This item would fit in any retro-design furnished area of your house. We think it looks awesome, and would love to have one (if only it were not such an expensive collectible...). This wonderful piece of retro-electronica is a coin-operated (coin-op for short) computer game from 1971 called Computer Space. In fact, it was the first ever commercial coin-op arcade video game!
This sample sold for $3,175 on Ebay, but in the past we have seen others sell for more. As with all auctions, the final price depends on the amount of interested bidders, and the desperation they feel to obtain a specific object.
Computer Space was designed by a man named Nolan Bushnell. After he had seen the game Spacewar in action on a PDP minicomputer, he conceived the idea of a stand-alone computer game machine. He sold his project to the company Nutting Associates in 1971, who also hired him to lead the development team. It is estimated that about 15oo of these machines were produced and sold, since production was stopped quickly due to little demand and the fact that Nutting Associates did not believe in the product. Due to this limited production run, Computer Space cabinets are quite rare. The housing around the internals was made of fiberglass, and came in various colors; yellow, green, red and blue (we love the blue one!).Nolan Bushnell continued to develop ideas and games, and formed his own company in 1972. Atari was born. The first machine developed by Atari was the world-famous Pong arcade machine. Later in the 70s, with small television based consoles selling like hotcakes, Pong would grow out to be the most popular computer game of its time, and for years Atari would dominate the video console and game market.
The are many other sites dedicated to video game collecting and history, we suggest use your favorite search engine to get to them ;)
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