Computer Space (Arcade)
While the discussion of what counts as the first video game gets muddled by discussions of what even classifies as a video game, it is at least commonly accepted that 1971’s Computer Space is the first video game available for play by the commercial public. However, outside of people interested in video games, you’ll often find people saying they believe Pong to be the first video game ever released despite it coming out a year later, and this actually leads to the distinction that Pong is the first commercially successful video game. This does leave us with an interesting question though: why didn’t Computer Space catch on well enough to achieve both of those titles?
One thing that certainly didn’t work against it is its stylish arcade cabinet. Despite literally being the oldest publicly available video game, the sleek and distinct futuristic design still evokes that sci-fi feeling 50 years later. In fact, the cabinet’s appearance even earned Computer Space the distinction of being the first video game in film thanks to an appearance in the 1973 film Soylent Green where it slipped into that movie’s vision of 2022 quite cleanly. The on screen visuals are black and white though and fairly simple due to the time they were released in, but they are suitably evocative, the player’s controllable rocket made of small dots but clearly a space traveling vessel even before you add the context of the star-filled backgrounds. The two UFOs the player is meant to shoot at to rack up points also follows this design approach, and while the moving dots that serve as your attack could blend in with the background, they’re also one of the few things on screen moving so it’s not like it’s too hard to see them even before you factor in their size difference compared to the static stars.
What could have held Computer Space back from wide success was its controls. The player is asked to control the action with a set of four buttons all in a row, and while their purpose is clearly indicated next to them, this arrangement isn’t the most conducive to movement. To rotate your ship you either press a clockwise or counterclockwise button, the turning a little clunky when you consider the thruster to move forward is in the same row as the turning buttons. Firing your missile is adjacent to the thruster button too, so you’ll likely be in a setup where the left hand does thruster movement and firing while the right manages the turning. Moving is much more easily handled when the means of doing so are kept together, a computer keyboard is already a good show of this since the up arrow is right next to the left and right keys so you could conceivably thrust forward and rotate just by shifting the same fingers around with little thought in such an arrangement. Computer Space’s arrangement isn’t awful and you can get used to it pretty quickly, but it does mean the game was certainly less approachable back in the 70s since arranging all four buttons in a row makes movement a little less fluid.
In Computer Space the goal is to shoot down the enemy UFOs as often as you can in a variable range of time, the arcade operator able to set that time period between 60 to 150 seconds. The UFOs will be firing back at you as well, but if you can kill them more than they kill you, you can continue playing in a hyperspace mode where the colors invert and you again try to outscore the UFOs to keep playing. The two enemy UFOs always move together, one positioned a small bit of space above the other but always traveling the same directions as its counterpart. Your missile doesn’t have a good amount of range on it unfortunately so you will have to fly in close and risk getting shot at by them, and while the UFOs always try to have a shot out so you can try and slip-in before an attack reaches its maximum range and disappears, they’re not bad at aiming it if you are in range.
During the inevitable close-range conflicts caused by your own shot not traveling far, you’ll start to see some of the issues inherent in controlling your rocket. Your ship’s thrusters both need a little time to start moving the rocket in a new direction and the momentum from moving previously will be preserved, meaning you might find yourself facing an incoming shot without the time needed to divert your course. Approaching more carefully is the way to avoid being done in by your movement troubles but since the UFOs keep a pretty consistent hail of fire up you can’t always afford to make the small adjustments when you’re in range. The screen does wrap around at the screen’s edges too, meaning a foe can fire upward and hit you while you lower on the screen or maybe fire off a side of the screen and catch you by surprise, so trying to run away after getting in a shot isn’t too safe.
Some challenge is certainly fine to have, the UFOs having a shot that travels farther than yours feels like a logical imbalance between player and foe since it adds in that need to be smart in your approach. However, there’s a few more little problems at play that start to throw things off. Your shots come out one at a time, the player needing to wait until it has disappeared or hit a target to fire again. That’s not too big of a concern if you plan your timing well, but in Computer Space, that shot is still tied to your ship’s movement in a strange way. If you press the turning buttons while a shot is active, you can cause its flight path to bend, which at first seems fairly nifty as you can adjust it to catch a UFO without having to aim at them directly. Your shots always come out of your rocket’s nosecone compared to the UFOs being able to fire in all directions, so being able to not have to directly face the enemy any time you want to hit them is a nice option. However, since your movement is so important, you can often find yourself forced to bend a shot as you try to flee from an incoming attack, further complicating the issue that your movement isn’t really the best for when you’re actually in range to attack the game-controlled enemies.
