Computer Space pitted a player-controlled rocket ship against two machine-controlled flying saucers in a space simulation set before a two-dimensional star field. The player controlled the rocket with four buttons: one for fire, which shoots a missile from the front of the rocket ship; two directional rotation buttons (to rotate the ship orientation clockwise or counterclockwise); and one for thrust, which propelled the ship in whichever direction it happened to be pointing. Think of Asteroids without the asteroids, and you should get the picture.

During play, two saucers would appear on the screen and shoot at the player while flying in a zig-zag formation. The player’s goal was to dodge the saucer fire and shoot the saucers.

Considering a game of this complexity playing out on a TV set, you might think that it was created as a sophisticated piece of software running on a computer. You’d think it, but you’d be wrong–and Bushnell wouldn’t blame you for the mistake. How he and Dabney managed to pull it off is a story of audacity, tenacity, and sheer force-of-will worthy of tech legend. This is how it happened.

The Germ of an Idea

The genesis of Computer Space dates back to 1962, when a group of computer enthusiasts at MIT created the world’s first known action video game. They called it “Spacewar!” (the exclamation mark was their idea too). It pitted two human-controlled ships against each other in a physics-based space duel that played out on the $20,000 vector display of a $120,000 DEC PDP-1 computer. For those of you keeping score, that totals up to over $1 million in 2011 dollars when adjusted for inflation.

Spacewar became very popular among computer users at MIT, and it soon caught the attention of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), the company that manufactured the PDP-1. Not long after its release, DEC began to distribute Spacewar as a glorified tech demo for PDP-series computers, which spread the game’s code to universities around the world. Over the next few years, fans ported the game to nearly every computer with a vector display, although those were admittedly few and far between–in the 1960s, most universities only owned one or two computers total; the machines were so expensive that only large organizations could afford them.

Two men playing Spacewar! on a PDP-1, circa 1962. (Photo: DEC)

In 1964, a young engineering student named Nolan Kay Bushnell encountered Spacewar for the first time at the University of Utah, which he attended. He found himself completely enraptured and could hardly pull himself away from the computer. “I loved the game and played it every chance I could get,” recalls Bushnell. “I didn’t get as many chances as I wanted.”

At the time, Bushnell worked a summer job as manager of the games department at the Lagoon Amusement Park in Farmington, Utah. There he saw electromechanical coin-operated arcade games that offered completely automated, interactive game experiences.

At that time, pinball machines dominated the coin-operated arcade game market, but manufacturers also offered shooting gallery, racing, and other crude games. Such games relied upon a postwar toolkit of relays, electromechanical components, film projectors, and transparencies to achieve the desired game play and visual effects, and they were prone to breaking down at any moment.

After seeing Spacewar, it occurred to Bushnell that the sci-fi computer game could form the basis for an amazing coin-op arcade machine. But the bright idea was soon followed by the realization that, with computer prices as high as they were, the game simply wouldn’t work as a commercial product. He filed it away in the back of his mind and moved on.

After graduating from University of Utah with a BSEE degree in 1968, Bushnell landed a job at Ampex in California. By that point Ampex had made its name as a prominent audio and video recording technology company; its innovations included the first multi-track audio recorder and the commercial video tape recorder. Bushnell packed up his things and moved out to the west coast, never looking back. He was 25 years old.

Bushnell (L) and Dabney (R) in 1972.

On his first day at Ampex as an engineer on the Videofile project, Bushnell met his new office mate, 31 year-old Samuel Frederick Dabney, Jr., known as “Ted” for short.

“I thought he was a nice guy, pretty straightforward, pretty level-headed,” recalls Dabney of Bushnell, whose charm and charisma always seemed to precede any practical engineering skills he might have. “I couldn’t quite figure out what he was capable of doing because, whenever I would ask him a question, he would ask me a question.”

Bushnell recalls Dabney as “a really, really nice guy. Smart guy. Self-taught, but just full of practical knowledge.”

The two hit it off, and Bushnell soon introduced Dabney to his love of board games. The two engineers played chess at first — mostly during office hours — but soon branched out to go, a complex Chinese board game that was immensely popular in Japan.

