It features a rocket controlled by the player engaged in a missile battle with a pair of hardware-controlled flying saucers set against a starfield background.

The goal is to score more hits than the enemy spaceships within a set time period, which awards a free round of gameplay.

It was first shown to industry press and distributors at the annual Music Operators of America (MOA) Expo in October.

The pair left Nutting in June 1972 and incorporated Syzygy as Atari, launching the successful Pong (1972) as their next arcade game.

At the beginning of the 1970s, video games existed almost entirely as novelties passed around by programmers and technicians with access to computers, primarily at research institutions and large companies.

One of these games was Spacewar!, created in 1962 for the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-1 by Steve Russell and others in the programming community at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

This two-player game has the players engage in a dogfight between two spaceships while maneuvering on a two-dimensional plane in the gravity well of a star, set against the backdrop of a starfield.

was extremely popular in the small programming community in the 1960s and was widely recreated on other minicomputer and mainframe computers of the time, later migrating to early microcomputer systems.

[1][5] Although the game was widespread for the era, it was still very limited in its direct reach: the PDP-1 was priced at US$120,000 (equivalent to about $1,209,000 in 2023) and only 53 were ever sold, most without a monitor, which prohibited the original Spacewar!

[7] In Computer Space, the player controls a rocket as it attempts to shoot a pair of flying saucers while avoiding their fire.

Counters on the right side of the screen track the number of times both the player's rocket and the saucers have been destroyed, as well as how long that round of gameplay has lasted.

[9][17] Over the summer they made plans for developing the game, and in the early fall they were joined by Larry Bryan, a computer programmer who also worked at Ampex.

[12][14] It is unclear if the pair were aware that Data General had demonstrated a more powerful variant of the Nova, sold for US$8,000, running a single game of Spacewar!

at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in December 1968, though that solution would have been too expensive for an arcade game, which typically cost US$1,000 at the time.

[9][12] Bushnell and Dabney began to design custom hardware to run the game's functions, and in January 1971 they had a dot moving on a screen.

He did not send the letter, however; near the end of January, he tried to run their program on a local Nova, and found that they had miscalculated the requirements.

[14] Although upset, Bushnell soon realized that it would be possible to entirely replace the Nova with custom hardware, and that the cost to build the whole game's computing systems would be much lower.

On the other hand, the custom hardware was not as powerful as the more expensive Nova computer, which meant that the pair needed to make gameplay modifications.

[14][17] The major arcade game manufacturers were based out of Chicago at the time, limiting their ability to demonstrate their idea to an existing firm.

[17] Dabney remained at Ampex until the summer, when he resigned to join Bushnell at Nutting, as he was initially unwilling to leave the stable job he had worked at for ten years without more proof that the game could be a success.

After Dabney joined Bushnell at Nutting, he helped with the creation of the cabinet itself, including the coin slot, control panel, and power supply, and designed a sound system that could make a noise like a rocket engine.

The ships themselves are drawn on the screen as a pattern of dots, rather than connected lines, and were essentially hardwired bitmaps, and are considered an early form of the concept of sprite graphics.

[22] The cabinet includes a General Electric 15-inch black and white television screen as the monitor, specially modified for the game.

[21] As Syzygy and Nutting prepared for the MOA show, Bushnell learned that another pair of engineers, Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck, were also creating an arcade version of Spacewar!

In August 1971 Bushnell called Pitts and Tuck, who were operating as Mini-Computer Applications, so that they could meet and discuss their solutions to the problem of running Spacewar!

[7][21] The Galaxy Game designers had run into the same issue, but had solved it with expensive customized military surplus joysticks.

[9] The game was popular with viewers, with a crowded display area, and trade magazine Cash Box called it "very promising" and "very glamorous".

[31] Bushnell later stated that he was encouraged by the success of Computer Space in regards to future game ideas, as he had never before created something that made so much money, and additionally felt that his time at Nutting gave him confidence in running his own company because he "couldn't screw it up more than they did".

[9] Bushnell's enthusiasm was soon vindicated, as Atari's first game, Pong, went on to substantially greater success than Computer Space.