8
A Nutty Idea

October 14, 1964, marked the opening of the 15th annual Music Operators of America Convention and Trade Show at the Sherman House Hotel in Chicago, Illinois, which had been hosting coin-op industry events since the 1930s. Forged in 1948 from a loose collection of state and local jukebox operators’ associations by George Miller of Oakland, California, and Al Denver of New York City, the Music Operators of America (MOA) was originally formed to combat efforts to eliminate the traditional music royalty exemption afforded to jukeboxes in the United States, but had since morphed into something greater.

The first jukebox, a device allowing a user to select among several records to play a song upon inserting a coin, entered the market in 1927; three years after Western Electric pioneered electrical recording techniques allowing for both improved sound quality and amplification.¹ Jukeboxes became popular in bars and taverns in the 1930s and emerged as one of the backbones of the coin-op industry, but total sales were eclipsed by games.² In the 1950s, the jukebox experienced a surge in popularity on the back of the 45 RPM record and rock and roll music, while coin-operated games entered a period of decline as the U.S. population dispersed and left the inner city arcades behind. As a result, the jukebox jobbers took over the majority of the operating business of music and games alike, and the MOA show became the principle convention of the entire amusement trade.³ By 1964, the primacy of the jukebox and the decline of the arcade had largely relegated coin-operated amusements to bars, taverns, and restaurants, which were typically only interested in operating a jukebox, a pool table, a cigarette vending machine, and one or two pinball tables or shuffle alleys.⁴ A man named Bill Nutting came to the Sherman Hotel that year feeling there was room for something more.

¹ The first jukebox, the National Automatic Selection Phonograph, was introduced by a company called the Automatic Musical Instrument Company (AMI), which itself was formed in 1925 out of the merger of two companies both founded in 1909, the National Piano Manufacturing Company, which built coin-operated musical instruments, and the National Automatic Music Company, which operated them. AMI was purchased by Rowe AC in 1962.

² While there were an estimated 400,000 jukeboxes in operation by 1941, there were thought to be 1.2 million coin-operated games. “The Coin Machine Industry,” Billboard, February 26, 1944, 66.

³ Before the formation of the MOA, the principle coin-op trade organization was the Coin Machine Institute (CMI), established in 1931 as the National Association of Coin Operated Machine Manufacturers, which was a manufacturers association rather than an operator’s association. CMI fell apart in the late 1940s in a dispute between Dave Gottlieb and Bally’s Ray Moloney over the prevalence of payout games and held its last trade show in 1952.

⁴ Smith, 2016, 74–75.

***

Born May 3, 1926, William Gilbert Nutting was the son and grandson of executives of the Marshall Field’s Department Store and grew up in the affluent Chicago suburb of River Forest, Illinois. A lifelong airplane enthusiast, he joined his high school’s aviation club and entered Army Air Corps cadet training after graduating in the middle of World War II. After the war, Nutting attended Colgate University for two years before transferring to Colorado University, where his high school sweetheart Claire Ullmann also attended school. In 1948, Bill and Claire were married, and two years later Bill graduated with a degree in business administration.⁵

Neither Bill nor Claire were interested in returning to Chicago society with its rituals and obligations, so they moved west to San Francisco.⁶ Bill briefly worked for the National Motor Bearing Company before moving on to Rheem Manufacturing in 1951, where he started as a production line foreman before cycling through inventory control, purchasing, and sales. Bill took a sales and office management position in Rheem’s Chicago office in 1956 to be closer to family again, but the Nuttings ultimately returned to California in 1959.⁷ Bill decided to follow in his father’s footsteps by becoming a buyer for the San Francisco luxury department store Raphael Weill & Company, known as the White House for its impressive beaux-arts façade.⁸

For his entire professional life, Bill found himself torn between following a retail path like his father or a manufacturing path like his father-in-law, Herbert Ullmann, who was a highly placed executive at Revere Ware, but his ultimate dream was to own his own business. He took his first step in that direction when his father-in-law informed him that his acquaintance Eugene Kleiner, one of the founders of Fairchild Semiconductor, needed investors for a startup called Edex Teaching Systems.⁹ Bill became a partner in the new firm in 1962, which marketed a teaching machine in which thousands of multiple-choice questions were stored on a filmstrip and projected onto a screen for students to answer by pushing the button located next to the correct answer. In 1963, a former Lockheed engineer named Thomas Nisbet adapted the Edex technology into a coin-operated entertainment system called the Knowledge Computer that featured questions in four categories – entertainment, travel, sports, and general knowledge.¹⁰ Nutting led the marketing of the product in 1964, which was tested in bowling alleys, student unions on college campuses, and transportation depots.¹¹ He then exhibited the game at the 1964 MOA show through a new Edex division called Scientific Amusements.¹²

⁵ Norm Petersen, “Bill and Claire Nutting’s Waco SRE,” Vintage Airplane, March 1992, 12.

