First coin-operated videogame, but not
the one that you are thinking now.
Computer Space was the
opera prima of
Nolan Bushnell. When he was an engineer student at the
Utah University he discovered
Spacewar and he decided to
port the game to a
coin-operated machine and make
money with it.
Years later, while working as a researcher for Ampex (inventors of the videotape) in Sunnyvale, CA, transistors were smaller, cheaper and more reliable so he started to think again about making his own commercial version of Spacewar. Bushnell started working in his spare time but finally he left Ampex to work full time in the project. When he finalized the design of the game, he sold it to Nutting Associates and joined the company as a chief engineer. 1500 units of Computer Space were built.
Bushnell overestimated the skill of the public controlling such a complicated videogame: as with Spacewar, you had to deal with real “space physics” and Computer Space had too many knobs and buttons for the almost inexistent 1971 videogames aficionado.
Along with Ted Dabney, Nolan Bushnell founded Atari, hired Al Alcorn as full time engineer and created the first successful videogame of all times.