It does not take long after its release for Pong to become a worldwide phenomenon. Early in the year, the game makes its way to Japan, where a cabinet is picked up by the electro-mechanical arcade game manufacturer Taito. The company finds its technology promising, so they assign engineer Tomohiro Nishikado to reverse-engineer the system, as he is one of their only employees with any sophisticated electronics experience.

  Thanks to this success, Syzygy is growing rapidly. They bring on a new secretary-treasurer, Fred Marincic, and open up an “amusement arcade” in a Los Angeles Mall with cabinets of Computer Space and Pong.

The leadership of Syzygy, shortly after the release of Pong. From left to right is Ted Dabney, Nolan Bushnell, Fred Marincic, and Al Alcorn.

A clip from the 1973 documentary Games Computers Play, filmed shortly after the release of Pong.

February

  The third issue of the People’s Computing Company Journal is published, including the full source code to several games. The size of these games is so small that the magazine’s subscribers are expected to copy it down by hand, painstakingly typing it into their own machines. By this point, games were written in the programming language BASIC, which had an active community of programmers thanks to its compatibility with a variety of different computers.

Among the games in this issue are Hurkle, and a sample of Mugwump, both credited to Bob Albrecht. Both are hide-and-seek games, originating from Project SOLO’s Hide and Seek, which had become a minor subgenre of BASIC games.

One reader of the magazine, Gregory Yob, is unsatisfied with the lack of creativity among these hide-and-seek games. In each of them, a creature is randomly hidden on a 10x10 grid, with the player having to use clues to hunt it down.

April

  Soylent Green, a dystopian science fiction movie starring Charlton Heston, releases in theaters, including a short scene showing a Computer Space cabinet for about 15 seconds.

Computer Space, pictured in Soylent Green.

May

  Syzygy sets up a subsidiary to export its games internationally, aiming to expand into Europe, and later Asia. As the company grows, the leadership move their headquarters from Sunnyvale to Los Gatos, California. As Ted Dabney and Nolan Bushnell are driving back from choosing the new office, their reality sets in. Bushnell asks what life will be like once they’re rich, but Dabney is not as excited. According to Dabney, “That moment Nolan became his money. Once he did, there was no reason to hang around with him anymore…once it all becomes money, it’s just not worth anything.”

Ted Dabney recounts the moment.

  Back in the computer labs, games are still developing on mainframe computers. Written by John Daleske with some help from Silas Warner, Empire is created as part of coursework for one of Daleske’s education classes. The game is built on Project PLATO, one of the first systems to support multi-user computing, which gives it the capability for something completely new in computer games thus far: networked multi-player. There’s no internet to play over, but players can dial in to the PLATO system and battle in spaceships to take over the galaxy as alien races taken from the TV show Star Trek. The game gains quite a bit of popularity, with various offspring popping up under the names Conquest, trek83, Xtrek, Netrek, and Galactic Attack.

John Daleske talks about Empire and the PLATO community.

Galactic Attack, a 1980 remake of the game for the Apple II computer.

July

  Syzygy release their next arcade video game, Space Race, the result of the driving game idea Bushnell had wanted to make instead of Pong. Designed by Ted Dabney, it is a space-themed driving game where two players race to reach the top of the screen while avoiding obstacles. The game isn’t boring, but it’s vastly eclipsed by Pong’s success. Advertisements for the game, however, contain the first use of the company’s new logo, reflecting their official name change: Syzygy is now Atari.

An advertisement for Space Race. At the bottom is Atari’s iconic “Fuji” logo, designed by George Opperman.

Space Race in action. Note the similarities to both Computer Space and Pong.

  Over in Japan, Tomohiro Nishikado had finished reverse-engineering Pong, enabling Taito to create Elepong with the technology, a clone of the game. Nishikado is enamored with the arcade video game format, and starts thinking of other games that could be built with the technology.

A graphic for Elepong.

Tomohiro Nishikado discusses the difficulties of making arcade video games in this era.

  Another Japanese arcade game company, Sega, release their own Pong clone around the same time, called Pong-tron. Along with Elepong, the two Pong clones are the first arcade video games to be produced in Japan, as well as the first video games from their respective companies.

A promotional image of Pong-tron.

  Outside the arcades, the book 101 BASIC Computer Games is published by Digital Equipment Corporation. It is the culmination of the efforts of David Ahl, gathering a huge range of text-based computer games, which, like before, readers would have to copy down into their own computers by hand. The BASIC programming language is so young that the majority of games written in the language are found in the book. Although many are nothing more than conversions of sports or board games, a number of important computer game genres are popularized by games found in this book.

• Super Star Trek is a version of the earlier Star Trek, written by Mike Mayfield, which was an attempt to convert the gameplay of Spacewar! into a purely text-based format, compatible with computers using teleprinters. It’s also an early fangame, using names based on the TV show of the same name.
• Hamurabi is a conversion of The Sumer Game, translated by David Ahl into the BASIC programming language.
• Lunar and LEM are versions of Rocket, the Lunar Landing game originally written by Jim Storer several years prior, converted into BASIC by David Ahl.
• Gunner, originally by Tom Kloos, is an early artillery game, requiring the player to adjust their gun to hit an enemy target before the enemy hits them.
• The hide-and-seek games Hurkle and Mugwump, both just a few months old, are found in the volume too.

The text of 101 Basic Computer Games. For more info, please check the original source here.

A browser emulator of 101 BASIC Computer Games. For more directions or more info, please check the original source here.

August

  Atari arrives in Japan, establishing Atari Japan in Tokyo and releasing Pong in the region soon after. However, the market for the game is not as wide open as expected, as they’re surprised to find that Elepong and Pong-tron had beaten them to the market months prior.

September

  Kee Games is formed by Joe Keenan, the next-door neighbor of Nolan Bushnell, advertising itself as a small start-up competing with Atari. Several ex-employees of Atari, labeled by Kee Games as "defectors", are hired to work at the company. In reality, Kee Games is a subsidiary of Atari, and these employees had been assigned to work at Kee Games. The move is an attempt to keep hold of Atari’s dominance over the market, giving distributors the illusion that they’re working with Atari’s competitors, when in reality, it’s all Atari.

November

  Hunt the Wumpus, coded by Gregory Yob, is published in the People's Computer Company newsletter, selling tapes of its BASIC source code through mail order. for mainframe computers. Set in a system of caves, the player must hunt down a creature called the Wumpus, using clues to move from cave to cave. The game builds on the formula of hide-and-seek games, arranging each chamber in the caves in a squashed dodecahedron shape, rather than the typical grid format, chosen because it is Yob’s favorite platonic solid. The game becomes very popular in the early programming community, with its Wumpus creature referenced frequently in certain early video games.

Play Hunt the Wumpus on an emulator. For directions or more info, please check the original source here.

  Taito releases Soccer and Davis Cup in Japanese arcades. Both developed by Tomohiro Nishikado, Soccer is a multiplayer game allowing both players to control a forward and a goalkeeper, whereas Davis Cup is a clone of Pong altered to play doubles. As it is the first video game in the region to not be a Pong clone, Soccer is considered the first original video game created in Japan.