Computer Space

This took Spacewar!, playable only inside a lab, and turned it into a box you could put out on the street. Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney built it with dedicated circuitry instead of an expensive computer, and put it on sale in 1971. It was the first video game ever sold as a commercial product, but it did not sell well. The reason usually given is that the controls were too hard — steering a ship drifting under inertia with four buttons. Set against Pong the following year, which asked only that you turn a knob up and down, the distance between these two machines is exactly the distance covered by the invention of making a game easy.