⁶ Claire Nutting, interview with the author, April 14, 2017.

⁷ “Profile On: William G. Nutting – Heading Up the Computer Generation,” Cash Box, February 17, 1968, 74.

⁸ Goldberg and Vendel, 2012, chap. 1.

⁹ Claire Nutting, 2017. Edex was short for “Educational Excellence.”

¹⁰ Thomas Nisbet, Instructional Apparatus, U.S. Patent 3,300,875A filed January 7, 1964, and issued January 31, 1967. The Knowledge Computer was not the first coin-operated quiz game. In 1946, a Detroit engineer named Richard Sisson adapted a training system that he had developed for the U.S. Navy similar to the Edex design into a coin-operated game called Telequiz. This game caused a brief sensation in the industry in the late 1940s. What influence it may have exerted over the Knowledge Computer is not known. “Detroit Free Press Tells Story of ‘Telequiz,’” Cash Box, August 26, 1946, 51.

¹¹ “Knowledge at the Drop of a Coin,” Cash Box, August 22, 1964, 52.

¹² “Convention Clippings,” Billboard, October 24, 1964, 66.

Edex was sold to Raytheon in 1965, which had no interest in pursuing coin-operated amusements further, so Nutting acquired the rights to the Knowledge Computer and started selling it through a company he called the Nutting Corporation. By the end of 1965, Nutting had placed roughly two dozen Knowledge Computer machines in the San Francisco area,¹³ but by then it was clear to Bill that the machine was both too expensive and too difficult to service in the field. Therefore, he began exploring a complete redesign of the system in partnership with his younger brother Dave.

Born December 26, 1930, David Judd Nutting was a tinkerer from an early age. After taking apart the family toaster when he was eight years old and putting it back in working order before his parents found out, he graduated to increasingly complex machinery until he finally disassembled the outboard motor of his father’s boat and failed to reassemble it. Like older brother Bill, Dave was fond of airplanes, but he preferred building the model variety to flying them. After assembling every kit he could find, Dave transitioned to designing his own.¹⁴

¹³ “Coinmen in the News,” Billboard, October 23, 1965, 58.

¹⁴ David Judd Nutting, Secrets to a Creative Mind: Become the Master of Your Mind (Denver: Outskirts Press, 2012), 20–21.

Dave’s father wanted him to continue the family tradition at Marshall Field’s, but with his love of creating things, he was only interested in the relatively new field of industrial design. After two years at Denison University, Nutting enrolled in the Pratt Institute School of Industrial Design in New York City. After graduating in 1955, he served in the U.S. Army and then took employment with Brooks Stevens Design Associates in Milwaukee in 1957¹⁵ There he designed a wide array of products ranging from aluminum pots and pans to outboard motors to tractors to helicopters. Perhaps his most impressive design was the Jeep Grand Wagoneer, considered the first SUV, of which 500,000 were built in 29 years of continuous production.¹⁶

Eager to work with his brother, Dave contacted a good friend who worked for electrical engineering firm Cutler Hammer named Harold Montgomery to propose partnering on a redesign of the Knowledge Computer.¹⁷ Meanwhile, Bill contacted a Michigan-based distributor and former schoolteacher named Gene Wagner, whom he had first met at the MOA show in 1964, to harness his coin-op experience for the venture. Bill gave Wagner the rights to market the quiz game east of the Mississippi River, while Wagner advised Bill, Dave, and Harold on how best to rebuild the quiz game.¹⁸ Dave and Harold subsequently took a first pass at a redesign, with Dave handling the cabinet design and rebuilding the projector and Harold developing circuit boards that accepted plug-in relays in order to make the whole system more reliable and easier to repair.¹⁹ They subsequently visited Bill in California to work out a deal, but after two or three days of meetings, he ultimately turned their proposal down.²⁰

