Galaxy Game: Restoring the First Coin-Op Video Game To support the preservation of Galaxy Game, please consider a donation today. Spacewar! was written on the PDP-1 at MIT in 1962 and spread wherever there was a display to run it, including the PDP-6 and later PDP-10 at the Stanford AI Lab, where Bill Pitts spent his nights playing it. In 1971 two teams set out to put it in front of the paying public. Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney built Computer Space for Nutting Associates instead. Pitts and Hugh Tuck went the other way. Galaxy Game, installed at Stanford’s Tresidder Union in September 1971, was the Cadillac of Spacewars. It ran on a real PDP-11/20 with 8K bytes of core, a point-plotting display interface designed by Ted Panofsky, and an HP 1300 A electrostatic X-Y display. No amount of dimes and quarters was ever going to pay for that hardware. A 1972 revision let one PDP-11 drive multiple consoles, and it ran until 1979. Pitts and Panofsky revived it in 1997.

Galaxy Game has now come to ICM for another restoration, instigated by Bill Pitts, Josh Dersch and Robert Schmuck. The PDP-11’s power supply has been rebuilt and the machine is running. The HP 1300 A displays are next, and they need a full refurbishment: these are 20 kV electrostatic-deflection tubes with a diode-ladder high voltage supply, and after fifty years they are dim and out of focus. You can come see Galaxy Game on display at ICM now, and you can play it today under MAME.