Computer Space. I did this because I’ve decided to do something silly: I want to play a video game released in every year from 1971 to now and write up a bit about my thoughts on each one. Why 1971? Because Wikipedia doesn’t have an article for a list of games made in 1970, but that makes me sound lazy, so I’ll also note it was the year that the first coin-operated arcade games hit the market. With Computer Space and Galaxy Game, video games had gone from the realm of enthusiasts with access to rare, expensive machines to something the average person might be able to get their hands on. And also I’m pretty confident I’ll be able to find something to play, or at the very least to talk about, for every year after that.

Let’s lay down the ground rules for this whole endeavor. The main goal here is to go through the history of games from start to finish and play a bunch of stuff I’ve never tried before along the way.

1. For every year from 1971 to the current year (at the time of writing 2024, but if I stick with it then this will probably take long enough that it’s a different year by the time it’s relevant) I will play a video game released in that year. Any platform, any genre, whatever, as long as I can get my hands on it (or an emulated version or a faithful remake/port to modern PCs) without breaking the bank. On the off chance I literally cannot find something to play, I’ll make a best-effort at studying something and come back.
2. This must be a video game I haven’t played before, or at least that I have not played a significant amount of. If I’ve only played ten minutes of a twenty hour game, that doesn’t count as having played it. That may mean missing out on some pretty historically significant stuff, but I don’t want to just retread stuff I’ve played before. Aside from that, I’m going to be picking games by feel, not by a rule. Sometimes they’ll be historically significant, sometimes they’ll be something I think looks fun but never got around to trying, and sometimes they’ll just be something I thought looked weird and cool.
3. If it’s a game you can somehow complete, I have to make a fair effort to do so. If it’s not, like endless arcade games or (if I can rope someone in to play with me) multiplayer games, then I have to play enough to have seen most or all of what the game has to offer. No punching out early through unless things are truly approaching unplayable, either in difficulty or quality. If I decide to ditch a game so early that I don’t have anything to say about it besides “it sucks,” I have to pick a new one. You’ll have to trust that I enforce this on myself fairly, but I believe in myself.
4. Guides, savestates, and general cheating/assist tools are allowed, but only after I’ve made a serious effort to beat the game on my own. I want to get the unfiltered experience before I start messing around with those. Also, I’ll try to use stuff that comes with the game before external stuff. For example, a game’s hintbook gets used before online walkthroughs, and in-game cheat codes get used before savestates, which get used before stuff like gameshark codes or Cheat Engine. Again, you’ll just have to trust I’m making a good-faith effort at this.
5. No food metaphors.

I’m not a scholar, journalist, or expert, I’m just a person who plays a lot of video games and quite enjoys reading about them as well. So, while I’ll throw in what I know about the history or context of a game if I think it’s relevant, I’m going to mostly focus on the game itself and how I feel about it. It really wouldn’t add much more to this if I paraphrased Wikipedia, anyways.

So, I played Computer Space. Specifically, I played the version from Mike’s Hangout as well as the first version hosted at Computer Space Fan. They’re pretty similar, with a few minor differences. The first game has better audio, and they’ve got different control schemes on the keyboard, but more importantly, while the second game gives both sides a point by default if you crash into a saucer, the first game awards no points. I watched gameplay recorded from an original cabinet on Down The Rabbit Hole (not that one, another channel that just happens to share the name), and the first game’s behavior appears to be correct, while the second lets you change how scoring works in the options menu anyways. Neither game includes “hyperspace mode,” which is, from what I’ve read, a mode where the background inverts and play continues for a second round. The core of the game is the same for both, though: you fly a rocket around with two buttons to turn and one to thrust, and you fire a steerable missile at two saucers which will fly in random directions and shoot at you. It’s a single-player version of Spacewar! at heart.

And it’s pretty fun! I sunk about an hour into it over the course of a few sessions, and while it’s simple, it’s got smooth controls and it’s satisfying to nail the saucers. It’s not too tough a game. By the second round I played, I was consistently “winning” against the aliens and racking up scores in each 100-second game that would’ve made the original cabinet’s single-digit scoreboard go wonky. But, let’s be fair here, I have played a lot of video games in my life, and I’m already pretty familiar with this sort of 2D momentum-based space shooter, mostly through the Star Control series. It probably would’ve taken longer to get the hang of it if I were someone not too familiar with computers in 1971 who’d never even heard the words “video game” before.

There’s not much else to say about the game itself. I don’t think there will be for some of these super early ones. So instead I’ll talk about why I picked this specific game. There’s not a whole lot of options for this year to begin with, but there’s a few others I could’ve picked. There’s Galaxy Game, another coin-op game based on Spacewar!; the original version of The Oregon Trail, the definitive dying-of-dystentery simulator; and Star Trek, a space strategy game about hunting down Klingon ships in the Enterprise. I’ve played the later Apple II version of The Oregon Trail before, so I didn’t feel like that was a good pick. Galaxy Game is multiplayer, and while I’m not opposed to trying those, I don’t have another person on hand to play with right now. So, why Computer Space over Star Trek, then?

Like I said up top, I think Computer Space represents the end of an era for video games. This wasn’t something being passed around by students or technicians messing around in their spare time, it was a commercial venture, the first attempt to make money off this stuff. For better and for worse, that’s pretty significant. I don’t think I need to go into all the problems with video games as a for-profit industry these days, but I don’t think it was all bad, especially at the time. People who had never touched the mainframes or minicomputers of the day got to play a video game for the first time! Star Trek is definitely a more complex game, and I might even go back to it sometime if I stick with this project, but it’s also firmly in that old world of games for students and computer professionals with access to a mainframe or minicomputer to run it on. Computer Space wasn’t just a Spacewar clone with a funky cabinet shape, it was the first step of a new industry.