With his brother out of the picture, Bill established a new company, Nutting Associates, in January 1966 and turned to a local company called Marketing Services for help redesigning his quiz game, which assigned an industrial designer named Richard Ball to the project. Ball started by placing a Knowledge Computer unit on test at the College of San Mateo and was amazed when he emptied the machine five days later and discovered it filled to the brim with dimes. Sensing a hit, Ball subsequently redesigned the game for easier manufacturing. The Knowledge Computer relied on copper relays for its operation, which created extreme service headaches, so Ball approached a company called Applied Technology to design a circuit board that would accept plug-in relays. He also rebuilt the projector from scratch.²¹

¹⁵ David Nutting. Testimony, Bally Manufacturing v. Williams Electronics, No. 78-2246 (N.D. Ill), January 6, 1983, 559.

¹⁶ David Nutting, 2012, 32–33.

¹⁷ David Nutting, interview with the author, November 13, 2017.

¹⁸ Gene Wagner, interview with Ethan Johnson, July 16, 2016.

¹⁹ Harold Montgomery, interview with Ethan Johnson, August 16, 2016.

²⁰ According to a letter Bill wrote to his son Craig in 2002, Bill and Dave Nutting had a complicated relationship going back to their childhood, and Bill always felt that Dave was jealous and resentful of him. Therefore, he distrusted his brother’s motives and was uneasy about going into business with him. For his part, Dave apparently believed Bill was willing to work with him until Claire talked him out of it.

²¹ Richard Ball, interview with the author, May 23, 2014.

In late 1966, Nutting Associates commenced manufacturing and marketing Ball’s redesigned game, now called Computer Quiz. Over the next year, Nutting Associates placed between 300 and 400 units on location through a franchise system,²² including several on or around the Stanford University campus that were operated by a Vietnam veteran and Stanford MBA student named G. Ransom White. In summer 1967, White came on board as director of marketing and prepared for the game’s official coming out at the MOA show in the fall, when the company would begin selling the game to traditional coin-op distributors. Dave Nutting, meanwhile, stuck with parts for around 100 machines when his brother called off their deal, formed his own company with Harold Montgomery and Gene Wagner called Nutting Industries and debuted his version of the Knowledge Computer, now dubbed I.Q. Computer, at the same show.

Computer Quiz and I.Q. Computer ignited a coin-op trivia fad. Arriving at a time when the industry was battling for legitimacy and when operators felt they had basically saturated all available locations, quiz games possessed an important quality that a pinball machine or pool table lacked: a perceived educational value. Consequently, the game was welcome at college campuses, department stores, large apartment complexes, and other locations that would never think of placing coin-operated amusements on the premises. Once an operator established himself in a location with a quiz game and the money started rolling in, location owners who had grown used to having a coin-operated game around would often start accepting other pieces as well, particularly after the new audio-visual games like Periscope and Speedway began hitting the market. In a time when most coin-operated games would sell no more than 1,500 units and 3,000 units constituted a major hit, Nutting Associates sold 4,200 units of Computer Quiz, while Nutting Industries supplied 3,600 units of I.Q. Computer.²³

²² “A Look at Your Future with Nutting Associates,” Employee Handbook, Nutting Associates, 1968, 2.

²³ Donovan, 2010, chap. 2.

Over the next two years, both Nutting brothers offered new variations on the quiz game concept. Nutting Associates developed a horoscope machine called Astro Computer, a sports trivia game called Sports World, and a blinking light guessing game called ESP, while Nutting Industries developed a golf trivia game called Golf IQ and a bowling instruction machine called Sensorama.²⁴ Both companies also continued to refine their original trivia games by releasing two-player versions, designing updated film packs with new questions, and improving the underlying technology. The concept reached its most advanced form in the summer of 1968 when Richard Ball worked with Applied Technology to eliminate the plug-in relays in Computer Quiz to create what was most likely the first solid-state product in the coin-op industry upon its release that October.²⁵ Technology improvements and expansion packs could only carry coin-operated trivia games so far, however, and by 1970, it was clear that the market was largely played out.

