1973 in video games

Events

• March 19 – Kagemasa Kōzuki establishes Konami Industry Co., Ltd. Formerly the owner of a jukebox repair/rental business in Osaka, Japan, Kozuki launches Konami to manufacture amusement machines for video arcades.
• May – Hudson Soft Ltd. is established in Sapporo, Japan for the purpose of marketing telecommunications devices and art photographs.
• Taito, an electro-mechanical arcade game manufacturer, enters the video game industry and opens a North American branch.
• Sega, an electro-mechanical arcade game manufacturer, enters the video game industry with Pong clones.
• Computer Space makes appearances in the films Soylent Green and Sleeper.
• Empire versions I, II and III are developed for the PLATO system by John Daleske. Possibly the first team game ever, the first fifty-player game ever, and numerous other innovations.
• Silas Warner takes over PLATO Empire version I and renames it Conquest.
• Lemonade Stand is developed for the first time.
• Maze War, an ancestor of the first-person shooter genre and an early network game, begins development for the Imlac PDS-1 computer.

Best-selling arcade video games in the United States

The following titles were the best-selling arcade video games of 1973 in the United States, according to annual arcade cabinet sales estimates provided by Ralph H. Baer.

Notable releases

Arcade games

• Midway Manufacturing Co. licenses Pong from Atari to produce Winner, their first video game arcade game.
• Atari releases Gotcha, the first commercial maze game, to video arcades.
• Atari releases Pong Doubles to video arcades. A variation on the wildly successful Pong, Pong Doubles is the first video arcade game to include four-player gameplay.
• Atari releases Space Race, the first Arcade Racing game ever.
• Williams Electronics releases Paddle Ball, an unlicensed duplicate of Pong, as their first arcade game.

Computer games

• Steve Colley, Howard Palmer, and Greg Johnson develop Maze War on the Imlac PDS-1 at the NASA Ames Research Center in California. It is recognized as an ancestor of the first-person shooter genre.
• BASIC Computer Games was first published. It included 101 games written in BASIC.

See also

• 1973 in games

References

1. Video game
2. 1970s in video games
3. 1973 in games
4. Maze (1973 video game)
5. Lunar Lander (video game genre)
6. Violence and video games
7. List of basketball video games
8. 1974 in video games
9. 1972 in video games
10. List of years in video games
11. 1971 in video games
12. History of video games
13. First generation of video game consoles
14. Artificial intelligence in video games
15. 1970 in video games
16. 1982 in video games
17. Multiplayer video game
18. 1980 in video games
19. List of horror games
20. 1983 in video games