Space Race (video game) screen while avoiding obstacles. Development of "Space Race" began in Summer 1972 under the name "Asteroid" by Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, based on ideas by him and co-founder Ted Dabney. The final design was done by Dabney, possibly with assistance by Bushnell and "Pong" designer Allan Alcorn. The game was planned to be quick to create to fulfill an earlier contract with Bally Midway. The engineering and prototyping was done by Alcorn; after it was completed and the design given to Midway to be released as "Asteroid", Atari produced its own nearly identical version as "Space Race". Fifty "Space Race"
Spacewar! coin-operated video games. While playing "Spacewar" at Stanford sometime between 1966 and 1969, college student Hugh Tuck remarked that a coin-operated version of the game would be very successful. While the high price of a minicomputer prevented such a game from being feasible then, in 1971 Tuck and Bill Pitts created a prototype coin-operated computer game, "Galaxy Game", with a US$20,000 PDP-11. Around the same time, a second prototype coin-operated game based on "Spacewar", "Computer Space", was developed by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, which would become the first commercially sold arcade video game and the first widely available video