Dave Nutting responded to the end of the trivia game craze by moving more heavily into the education market through a new subsidiary called MODEC that developed filmstrip-training equipment for businesses. He also adapted the underlying filmstrip technology in IQ Computer to create a coin-operated target shooting game called Red Baron. Bill Nutting could not adapt so easily. In late 1968, Richard Ball and recently promoted general manager Ransom White fell out with their boss over his use of company funds to purchase two airplanes and left to form their own coin-operated amusement manufacturer named Cointronics.²⁶ Nutting refreshed his executive staff by hiring Rod Geiman away from pen manufacturer Micropoint International to serve as his new executive vice president in late 1968 and Dave Ralstin as his marketing director roughly a year later, but he lacked competent designers or engineers to develop new equipment. Consequently, when Nolan Bushnell called Ralstin on the advice of his dentist in early 1971, Nutting wasted no time in hiring him to finish developing his video game.

²⁴ Nutting Industries had particularly targeted bowling alleys with its original I.Q. Computer because Harold Montgomery had a friend highly placed in the American Bowling Congress, so the Sensorama was an attempt to further capitalize on that market. Montgomery, 2016.

²⁵ In 1961, a company called the Victor Electronics Corporation debuted a coin-operated golf game called Golf-It at a trade show in which a player swung at a golf ball affixed to a tee and then the path of the ball was calculated electronically. This may have been the industry’s first solid-state game, but it appears to have only received a limited test release and faded quickly. Computer Quiz was probably the first solid-state game to attain a wide release. “New Coin Golf Game Measures Player’s Drive Electronically,” Billboard, November 27, 1961, 37.

²⁶ Ball, 2014. Cointronics only released a handful of unremarkable games before going out of ­business in 1970.

***

Nolan Bushnell knew he needed a company like Nutting to back the creation of his hardware, but he was not about to hand his future over to someone else. Perhaps sensing Nutting’s desperation for new product, he negotiated a deal allowing him to retain the rights to his video game technology. He also stipulated that he would work on projects for Nutting during regular business hours while confining his work on the video game to evenings and weekends so Nutting would not acquire shop rights to his work. In return, Nutting would manufacture the finished product and pay Syzygy a royalty on each unit sold.²⁷

When Bushnell joined Nutting, he had a basic hardware system that could move dots around the screen and a desire to create a product like Spacewar!, but he did not yet have a fully formed game concept due to the continuing difficulties he and Dabney faced in developing cost-effective hardware. In fact, at one point they toyed with moving to a simpler concept by just designing a piloting game in which the player controlled a spaceship and dodged asteroids.²⁸ In the end, the partners decided to press on with the Cosmic Combat shooting game. The limitations of the hardware necessitated some changes from Spacewar!, however. Gone was the sun and its gravity, the hyperspace function, and two-player combat. Instead, Bushnell crafted a game in which the player controls a rocket ship and attempts to shoot down two flying saucers that also shoot back at him. Both the player and the saucers score a point each time they destroy one another. If the player has more points than the saucers at the end of a 90-second round, he gets another 90 seconds of play; otherwise the game ends.

Over the next several months, Bushnell spent his days hunched over a drafting table just outside his office door at Nutting plotting out the circuitry that would tell the spot generator where to place dots on the screen and how they should interact with the player’s controls. He also created the graphics for the game by rendering the player’s ship and the flying saucers as a series of dots and creating routines allowing them to rotate smoothly. In one of his cleverer feats of engineering, Bushnell employed mirroring techniques so that he would only have to store four different ship positions in memory rather than the 16 needed to cover every possible facing. He also chose to lay out the diode matrix in which the graphics were stored – core and semiconductor memory being far too expensive at the time – in the shapes of the ships themselves to allow operators to easily figure out which diode needed to be replaced in case of malfunction. Finally, Bushnell crafted the AI of the hardware-controlled opponents by dividing the playfield into quadrants and giving the saucers the ability to detect which quadrant the player’s ship currently inhabited, so they would fire in that direction.²⁹

²⁷ Benj Edwards, “Computer Space and the Dawn of the Arcade Video Game,” Technologizer, December 11, 2011, https://www.technologizer.com/2011/12/11/computer-space-and-the-dawn-of-the-arcade-video-game.

²⁸ Bushnell, deposition, January 1976.

²⁹ Edwards, 2011.

