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 minicomputer by Steve Russell and others in the programming community at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The two-player game has the players engage in a dogfight between two spaceships, set against the backdrop of a starfield, with a central star exerting gravitational force upon the ships.

[3] Spacewar 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.

[2][5] The original developers of Spacewar considered ways to monetize the game, but saw no options given the high price of the computer it ran on.

Soon, Pitts had ceased going to classes, instead spending his nights in the computer lab interacting with the graduate and postgraduate students and playing Spacewar on the PDP-6.

While this was still too high for a commercially viable product, as most electronic games in arcades cost around US$1,000 at the time, Tuck and Pitts felt it was low enough to build a prototype to determine interest and optimal per-game pricing.

[6][7][8] The gameplay of Galaxy Game, like Spacewar!, involves two monochrome spaceships called "the needle" and "the wedge" (though their appearances have been modified for the coin-op version) each controlled by a player, attempting to shoot each other while maneuvering on a two-dimensional plane in the gravity well of a star, set against the backdrop of a starfield.

[7] The display adapter for the monitor was built by Ted Panofsky, the coin acceptors were sourced from jukebox manufacturer Rowe International, and the joysticks found at a military surplus store as remainders from B-52 bomber controls.

[10] The code for the game was based on a version of Spacewar running on a PDP-10 in the Stanford artificial intelligence lab, but modified with additional features.

[13] They were curious about what Tuck and Pitts had done to make a commercially competitive version of the game, but were relieved, though also somewhat disappointed, to find that they had not solved that problem yet.

[6][11][14] The veneered walnut console, complete with seats for players, was located on the second floor of the building and connected to the PDP-11 in the attic by a 100-foot cable.

[8] By the time the second prototype was completed the pair had spent US$65,000 on the project and had no feasible way of making up the cost with the machine or commercial prospects for a wider release.

Throughout its time on display, it remained popular, with "ten to twenty people gathered around the machines most Friday and Saturday nights when school was in session.

Due to issues with space and maintenance, in 2000 it was moved into the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, in the displayed storage section.

[7][15] In August 2010, the museum loaned the console to Google to be placed at their headquarters campus at the request of Pitts—who wanted the game to be played as well as displayed—due to a discussion with senior vice president Jonathan Rosenberg, who had been hired as a 13 year old by Tuck and Pitts in the mid-1970s to keep the machine cleaned.