To facilitate their regular in-office gaming sessions, Dabney built a go board with an Ampex logo on the back for camouflage. They would set the board on a trash can between their desks while playing, and if management came along, they would flip the board over and hang it on the wall, logo-side out, so no one would know what they were up to.

While playing these games, Dabney says that Bushnell shared his dreams of creating a family-friendly amusement restaurant that would bring coin-operated games out of amusement parks and into the mainstream. The pair examined the concept in detail, even visiting some restaurants together for research. They decided not to act on the idea (for the moment), but it marked the beginning of their plans to go into business together.

The Epiphany

While navigating the Silicon Valley social scene, Bushnell made friends with a computer engineer named Jim Stein who worked at Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (yes, they were already researching AI in 1969). The lab owned its very own PDP-6 computer and an I3 vector display, which prompted Bushnell to inquire if it could run Spacewar. Stein said yes, and the pair spent hours playing the game on one of the Ampex engineer’s night visits.

Not long after, Bushnell ran across an ad for the new Data General Nova minicomputer in one of his engineering magazines. As one of the lowest-cost minicomputers on the market (a stripped-down base model cost a mere $3,995–roughly $24,600 today), the Nova represented a new era in computing. Bushnell realized that an economically justifiable coin-operated computer game might finally be within his reach.

It wasn’t long before Bushnell dragged Dabney down to the lab to see Spacewar, which Bushnell enthusiastically gushed over. It was then that Bushnell revealed his ideas for a commercial computer game to Dabney. “He said, ‘We’ve got to put a coin slot on that thing,’” recalls Dabney. The self-taught engineer wasn’t too impressed with Spacewar itself, but he wasn’t about to back away from an interesting technical challenge either.

The pair began discussing what it would take to make Bushnell’s idea a reality. “We knew we needed a computer, so we needed a computer programmer,” says Dabney. They enlisted Larry Bryan, another Ampex engineer as their “computer guy.” The trio decided to form a company; Bryan came up the with name Syzygy, an astronomy term for a straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies. Each would deposit $100 into a group bank account to get started.

That was the plan, anyway. Bushnell and Dabney put in their money, but Bryan never did. It actually worked out for the best, because the “computer guy” soon became superfluous to the project. To better make use of a costly minicomputer, Bushnell had planned to hook two game-playing stations to one Nova, which would play two separate games simultaneously. Bushnell worked out the math and found that the Nova, the only computer they could dream of affording, was too slow to meet their needs.

After that, the idea died down. Months went by and Dabney figured their plan to make a computer arcade machine would never materialize. But Bushnell would not be deterred. Dabney recalls the scene of Bushnell’s breakthrough epiphany.

“Nolan came to me one time and he said, ‘On a TV set, when you turn the vertical hold on the TV, the picture will go up, and if you turn it the other way, it goes down. Why does it do that?’ I explained it to him. It was the difference between the sync and the picture timing. He said, ‘Could we do that with some control?’ I said, ‘Yeah, we probably can, but we’d have to do it digitally, because analog would not be linear.’”

What Bushnell had hit upon was an idea to electronically manipulate the video signal of an ordinary television set so they could play an interactive electronic game without the need for a computer. It wasn’t the first time in history that someone had made that realization; Ralph Baer, an engineer at Sanders Associates, had invented the first TV video games in 1967, but Bushnell had no knowledge of that prior discovery.

Bushnell asked his friend if he could put together a prototype that could do exactly what he had described, and Dabney took up the challenge. Dabney moved his eldest daughter, Terri, into a smaller bedroom and requisitioned her old sleeping space as a lab where he could implement his ideas. Working completely alone, Dabney built a circuit board that could display a single spot on a TV set while allowing a user to move the spot around using switches. “My neighbors would come over and see what I was doing, and they would start laughing at how funny that looked,” says Dabney.

Dabney showed Bushnell his work, completed in the fall of 1969, and the younger engineer was impressed. He handed over the board to Bushnell for further tinkering and forgot about it for the moment, becoming re-absorbed in his work at Ampex. Meanwhile, Bushnell had big plans for Dabney’s new invention.