Dabney, meanwhile, remained at Ampex but joined Bushnell in the evenings to design many of the features required to turn their prototype into an actual arcade system such as the cabinet, coin slot, control panel, and power supply. He also developed a primitive sound system by taking a voltage regulating diode that generated pink noise and attaching an amplifier and integrator in order to provide the sound of the rocket’s engines.³⁰ By the middle of summer, Dabney had become so impressed with Bushnell’s progress on the game that he joined Nutting full time.

By August 1971, Bushnell and Dabney’s game, now named Computer Space to line up with the hit Computer Quiz, was far enough along that Nutting decided to do a location test, an important step in the coin-op industry in which a prototype game is placed on location and the coin-drop is measured to see if the game is shaping up to be a hit.³¹ Shortly after coming to Nutting Associates, Rod Geiman had established a company called ACEM Incorporated to operate a route of roughly 50 machines,³² so he placed the game in a bar on the route frequented by students of Stanford University called the Dutch Goose. Packing the prototype unit into Dabney’s Datsun pickup truck, Bushnell and Dabney brought the game to the bar and watched as players flocked to the machine. It looked like the duo had a hit, but a second test at a pizza place did not go nearly so well. Like Spacewar!, Computer Space used a multi-button control scheme and realistically depicted the physics of movement in a zero-g environment – in which an object continues to move in the same direction until a force is exerted in the opposite direction. The Stanford engineering students at the Goose, some of whom were probably Spacewar! veterans, caught on right away. The working-class patrons at the pizza place did not.³³

³⁰ Paul Drury, “The Making of Computer Space,” Retro Gamer no. 93, 2011, 28–29.

³¹ Goldberg and Vendel, 2012, chap. 1.

³² Rodney Geiman, interview with Ethan Johnson, August 30, 2016.

³³ Goldberg and Vendel, 2012, chap. 1.

Around the same time that Computer Space went out on test, the duo learned they were not the only people pursuing a coin-operated version of Spacewar! Through mutual contacts, Bushnell learned that a young man named Bill Pitts was in the process of recreating Spacewar! on a minicomputer. Worried that Pitts had found some revolutionary new way to create a fully functioning port of the game on a cost-effective coin-op system, Bushnell called Pitts to setup an information sharing session. The duo met for coffee at Stanford, after which Nolan invited Pitts back to Nutting Associates to show off his Computer Space work. By the time the meeting was over, Bushnell was relieved to learn that while Pitts’s system was technically impressive, there was no way it would ever prove economically viable.

***

As Bill Nutting prepared to unveil the Edex Knowledge Computer in the fall of 1964, Palo Alto native Bill Pitts was just beginning his first semester at Stanford University. Interested in chemistry and physics in high school, Pitts was assigned an academic advisor in the electrical engineering department. Noting the new student’s interests, the advisor arranged for him to push back Stanford’s required “History of Western Civilization” course so he could take the newly offered “Introduction to Computer Science” course instead. Pitts was immediately hooked.³⁴ At the time, the university did not offer an undergraduate computer science degree, so Pitts chose to major in statistics, a relatively unpopular field that allowed its students to take graduate-level courses to attract greater enrollment, so he could take additional computer courses.³⁵

Alongside his interest in computers, Pitts also held a fondness for exploring the complex array of steam tunnels running under the campus and breaking into restricted areas of university buildings. One night in 1966, Pitts left the heart of campus bound for Rossotti’s, a popular student hangout west of the university. By now, Pitts had already broken into every building on the main campus, but this night he noticed a sign for an unfamiliar building set in the rolling hills outside the university. Returning later that night to practice his craft, Pitts was disappointed to discover the building was unlocked. What did not disappoint him was the PDP-6 time-sharing system sitting in the heart of the building. Pitts had just discovered John McCarthy’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.³⁶

³⁴ Greta Lorge and Mike Antonucci, “Bill Pitts, ’68,” Stanford Magazine, April 30, 2012, https://stanfordmag.org/contents/bill-pitts-68.

³⁵ Smith, 2016, 55.

³⁶ Donovan, 2010, chap. 2.

