Asteroid was originally developed by Atari for Midway in fulfillment of a contract to supply one video game and one pinball machine. Atari had initially offered Pong during its development to fulfill the contract, but had been rejected. After finishing Asteroid Atari developed a near identical version of the game and released it themselves under the title "Space Race".
Soccer is Taito's third ever video game release and the first developed internally. The game was designed by the highly influential Tomohiro Nishikado, who would later go on to create Space Invaders.
Soccer is a ball-and-paddle game like Pong, but with a green background to simulate a playfield, allowing each player to control both a forward and a goalkeeper. The players can adjust the size of the players, who are represented as paddles on screen. It also has a goal on each side.
Soccer is likely to be Japan's first original domestically produced video game, in comparison to Japanese Pong clones released earlier, including Sega's Pong Tron and Taito's Elepong. Since it was exported to Europe in 1973 it may also be the first Japanese video game to be released on the European continent.
Hockey was a PONG-clone by RamTeK featuring a somewhat different gameplay by introducing "forward" paddles which were moved simultaneously with the "goalie" paddles. Just like PONG ot got ported to various 1st generation consoles and was also one of the two build-in games for the Fairchild Channel F - the world's first 2nd generation console.
Gotcha is a two-player maze game where the objective is to catch the other player.
A maze is displayed on the screen. The first player controls the Pursuer which is represented by a square and the second player controls the Pursued which is represented by a plus sign. As the Pursuer moves closer and closer to the Pursued, an electronic beep sound increases in frequency to a feverish pitch until the Pursuer catches the Pursued. Each time, the Pursuer catches the Pursued, a point is scored and the chase starts over again.
Trek73 is a computer game based on the original Star Trek television series. It was created in 1973 by William K. Char, Perry Lee, and Dan Gee. The game simulates battles between space ships of the Star Trek franchise. Through text commands, a player may order the ship to perform certain tasks in battle against an opposing vessel.
Sega's first "video" arcade game. Unlike their earlier amusement games, it uses discrete logic as opposed to being electro-mechanical. The game used boards imported from the United States mounted in a Sega-produced cabinet.
Space Race is the second arcade game created by Atari and was released in July, 1973. The two players each control a rocket ship; the object of the game is to make it from the bottom of the screen to the top, while avoiding obstacles such as asteroids. Score is kept electronically and the background consists of a simple starfield.
Allied Leisure's second game was a four-player version of Paddle Battle. It was the first four-player Pong-style game, predating Atari's own Quadrapong by two months.
Taito's attempt at the arcade ping-pong game genre, and likely their first ever arcade game release. It uses imported Pong PC Boards in a Taito-produced cabinet.
Mugwump is an early video game where the user is tasked with finding four "Mugwumps" that are randomly hidden on a 10x10 grid. It is a text-based game written in BASIC.
The user enters a pair of single-digit co-ordinates in the range from 0 to 9 which are the x,y coordinates to scan. If a mugwump is at that location then the user is alerted. Otherwise the user is told the distance from the scanned coordinates to each of the mugwumps that are yet to be found. The game ends after ten turns or when all of the mugwumps have been found.
Empire is the name of a computer game written for the PLATO system in 1973. It's significant for being quite probably the first networked multiplayer arena shooter-style game. It may also be the first networked multiplayer action game (although Maze War is another possibility for this distinction).
Hunt the Wumpus is an early computer game, based on a simple hide and seek format featuring a mysterious monster (the Wumpus) that lurks deep inside a network of rooms. It was originally a text-based game written in BASIC and has since been ported to various programming languages and platforms including graphical versions.
The original text-based version of Hunt the Wumpus uses a command line text interface. A player of the game enters commands to move through the rooms or to shoot "crooked arrows" along a tunnel into one of the adjoining rooms. There are twenty rooms, each connecting to three others, arranged like the vertices of a dodecahedron or the faces of an icosahedron (which are identical in layout). Hazards include bottomless pits, super bats (which drop the player in a random location, a feature duplicated in later, commercially published adventure games, such as Zork I, Valley of the Minotaur, and Adventure), and the Wumpus itself. The Wumpus is described as having sucker feet (to escape the bottomless