Galaxy Game
Galaxy Game is one of the earliest known coin-operated computer/video games. It was installed at the Tresidder Union at Stanford University in September, 1971, two months before the official release of Computer Space, the first mass-produced video game. Only one unit was built initially, although the game later included several consoles allowing users to play against each other.
SCREENSHOTS
HISTORY
Galaxy Game is a space combat arcade game developed in 1971 during the early era of video games. Galaxy Game is an expanded version of the 1962 Spacewar!, potentially the first video game to spread to multiple computer installations. It features two spaceships, "the needle" and "the wedge", engaged in a dogfight while maneuvering in the gravity well of a star. Both ships are controlled by human players.
Created by Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck, the initial prototype cost US$20,000 (equivalent to about $159,000 in 2025) to build. It consisted of a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11 minicomputer attached by a cable to a wooden console with a monitor, controls, and seats. It charged players 10 cents per game or 25 cents for three, and drew crowds "ten-deep". This was one of the first coin-operated video games; the prototype was installed in November 1971 at the Tresidder student union building at Stanford University, only a few months after a similar display of a prototype of Computer Space, making it the second known video game to charge money to play.
The pair built a second prototype, replacing the first in Tresidder in June 1972. It featured the capability to play multiple games simultaneously on four monitors, though due to space restrictions only two consoles with monitors were actually installed. These consoles had a blue fiberglass casing, and the PDP-11 was housed inside one of the consoles. By the time of its installation, the pair had spent US$65,000 (equivalent to about $500,000 in 2025) on the project, but were unable to make the game commercially viable.
The second prototype remained in the student union building until 1979, when the display processor became faulty. It was restored and placed in the Stanford computer science department in 1997, then moved to the Computer History Museum in 2000, where it remains as of 2017.
Background
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. The game was copied to several of the early minicomputer installations in American academic institutions after its initial release, making it potentially the first video game to be available outside a single research institute. 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. Early computer scientist Alan Kay noted in 1972 that "the game of Spacewar blossoms spontaneously wherever there is a graphics display connected to a computer," and contributor Martin Graetz recalled in 1981 that as the game initially spread it could be found on "just about any research computer that had a programmable CRT". 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 $954,000 in 2025) and only 55 were ever sold, most without a monitor, which prohibited the original Spacewar or any game of the time from reaching beyond a narrow, academic audience. 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.
In 1966, Stanford University student Bill Pitts, who had a hobby of exploring the steam tunnels and buildings of the campus, broke into a building he found out to be the location of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Project, which held a DEC PDP-6 time-sharing computer system with 20 Teletype consoles connected to it. Fascinated by the computer and having taken several introductory computer classes, Pitts convinced the head of the project, Lester Earnest, to let him use the computer after hours. 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. Pitts often played against Hugh Tuck, a student at California Polytechnic State University who was a friend from high school. During one Spacewar session that took place, depending on the source, between 1966 and 1969, Tuck remarked that a coin-operated version of the game would be very successful. Such a device was still unfeasible due to the cost of computers, and the pair did not pursue the project. In 1971, however, Pitts, who by then had graduated and was working at Lockheed as a PDP-10 programmer, learned of the 1970 DEC PDP-11, which was sold for around US$14,000. 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.
Gameplay
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. The ships fire torpedoes, which are not affected by the gravitational pull of the star. The ships have a limited number of torpedoes and a limited supply of fuel, which is used when the player fires his thrusters. Torpedoes are fired one at a time, and there is a cooldown period between launches. The ships follow Newtonian physics, remaining in motion even when the player is not accelerating, though the ships can rotate at a constant rate without inertia.
Each player controls one of the ships and must attempt to shoot down the other ship while avoiding a collision with the star. Flying near the star can provide a gravity assist to the player at the risk of misjudging the trajectory and falling into the star. If a ship moves past one edge of the screen, it reappears on the other side in a wraparound effect. A hyperspace feature, or "panic button", can be used as a last-ditch means to evade enemy torpedoes by moving the player's ship to another location on the screen after disappearing for a few seconds, but the reentry from hyperspace occurs at a random location, and there is an increasing probability of the ship exploding with each use. Player controls include clockwise and counterclockwise rotation, forward thrust, firing torpedoes, and hyperspace. Galaxy Game features, as improvements over the original, optional modifications to the game to have faster ships, faster torpedoes, to remove the star and its gravitational field or reverse the gravity to push away from the star, and to remove the wraparound effect. The movement of the ships was controlled with a joystick, while the torpedoes, hyperspace, and game options are controlled via a panel of buttons.…