Through his coursework, Pitts had worked with the systems available in the computer science department in Polya Hall, but nothing there compared to SAIL’s PDP-6. Although this computer was technically restricted to the staff and students working for SAIL, Pitts pleaded with McCarthy’s right-hand man, Lester Earnest, to allow him to program on the computer. Earnest decided that since Pitts was a Stanford student, he could have access to the machine when no official projects were in operation. For the next two years, Pitts began sleeping during the day and staying up all night programming at SAIL, skipping class so he could spend as much time with the computer as possible. His persistence eventually paid off, as he secured a position as a research assistant at SAIL in 1967. The next year, he aided Arthur Samuel, who came to SAIL after leaving IBM in 1966, in further developing his pioneering checkers program.³⁷

Pitts had played Spacewar! in Polya Hall before discovering SAIL,³⁸ so he was quickly sucked into the AI Lab’s obsession with the game. On several occasions, he even brought his high school friend Hugh Tuck to play the game when he was in town. A mechanical engineering student at California Polytechnic in San Luis Obispo, Tuck had never been one for playing pinball or other coin-operated amusements, but he was so blown away by Spacewar! that he told Pitts if they could just attach a coin slot to the machine, they could become rich.³⁹ A PDP-6 cost well north of $100,000, however, and the other computers available circa 1968 were no better. Therefore, Tuck’s ambition was cast aside unrealized.

After graduating from Stanford in 1968, Pitts did a brief stint in the Navy and continued to work on the checkers program at SAIL, which was ported to the PDP-10 in 1969. He subsequently parlayed his work at SAIL into a position at Lockheed as a PDP-10 programmer. Lockheed did not actually own a PDP-10 yet when he was hired, however, so in late 1970 as he waited for that job to begin he had ample free time to take stock of the current state of the computer world. By now, minicomputers had come down drastically in price in the wake of the release of the Data General Nova, and DEC was preparing to launch a product that would become a new industry standard, the PDP-11.

³⁷ “Mini-Computer Applications Business Plan,” c. 1972.

³⁸ Smith, 2016, 56.

³⁹ Hugh Tuck, interview with the author, April 6, 2016.

***

The departure of Ed de Castro and friends to form Data General in 1968 had gutted DEC’s engineering talent at just the moment the company desperately needed a new 16-bit computer to remain relevant in the minicomputer industry it had created. Therefore, to bring a computer to market quickly would require going outside the company. DEC hired Andrew Knowles from RCA to serve as the product manager for the new 16-bit computer and then poached Roger Cady from Honeywell and Julius Marcus from General Electric to head up engineering and marketing, respectively. After a year of work, however, all the trio had managed to produce was an incredibly flawed prototype design.

Enter Gordon Bell, one of DEC’s first engineers and the originator of the company’s minicomputer line with the PDP-5 back in 1964. After the debacle of the PDP-6, Bell had taken an extended sabbatical from DEC to teach at Carnegie Mellon University. With their computer design going nowhere, Knowles, Cady, and Marcus traveled to Carnegie Mellon to consult with Bell, who over the course of a long weekend oversaw the design of a completely new architecture developed by one of his graduate students. This effort culminated in the release of the PDP-11 minicomputer in late 1970, which not only offered superior performance to the Nova at only a slightly higher price – $10,800 – but was designed to be scalable like the abandoned PDP-X.⁴⁰ By 1972, DEC had recaptured the lead in the minicomputer market from Data General on its way to selling over 600,000 PDP-11 units by the time it was discontinued in the 1990s.

When Pitts took note of the PDP-11 during his downtime at Lockheed, he thought back to Tuck’s ambition to transform Spacewar! into an arcade game and contacted him to say this project now appeared possible. Tuck remained on the fence for several months, but after the duo surveyed both the coin-op and minicomputer markets, he ultimately decided to go ahead. Pitts and Tuck established a company called Mini-Computer Applications in May 1971 to transform Spacewar! into a coin-operated game.⁴¹

Pitts and Tuck designed the initial version of their game between July and November 1971. As the computer expert, Pitts took primary responsibility for programming the game and interfacing the computer with a monitor, while the mechanical engineer Tuck designed the cabinet and other components. Tuck also served as the company’s main financing connection, as his father owned one of the Bay-area’s largest HVAC firms, the Atlas Heating and Ventilating Company. Although never comfortable around computers himself, the elder Tuck became the largest investor in Mini-Computer Applications, while Hugh also put in some of his own money alongside contributions from a sister and a couple of cousins. In all, building the initial prototype of the game cost $20,000.⁴²

⁴⁰ Rifkin and Harrar, 1988, 100–104.