Enter Nutting Associates

By early 1970, Bushnell had already been brainstorming about how to turn Dabney’s video control board into a shipping game. He decided that he needed investment from an outside source to make his dream of a coin-operated video game a reality, but he had no connections in the arcade industry.

The opportunity Bushnell needed fell into his lap in February 1970 during a visit to the dentist. While getting his teeth checked out, Bushnell described his current project to the doctor, who recalled a patient of his that worked as marketing director for a local coin-op game company.

That patient happened to be Dave Ralston of Nutting Associates, a small arcade game maker based in Mountain View. Nutting’s marquee product at the time was Computer Quiz, a general trivia arcade machine that projected questions onto a screen and allowed users to choose answers with push button controls. (No computers were actually involved.)

Bushnell called Ralston, and two days later he was in Nutting Associates’ offices pitching to both Ralston and Bill Nutting, president of the company, on his idea for a coin-operated Spacewar game. At the time, Nutting Associates was in financial decline, almost wholly dependent on its three-year-old Computer Quiz game to get by. The pair were anxious for another product to revive their business, so they said yes to Bushnell’s idea while also extending an offer to hire him as chief engineer of Nutting.

Sensing Nutting’s desperation, Bushnell pitched an amazingly lopsided deal that allowed him and Dabney to retain the rights to Computer Space, licensing it to Nutting for production in exchange for a 5% royalty on unit sales — even though Bushnell would develop the game as an employee. Nutting would provide the facilities for Computer Space’s development and pay its manufacturing costs.

“I was very careful,” recalls Bushnell. “In my employment contract, I excluded the video game technology and all the shop right issues and told them that I would not work on the design of the video game on their time until it was ready to be put into production, which is something that I would allow them to pay for.”

Before Bushnell came along, Nutting Associates had no in-house capability to design a game for itself. Computer Quiz had been created by Bill Nutting’s brother, David, who lived in Chicago and operated his own amusements company. “They didn’t have an engineering staff,” says Dabney, “and they didn’t have anybody that understood how to fix their machines when they broke. Nolan convinced him he could do that.”

So, in a sense, Bushnell became Nutting’s engineering department when he joined Nutting in March 1970, quitting his job at Ampex without a second thought. Meanwhile, Dabney stayed behind at his old employer. He wasn’t ready to give up his secure job for a risky proposition — yet.

Bushnell, on the other hand, was convinced that video-based arcade games were the future of the arcade amusement industry. They would be solid state, having no moving parts other than the controls, so they would be easy to deploy and maintain. At Nutting, he set out to build the first coin-operated video game ever created. As it turned out, he wasn’t completely alone.

A Coincidence Six Miles Away

Around the time Bushnell started developing Computer Space at Nutting, a Stanford alumnus and his high school buddy had just begun work on their own coin-operated version of Spacewar. Unlike Bushnell’s version, their game would rely on a real computer to function.

In 1971, Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck bought a $14,000 DEC PDP-11/20 minicomputer and a $3,000 vector display with money gathered from family and friends. Tuck built controls and enclosures while Pitts began programming a custom reproduction of Spacewar with the goal of creating a coin-munching pay-to-play amusement device.

With the “war” in “Spacewar” being an unpopular subject on university campuses at the time, they chose the title “Galaxy Game” to describe their work.

Just as Tuck and Pitts were finalizing their game, they received a call from Nolan Bushnell, who had heard about Galaxy Game through mutual contacts. Neither party knew of the other’s effort when they started, so Bushnell was understandably intrigued.

“I can remember thinking ‘Gee, I’ve got to meet with these guys,’” recalls Bushnell. Over coffee at Stanford, the Nutting engineer told Galaxy Game’s creators about his plans for Computer Space and invited them over to Nutting’s offices to take a look.

“We went in there and Nolan was literally an engineer with an oscilloscope in hand working on Computer Space,” said Pitts in an interview with Tristan Donovan for the book Replay: The History of Video Games. Pitts and Tuck were impressed with what Bushnell was pulling off technologically, but they felt their game was superior because it was true to Spacewar.