If you do overcome the awkwardness in button arrangement, the potential impact your movement has on your shot, and your own need to move in close and keep moving to avoid being taken down yourself, you might land a hit. This can happen reliably despite the obstacles to it, but then a different issue emerges. When you shoot a UFO both disappear for a bit before reappearing ready to immediately fire. The UFOs can appear almost anywhere on screen when they revive and are smart enough to always fire in the player’s direction as best they can, so it is possible they’ll appear very close to you and immediately kill you. Even if they’re not right next to your spacecraft though they might appear somewhere fairly close or unusual, catching you off guard as they maybe shoot through the screen edges as soon as they come to life. You can’t just fire forward and hope to hit them because there’s no reliable way of predicting the spot they’ll appear in, so sometimes you earn a point just to have the opposition come back to life and immediately even the score. Since the UFOs can move freely without any clockwise turning shenanigans, thruster concerns, or even momentum, you are essentially left to hope the game is merciful in how those UFOs choose to move.
THE VERDICT: Computer Space isn’t difficult so much as the player is ill-equipped to handle an often unpredictable foe. While the four button row takes a little getting used to, even once you do understand the movement you’ll find your ship can’t move as cleanly as the enemy UFOs, their shot goes further, and a new shot is fired the moment the previous one disappears. Getting in safely to shoot down a UFO doesn’t always pay off either thanks to the enemy respawning where it pleases and getting first shot as it does so, leading to a gameplay loop where the player struggles to get in cleanly to attack and has no reliable way of ensuring their safety after. While you can manage to squeak out wins despite these hurdles, the moments you have planned your attack well are undermined by the moments where it feels like every part of the game was designed against you.
And so, I give Computer Space for arcade machines…
A BAD rating. Computer Space shows the fallacy of rating a game highly simply for its importance as well as introducing an interesting discussion of how much a game’s time of release should be factored into its rating. Computer Space was technically the best game released at the time since it was the only release, but that also meant it was the worst, and simply being first doesn’t mean that the designers had a good feel for what works. Rarely do other mediums like film receive such unusually weighted scores, there was a time people would gather in theaters to watch black and white silent clips of people sneezing but we don’t nuzzle these in next to cinematic masterpieces simply because they were revolutionary. Computer Space had the novelty of being interactive electronic entertainment but even then many realized that it wasn’t put together too well. You can’t say they had no way of knowing better since Computer Space was directly inspired by Spacewar!, a game that hadn’t received a public release but had come across the tables of designers Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. Those two would go on to start Atari and make Pong shortly after which handles itself much better than Computer Space, but then again it had less moving parts to mess up.
Computer Space’s controls could be arranged better, that at least feels like a problem incurred by the time of release, but it seems even the first video game released had an issue with random factors having too much of an influence on the outcome of play. You need to be good to get in safely and fire your shot while handling your spacecraft well enough to avoid the dangers incurred from getting so close, but then the UFOs could spawn anywhere and fire so quickly that you might as well not have earned a point. A tiny delay on when the UFOs could fire on reappearing would do a bit to fix this luck-based moment, but movement already isn’t quite smooth which just adds that small complicating layer. Notably, 1979’s Asteroids would have the same exact controls as Computer Space. While not being technically better, they do prove fitting for a game where the things you are shooting behave in a reliable manner and random elements like how a rock splits or a UFO appears can be accounted for, especially since you can fire more than one shot at a time.
Computer Space’s design can definitely be improved upon, but that’s what decades of game design after it could set about doing. Going from a rough little game where shooting at other space ships is clumsy and luck-based to huge simulations of epic space battles shows how far the gaming medium has come, but the first game out of the gate could have certainly been worse and its flaws are easier to accept since they came from a formative time for the medium. There were still ways it could have been done better even in its time, but it’s not an awful first effort even though its issues are definitely why its younger brother Pong is the one most people remember. Actually playing the first game released still has some appeal thanks to its historical importance, but without that claim to fame, Computer Space wouldn’t be worth much attention.