⁴¹ Mini-Computers Business Plan, 1972.

⁴² Tuck, 2016.

Completed in late November 1971, Pitts and Tuck’s game, which they called Galaxy Game rather than Spacewar! due to the anti-war sentiment prevalent on university campuses at the time,⁴³ consisted of a PDP-11/20 with 8K of memory, a Hewlett Packard 1300A Electrostatic Display, and a point-plotting display interface designed by a man named Ted Panofsky. The coin box for the game was donated by jukebox company Rowe International, while the joysticks used to control the spaceships were military surplus out of a B-52 bomber purchased by Pitts from J&H Outlet in San Carlos. The massive walnut cabinet that Tuck designed to house the game was built by an engineering firm in Palo Alto and incorporated a seat to encourage long playing sessions. The duo set a price of ten cents per game or twenty-five cents for three games and reached an agreement with the manager of the Tresidder Union on the Stanford campus to place the game in a music listening room on the second floor.⁴⁴

For the first few days it was on location, Galaxy Game was barely touched despite an advertisement placed in the Stanford Daily newspaper. Then, interest suddenly blossomed until it was not uncommon for 20–30 people to be clustered around the machine at once waiting for the chance to play a match. In December, the game was moved to the more accommodating coffee house on the first floor of the union, and players were soon forming long lines and waiting an hour or more for their shot on the machine.⁴⁵ For a time, there was even a second monitor installed above the cabinet to facilitate easier spectator viewing of matches.⁴⁶

⁴³ Hugh Tuck believes his sister suggested the name change, though he is not certain. She was attending UC Berkeley at the time, which was one of the centers of the student protest movement. Tuck, 2016.

⁴⁴ Smith, 2016, 58.

⁴⁵ Mini-Computer Applications Business Plan, 1972.

⁴⁶ Bill Pitts, email to Marty Goldberg, 2015.

With the prototype proving a hit, Pitts and Tuck began work on a production model suitable for commercial release. Pitts built a new display interface capable of driving four monitors at once to make the whole system cost effective. These monitors could each run separate games, or they could be linked to allow more than two players to play in the same game. The duo also designed a striking blue fiberglass cabinet to increase the system’s aesthetic appeal. In June 1972, this version replaced the original in the coffee house in the Tresidder Union, though it had to be cut down to only two monitors to fit into the space allotted by the university.⁴⁷ Once version two went live at Stanford, Pitts carted version one to other locations around town, but it never did as well as the installation on campus. Building the new system ran the cost of the project to $60,000.⁴⁸

Pitts and Tuck realized their game was too expensive for the traditional coin-op market, but they thought they could market it to college campuses, which required entertainment in student unions and large dorms, but were often hesitant to purchase traditional coin-operated equipment like pinball machines. The duo envisioned owning and servicing all the machines through their company, thereby requiring no commitment from the university other than space. After a three-month trial period, the university would enter a three-year lease in which the institution would keep 12% of the gross coin drop in the first year, 16% in the second, and 20% in the third. This was a far different arrangement from that found in the traditional coin-op industry, in which operators and location owners would generally split the take 50-50 but was necessary if Pitts and Tuck were ever going to recoup their costs. To further increase the appeal of their system, they also planned to design several more games.⁴⁹

In early 1972, Pitts and Tuck drew up a business plan in hopes of attracting investors to get their venture off the ground, but they found no takers. While the duo had developed an extremely faithful recreation of Spacewar! with immense play appeal, it was simply too expensive for any reasonable business model to work. Therefore, while the second prototype continued to run at Stanford until the display malfunctioned in 1979, and Pitts was able to harness the profits from that machine to pay back all the original investors, Galaxy Game never achieved a wider release and remains a footnote in the early history of video games. Instead, it would be Bushnell and Dabney’s more compromised, but also far cheaper, Computer Space that would become the first coin-operated video game to enter mass production.

⁴⁷ Bill Pitts, “The Galaxy Game,” Stanford Infolab, October 29, 1997, http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/voy/museum/galaxy.html.

⁴⁸ Smith, 2016, 47-48.

⁴⁹ Mini-Computer Applications Business Plan, 1972.