Atari Greatest Hits should be available for the iPhone and iPad sometime this evening for U.S. users. The app includes Pong for free, and includes 99 games from the Atari 2600 and arcade system for purchase. Games are sold in bundles of three or four for $1 each, or $15 for the entire collection. A handful of games include local multiplayer over Bluetooth.

Some of the classics include Yars’ Revenge, Super Breakout, Centipede and Missile Command. I’m saddened but not surprised that Activision’s Atari games, such as Pitfall and River Raid, aren’t on the list. No Pac-Man or E.T., either, but that’s probably for the best.

This isn’t Atari’s first endeavor in the iPhone App Store. The publisher has previously launched modern-looking versions of Centipede, Missile Command and Super Breakout, but the games in Greatest Hits are the actual old-school versions. It’s also Atari’s first store within a store, joining Commodore 64 and VH1 Classic Presents: Intellivision in the iPhone’s roster of classic video game emulators.

I wouldn’t expect to see an Android version. As we learned from the Kongregate debacle, in which Google temporarily removed a Flash game portal from the Android Market, stores within stores are one way to run afoul of Market policy. But that shouldn’t be a problem for Android users, who are free to purchase a third-party Atari emulator and play the console’s entire catalog without paying a dime to Atari. Makes sense to me.

The company, now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Infogrames, is remaking the Atari 2600 classic Haunted House, and a couple of listings on Gamefly suggest that Centipede and Star Raiders remakes could be next.

Given the timing, this wouldn’t surprise me. E3 was crowded with remakes of well-known or in some cases forgotten video game franchises. Fondly remembered games like Goldeneye and NBA Jam are being brought back to life, while franchises that never really went away, such as Sonic the Hedgehog and Mortal Kombat, are going back to their 2D roots. These are safe bets in the midst of a games industry slump. If Atari wants to jump on the nostalgia train, now’s the time.

The difference between Atari’s remakes and the examples I saw at E3 is that Atari’s games are so old, there’s very little to build from. Haunted House could be a great game, but it’s impossible to say whether the remake is faithful to the original, because the original is so primitive. If Star Raiders gets remade, it’ll probably resemble Wing Commander more than anything else.

Basically, I feel the same way about Atari’s games as I do about the upcoming surge of movies based on very old video games. They won’t necessarily be bad, but they’re just blank slates with recognizable names.

This morning it dawned on me: The iPad keyboard feels a lot like the one on the first computer I ever bought with my own money, the Atari 400.

The Atari’s famously bad keyboard just barely counted as a physical one: In one of the cheesiest cost-cutting decisions ever made by a PC manufacturer, there were no individual keys. Instead, the whole thing was molded out of one piece of flat plastic, so the “keys” had no travel. The only real evidence of physicality were the ridges around each key, which didn’t do much to make the typing experience better.

I got my Atari 400 in 1982 and used it a lot–especially to write programs in BASIC, which involves plenty of typing. I haven’t used it since the mid-1980s. But the tactile experience of  smacking my fingertips down on a surface with no give to it was stuck somewhere in the back of my brain, and using the iPod unlocked it in a strangely Proustian fashion.

At the time I owned the Atari, I was defensive about that keyboard. I don’t think I maintained that it was good, but I did get pretty proficient on it. I could see myself getting similarly proficient on the iPad keyboard. And the iPad’s version has one gigantic advantage: built-in autocorrecting that should fix a sizable percentage of typing errors on the fly.

Doing a little typing on the iPad was enough to convince me that it might not be as lousy an experience as I’d anticipated. But I want to do real writing on it. Safe bet: When I get my hands on an iPad  for real-world testing, I’m going to blog on it and see what it’s like to type 300 or 600 or 2000 words on the thing. If it’s no worse than writing 16KB of BASIC on an Atari 400, I’ll be relieved…

This list is by no means exhaustive, nor are all of these consoles bad overall (see The Worst Video Game Systems of All Time for that list). And though some of these problems keep popping up in one form or another–like the bad call of feeding power to the console via the RF switch shared by RCA’s Studio II and Atari’s 5200–other errors in judgments were unique to one console. Thank heavens for that.

