Arcade game Invaders", however, dealt a yet more powerful blow to the popularity of electro-mechanical games. In 1971 students at Stanford University set up the "Galaxy Game", a coin-operated version of the Spacewar video game. This ranks as the earliest known instance of a coin-operated video game. Later in the same year, Nolan Bushnell created the first mass-manufactured game, "Computer Space", for Nutting Associates. In 1972, Atari was formed by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. Atari essentially created the coin-operated video game industry with the game "Pong", the first successful electronic ping pong video game. "Pong" proved to be popular, but imitators
Galaxy Game were well into development and had gotten permission to place the machine at the Tresidder student union building at Stanford as a test site. It was then that they received a call from Nolan Bushnell, who had heard of their project and wanted to show them his similar project he was working on. Bushnell had also played "Spacewar" during the 1960s and wanted to make an arcade game version of it, but had gone in a different technological direction. He and Ted Dabney had initially started with a US$4,000 Data General Nova computer which they thought would be powerful enough