Boasting a curved, futuristic fiberglass cabinet that truly looks like an alien art object, Nutting Associates’ arcade video game Computer Space hits an amusement market dominated by pinball machines and jukeboxes. Devised by Nolan Bushnell, Computer Space is a coin-operated homage to the mainframe game Spacewar, complete with complicated controls, and fails to sell well. Bushnell later has a revelation: arcade games will need to be easy to learn (but not easy to beat) in order to catch on.
More about Computer Space in Phosphor Dot Fossils
Hear about it on the Sci-Fi 5 podcast