In chronological order…

RCA Studio II (1977)

Problem #1: Poor Controllers

The RCA Studio II shipped with no external controllers, just a pair of built-in ten-button keypads. These keypads were awkward and uncomfortable to use. It made games difficult to control and limited the potential of software for the system.

What Were They Thinking?

My best guess is general cluelessness as to what constituted a decent game controller on RCA’s part. To some extent it’s excusable, since home video games were in their infancy in 1977. And there’s no doubt that omitting detachable controllers reduced the system’s overall complexity and thus manufacturing costs overall — but it also greatly reduced the consumer’s desire to buy and play the system.

Problem #2: Power Through RF Switch

Similar to the Atari 5200–see below–the RCA Studio II received main system power through the video output cable. An AC adapter plugged into a special RF switch that provided power to the console, but unlike the 5200′s switch, the Studio II’s did not include any special functionality. Studio II owners with lost of damaged RF switches found themselves regretting their purchase.

What Were They Thinking?

RCA’s engineers probably felt that it was simpler to have one cable going in and out of the system. It was simpler — in the short term–until someone lost their switch box. Today, the special Studio II RF switch is extremely difficult to find (and for an already difficult-to-find system, that’s bad).

Mattel Intellivision (1979)

Problem #3: Ergonomically Hellish Controllers

Like most keyboards on early personal computers, the hand controllers and joysticks included with early video game systems were typically pretty bad. It took a long time before one innovator clearly came along (in this case, Nintendo with its NES pads) and provided a truly easy-to-use, accurate, sensitive, and comfortable solution.

Mattel’s Intellivision controller is no exception to the early-but-awkward rule. It includes a digital 16-direction disc that players pushed inward to control an onscreen character, similar to operation of +-shaped Nintendo control pads, but nowhere near as precise. If you were tempted to rotate the disc while depressing it for quicker maneuvers, you’d quickly be disappointed by the controller’s erratic performance.

The controller also included two buttons on each side of the unit (each set with the same function) that were hard to push and provided poor tactile feedback. Even worse, the controller was an odd shape that didn’t fit well in any human’s hands.

What Were They Thinking?

The designers at Mattel responsible for the Intellivision controller probably thought they were being clever and innovative. Sadly, they were wrong. Many players suffered through the controllers anyway, as the Intellivision hosted a large share of great games. Like proponents of other bad-but-classic technologies, those who defend the Intellivision’s knucklebusters primarily do so out of nostalgia (i.e. we walked uphill both ways on nails and we liked it).

Interestingly enough, the Intellivision wasn’t the only “-vision” game console to ship with bad controllers — the ColecoVision also came with a pair of its own stumpy, keypad-laden ergonomic nightmares. But that’s for another article.

Atari 5200 (1982)

Problem #4: Unreliable Analog Joystick

The Atari 5200 shipped with a pair of analog, non-centering joysticks whose rubbery buttons provided little tactile feedback and would wear out or break easily.

What Were They Thinking?

Atari engineers likely wanted to try something new with the Atari 5200′s analog controller, which unfortunately didn’t translate well to the arcade ganes of the day. The controller’s absolute worst application was Pac-Man–a game that demands precise, 4-way digital control–that ironically shipped as a pack-in game for the console during its later years.

Had Atari put forth any sort of effort to develop new, original games that specifically took advantage of the 5200′s analog stick, the system might have fared much better than it did.

Regarding the buttons, they were unreliable due to the thin plastic flex circuits beneath them, which were prone to tearing from repeated pressure — the kind commonly seen in any button application. Oops. It’s likely Atari used flex circuits due to space concerns (the unit was pretty cramped) and because they were less expensive than rigid PC boards.

On the bright side, the 5200 joysticks included the world’s first on-controller pause button.

Lunar Lander games abound on every platform. Along with Tetris and Pac-Man, the game–in which your mission is to safely maneuver your lunar module onto the moon’s surface–is one of the most widely cloned computer games of all time. But did you know that game players began touching down on the moon in Lunar Lander just months after Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin did so on July 20th, 1969?

