If you ever wanted to meet the man responsible for the loss of all your quarters to arcade games, you wouldn't have to farther than Nolan Bushnell, one of the founders of Atari and the creator of Computer Space. Working with Ted Dabney (the other eventual Atari founder), Bushnell came up with the first coin-operated, stand-alone arcade game. The console was futuristic. The paint job was metallic. The screen was black and white. Hey, the year was 1971, we're lucky the whole thing wasn't powered by a hamster on a wheel.

Video games were not unknown at the time but they were mostly installed in computer labs on college campuses. Computer Space tried to bring the excitement of two dots firing at each other to all the good boys and girls across the land. The object of the game was to keep your spaceship away from the fire of two flying saucers. The player had two controls for rotation at his disposal, and two more for thrust and firing back at the enemy. If your score was higher than the saucers' tally after a certain time interval, you lived to fight another day.

The game might have been easy and fun for a couple of video game visionaries like Dabney and Bushnell but it didn't go over very well with crowds at bars and bowling alleys, who thought it complicated. Luckily for them, Bushnell's next endeavor was the legendary Pong and even a tipsy bar patron could maneuver those paddles. Maybe.