Copyright and video games between the games were limited to the plaintiff's ideas. According to the court the similarities, "were inevitable given the requirements of the idea of a game involving a spaceship combating space rocks and given the technical demands of the medium of a video game." In Atari v. North American Philips Consumer Electronics Corp. (1982) the 7th Circuit wrote that "no plagiarist can excuse the wrong by showing how much of his work he did not pirate." This was said in the context of the fact that, "while a game is not protectable by copyright as such, this kind of work
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