Today’s versions of Lunar Lander are easily taken for granted; they’re generally regarded as dinky games you can get for free–”Who would pay for that?”

But the mother of all realistic space simulations wasn’t always perceived that way. In 1969, it was, in its own way, a sophisticated, ambitious piece of digital entertainment. And during the BASIC era of the 1970s and 80s, many programmers cut their teeth by attempting to program their own version of Lunar Lander. David Ahl, founder of Creative Computing magazine, called it “by far and away the single most popular computer game” in 1978 (and he was only talking about the text version!). Indeed, Lunar Lander was one of the early computer games that helped define computer games.

The Eagle Lands

YOU ARE LANDING ON THE MOON AND HAVE TAKEN OVER MANUAL
CONTROL 500 FEET ABOVE A GOOD LANDING SPOT. YOU HAVE A
DOWNWARD VELOCITY OF 50 FT/SEC. 120 UNITS OF FUEL REMAIN.

Among the millions who watched the Apollo 11 landing was a 17 year old Massachusetts high school student named Jim Storer. In the fall of 1969, around the time of the Apollo 12 launch, Storer took his inspiration to class with him. There, he programmed a simple text-based simulation of humanity’s greatest technological achievement on his school’s Digital Equipment Corp. PDP-8 minicomputer system.

“Lexington High School had a PDP-8,” Storer recalls. “It had 8 Teletypes, a small hard drive, and 12KB of main memory, where 8KB was used by the system and 4KB time shared by the users.”

Storer wrote his new program, “Lunar Landing Game,” in FOCAL, a programming language for the PDP-8 that was similar in some ways to BASIC (both were introductory languages known for their ease of use). His simulation was simple, yet powerful: underneath lay a realistic set of equations Storer believes his father may have taught him.

Lunar Landing Game’s gameplay consisted of a turn-based question and answer session, asking the user for the rocket fuel burn rate at each turn, which the user would then enter as a number from 0 to 200. The constraints against you were simple:

HERE ARE THE RULES THAT GOVERN YOUR SPACE VEHICLE:
(1) AFTER EACH SECOND, THE HEIGHT, VELOCITY, AND REMAINING FUEL WILL BE REPORTED.

(2) AFTER THE REPORT, A ‘?’ WILL BE TYPED. ENTER THE
NUMBER OF UNITS OF FUEL YOU WISH TO BURN DURING THE
NEXT SECOND. EACH UNIT OF FUEL WILL SLOW YOUR DESCENT
BY 1 FT/SEC.

(3) THE MAXIMUM THRUST OF YOUR ENGINE IS 30 FT/SEC/SEC OR
30 UNITS OF FUEL PER SECOND.

(4) WHEN YOU CONTACT THE LUNAR SURFACE, YOUR DESCENT ENGINE
WILL AUTOMATICALLY CUT OFF AND YOU WILL BE GIVEN A
REPORT OF YOUR LANDING SPEED AND REMAINING FUEL.

(5) IF YOU RUN OUT OF FUEL, THE ‘?’ WILL NO LONGER APPEAR,
BUT YOUR SECOND BY SECOND REPORT WILL CONTINUE UNTIL
YOU CONTACT THE LUNAR SURFACE.

Along the way, Jim Storer created one of the earliest computer games–one of a handful of text-based PDP-8 games of the 1960s, and one of the first computer simulation games ever. In less than 50 lines of code, Storer captured the imaginations of an entire generation of programmers with a gripping space drama composed of nothing more than simple text statements.

Storer submitted his game to PDP-8 maker DEC, which was always looking for innovative and interesting uses of its computers. The programs were usually distributed for free or used as demonstrations to potential clients, serving as a powerful marketing tool. At DEC, an employee named David H. Ahl translated Storer’s Lunar Lander into the BASIC language, which soon overtook FOCAL as the most popular introduction to programming. From there, both the FOCAL and BASIC versions of Storer’s simulation spread to other PDP-8 users through DEC’s EDU newsletter and through distribution by DEC’s Education Product Group.

