Posted June 08, 2009
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Spacewar! technically isn't the first computer game either, it was predated by a few others, most notably Tennis for Two and OXO (Tic-tac-toe).
Pong was first released a full decade later in 1972. As you can imagine technology had moved on quite a bit by then making it much easier to distribute to the wider public. It came out a year after Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney released Computer Space which was essentially a clone of the original Spacewar!. Computer Space was largely a failure due to its difficulty.
http://www.dmoz.org/Games/Video_Games/History/
http://www.thedoteaters.com/stage1.php
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blcomputer_videogames.htm
http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3116291
Cool. Good stuff. I was posting from memories of things I'd read, instead of researching, and was confusing Computer Space with Spacewar. I didn't actually realize that the gap between Spacewar and Computer Space was almost a decade.