***

Roughly a month before Galaxy Game debuted at the Tresidder Union, the Nutting Associates team flew to Chicago to attend the MOA show, held that year from October 15-17 at the Conrad Hilton Hotel, to reveal Computer Space to the world. The original prototype debuted at the Dutch Goose was housed in a simple wooden cabinet built by Dabney, but by the MOA, the game sported a futuristic-looking fiberglass cabinet designed by Bushnell using modeling clay and built by a seamless swimming pool manufacturer named John Hebbler located by Dabney. The controls were placed on a lighted panel jutting out from the cabinet and consisted of four buttons – two for left and right rotation, one for thrust, and one for firing.⁵⁰ The panel bore the Nutting Associates name and logo, but in a nod to the game’s creators, it also included the phrase “Syzygy engineered.”

Nutting brought four cabinets to the MOA show to give the appearance the game was already in production, though in truth these were the only four copies of the game in existence. Each game was housed in a different color cabinet – yellow, red, white, and blue. Disaster nearly struck when the team discovered the monitors had all broken loose from their cabinets during shipping, but Bushnell was able to repair three of the units. The fourth was left open as a display of the internal components of the system, a clever ploy to mask the accident from distributors.⁵¹ Kept completely secret in advance of its debut, the game was met with a mixture of astonishment and bewilderment.⁵² Nutting’s booth remained crowded for much of the show, but many distributors worried that operators raised on electromechanical technology would not be able to service the machines and that patrons would smash them up to steal the televisions. In the end, Nutting took few, if any, orders.⁵³

At this point, Ralstin and Geiman began working their marketing magic. When production of Computer Space finally began in late November or early December, Ralstin sent the first five machines off the assembly line to various distributors around the country to gauge its earning potential, while Geiman also placed units on his own coin route.⁵⁴ By the time full production of the machine commenced in late January/early February 1972, this ploy had generated several orders on the back of fantastic earnings reports,⁵⁵ but did little to alleviate most of the industry’s skepticism of the machine. While some distributors were highly enthusiastic about the game and pushed it aggressively to good results, many others saw video as a gimmick and resisted stocking the product. In the end, the Nutting sales team had to practically force many distributors into taking the game,⁵⁶ which may have failed to sell its entire 1,500-unit production run.⁵⁷ While not strictly a commercial failure and even capable of delivering a high return on investment when placed in the right venues, Computer Space ultimately failed to cement a place for the video game as a viable new form of entertainment.

⁵⁰ While initial tests demonstrated the buttons might be too complicated a control scheme, attempts to use a metal joystick-like device for movement had failed when it proved too fragile and broke the first night that version went out on test. Goldberg and Vendel, 2012, chap. 1.

⁵¹ Edwards, 2011.

⁵² “MOA Socks ‘Em in at Expo,” Cash Box, October 30, 1971, 56.

⁵³ In a 1976 deposition, Nolan Bushnell said the company took no orders at the show, a sentiment echoed by Rod Geiman to Ethan Johnson. Bushnell, 1976, 312, and Geiman, 2016. Other sources indicate they might have taken at least a few.

⁵⁴ Goldberg and Vendel, 2012, chap. 1.

⁵⁵ “Old-Fashioned Op Scored by NA Exec,” Cash Box, February 12, 1972, 42.

⁵⁶ Steve Bloom, Video Invaders (New York: Arco Publishing, 1982), 8.

⁵⁷ In his 1976 deposition, Nolan Bushnell estimated sales of 1,300–1,500 units. Bushnell, January 1976, 39.

Perhaps the biggest problem faced by the game was its confusing multi-button control scheme and its accurate modeling of Newtonian physics, which combined to make the spaceship difficult to control. While the tech savvy individuals who hung around college campuses were able to adapt to these conditions fairly quickly as demonstrated by the game’s success at the Dutch Goose, the coin-op business of the early 1970s was still primarily focused on working-class bars and taverns, where patrons were uninterested in reading pages of instructions or mastering complex controls. Introducing the public to the video game would, therefore, require a far simpler concept that was easy to learn, yet interesting enough to hold a person’s attention over time. Unbeknownst to Bushnell, such a video game concept had already been in development for five years by the time Computer Space made its debut in October 1971 at New Hampshire defense contractor Sanders Associates.