Wow! This one sucks!
I was expecting an arcade recreation of Spacewar! to at least be a good time, even if it does feel a bit cynical (Spacewar!, notably, wasn't ever something the creators could monetize; they looked into it, but with computer hardware as inaccessible as it was, the audience just wasn't there. Computer Space, on the other hand, as one of the first commercial arcade cabinets ever released, was raking in quarters for every play.) What I was not expecting was an appreciably inferior recreation of Spacewar!
Obviously you couldn't just flatly recreate it for an arcade cabinet intended for single-player gameplay, and there were significant technical hurdles in switching from a timeshared computer mainframe to a free-standing arcade cabinet, but I truly was not prepared for just how slapdash and boring the adjustments would be. Gone is the environmental effect of a universal gravity well, if you don't push a button your ship will simply maintain its current inertia indefinitely. To make up for the lack of player 2, there are now a pair of flying saucers serving as enemies; I say "a pair" rather than "2" because, in terms of gameplay function, these really do seem to be a single entity. One is always located a short distance above the other, they move as one. You can at least shoot one without disrupting the other, and one at a time will occasionally lackadaisically fire a bullet toward your current position, but they don't appear to be capable of moving independently and, on top of that, their synchronized movement seems to come exclusively in the form of slow, predictable zigzags, with periods of stillness in between moves. So you don't have an opponent capable of anything remotely resembling interesting movement or behavior; simultaneously, your own movement has been made far more powerful and flexible. Where Spacewar! was weighty and high-commitment with its movement, Computer Space is faster and more maneuverable. You can more or less just hold down the thruster and steer yourself around with impunity. I assume this was a concession to the arcade market (one must imagine that the average bar patron is somewhat less interested in wrestling with space travel physics than the average 60s computer nerd) but in practice it takes all the intrigue out of the movement mechanics. You won't find yourself stuck on a particularly aggressive trajectory and struggling to change course quickly enough to avoid disaster, you can simply swerve around in tight circles as much as you like. It more or less renders the gameplay as braindead as your average modern ad-riddled freeware mobile stim toy, before you even consider that for some inscrutable reason, turning your ship also turns the trajectory of your bullets. I have absolutely no idea what the reason for this might be. It doesn't make sense from either a simulation perspective or a mechanical one, I half suspect it might have been the result of some kind of bizarre technical constraint.
Regardless of whether that's the case for this one specific feature, it's very clear that much of the rest of the game's design is a compromise to make it run on the custom hardware Syzygy (later Atari) designed to put in these arcade cabinets; it's not powerful enough to run a second player or a star's gravitational field, so ditch the star and make it single-player. Unfortunately this simply optimized the fun out of the game; it runs on that slick, futuristic-looking arcade cabinet, but it's not much of a good time.
I do feel like I should maybe cut it a little slack on this point, seeing as this game innovated the idea of putting specialized hardware in a cabinet specifically for running one particular game, and in so doing more or less invented the arcade video game market. On the other hand, is that really a good thing? I can't help but feel that it's a little bleakly appropriate that one of, if not the first commercial game release was a pared-down, dumbed-down, compromised recreation of a much better open source freeware game, being sold to booze-addled players for twenty-five 1972 cents a pop. It really does seem that the more things change the more they stay the same; this must be what it felt like for Deus Ex fans when Invisible War dropped. It's worth noting that this game was the starting point of Atari, a company that more or less was video games as far as the American market was concerned, which maintained a policy of refusing to credit developers right up until their deluge of overpriced, poorly-produced shovelware killed the industry in this country for several years until Nintendo was able to revive it by marketing their console to children as a toy instead of to adults as a game (which, let's be real, is also a little questionable; I'm not going to pretend that a lot of Nintendo's flagship games aren't bangers, but their success story is much more a story of marketing triumph than of game design triumph. Plenty of fantastic games have failed upon hitting the market and are now more or less forgotten, Nintendo just managed to insert themselves into the Reagan-era deregulated pop culture ecosystem.) My girlfriend's roommate and I checked, by the way, and that single shiny quarter per play in 1972 was the equivalent of two dollars in 2025. It's no wonder they needed to sell it with a cool, futuristic-looking cabinet case and a promo image of a beautiful woman standing next to it, that shit was steep. It's the kind of thing you'd need to turn mainly toward presentation, novelty, and good ol' 70s salesmanship to move units of. What I'm left with is the impression that my quest for historical context in gaming history has already borne fruit; 50 years ago, the first widely-released coin-op arcade cabinet was also gaming's first cynical cash grab.
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