After that, Storer forgot about the game. Life went on. He never sold it, and never followed the progress or influence of its imitators as they echoed down through the years. “After leaving high school I never thought about the game again,” says Storer. “Until about a couple of months ago when someone e-mailed me about this, I was completely unaware of any Lunar Lander game other than the one I wrote in high school.”

But Storer’s computer experiences in high school shaped the rest of his career: “I became interested in computer science as a result of taking that computer class and doing programming on the PDP-8.” Storer later studied computer science as an undergraduate at Cornell University and then received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Princeton University. He is now a professor of computer science at Brandeis University.

In 1973, DEC published a book edited by Ahl called “101 BASIC Computer Games” that included both Storer’s version of Lunar Lander and two others that had been inspired by Storer’s program. In 1978, Ahl revamped the book with a focus on home microcomputers that were common at the time, and it sold over a million copies. Thanks to Ahl’s book, Lunar Lander’s status as one of the classics of early computer gaming was assured.

Lunar Lander Gets Graphical

DEC consultant Jack Burness had long been a fan of America’s race to the moon. He recalls with great clarity the excitement of the period: “The space program was an incredibly big project then. More than a project, it was a national embracing of the future.”

Inspired by a co-worker who attended the launch of Apollo 16, Burness pestered his local senator for passes to see the launch of the final Apollo mission, Apollo 17, in December 1972. “A bunch of my friends went with me to see it,” recalls Burness. “It was the last launch and was at night–an overwhelming powerfully experience.”

That experience simmered in the back of his mind for the next few months, and it proved influential when DEC needed a software demo for its new GT40 terminal.

The DEC GT40 was a graphical computer terminal–unusual for its time, since it used a vector CRT display. One electron gun directly drew geometric shapes on the screen, providing a potent way to generate sharp, high-resolution computer graphics with the limited computing power available at the time. Conventional bitmapped raster displays (like those on conventional TV video games) draw the screen progressively from top to bottom, one row at a time, and required vastly more memory to compose a detailed on-screen image.

“I actually had quit Digital the previous spring and moved to Cambridge to consult for Draper Labs,” says Burness. “For some now long-forgotten reason I was back consulting to DEC that winter.”

No joke, Universal has picked up the film rights, prevailing in a bidding war against three other studios. Matthew Lopez, whose writing credits include Race to Witch Mountain and Bedtime Stories, will pen the script. Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who produced both Transformers movies and, fittingly, Doom, will be the producer.

Now, I tend to be skeptical when it comes to nostalgia acts — I skipped the 2007 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie on principle — but this idea is truly wacky. We’re of course talking about a video game that had no plot, no characters and really, no reason to be reincarnated in any form. Asteroids is a game whose most interesting development is the occasional appearance of a flying saucer that fires bullets at random angles (so you can bet this movie will have aliens!).

One could argue that Asteroids’ complete lack of substance opens the door to limitless possibilities, but then isn’t this movie just a cheap use of name recognition to cover for generic space opera? Unless Asteroids the movie features an endless battle against free-floating rocks, complete with ruminations on the inevitability of death, I won’t be moved.

View Atari Touch Tablet unboxing slideshow

The next time you use your shiny new Wacom tablet and Adobe Photoshop CS4, think back to a time before time–a time before blends, morphs, heal brushes, and 10-megapixel images.  A time like 1984, which, for computer graphics, was darker than the Dark Ages. It was a time when you could buy an $89.95 Atari CX77 Touch Tablet for your Atari 8-bit home computer.  Luckily, I bought mine for considerably less last year, although it was still in new, unopened condition.  Safely sequestered in the official Vintage Computing and Gaming computer lab, I recently began the task of unpacking the antique peripheral and documenting the process.  Here’s an account of the experience.

The first three decades of digital gaming saw a flurry of concepts, technologies, and products that were groundbreaking in their era and still matter today. And the drawings their inventors used to document them in patent filings are a nostalgic, charming blast. Here are thirty-two of those sketches–including ones for some the most successful games ever and a few which I’m not sure ever made it to market at all.

As with my earlier patent galleries, I couldn’t have done this one without the wondrous research tool known as Google Patents. The filing dates that follow link to the full patent documents there.