SPACE WARS came out in 1977, as Cinematronics' first entry into the then-fledgling videogame market.  The game had a number of unique features – not the least of which was the huge cabinet that it came in!   It had to be big, since SPACE WARS was a two-player-only game – the computer couldn't play against a single person, so there had to be room for two sets of player controls, and room for two people to stand side-by-side while playing.  This was actually not uncommon for the time; in the PONG-era mid-1970s, if a game offered a two-player mode at all, it was usually a competitive head-to-head mode.  Alternating play didn't become the dominant 2-player mode until the success of games like SPACE INVADERS and GALAXIANS.  Still, SPACE WARS was among the few which, like PONG, actually required two players since the machine had no provision for a single-player-vs.-computer mode.

SPACE WARS was originally born at MIT in 1961, as a program called SPACEWAR that ran on the then-brand-new DEC PDP-1 minicomputer.  A hacker named "Slug" Russell was the author of the original core, but the game was a true open-source, "stone soup" project, with the other MIT hackers constantly adding and refining features.  It soon spread to other owners of PDP-1 systems, to the annoyance and consternation of more than a few lab professors and systems administrators who just couldn't understand why these crazy kids insisted on tying up their massively expensive hardware with something so trivial.  Eventually, it even spread to DEC itself, where it was used as a final diagnostic check of new PDP-1's before they went out the door after the engineers discovered that SPACEWAR gave the hardware a more intensive "torture test" workout than their own diagnostic programs did.  The Cinematronics version is somewhat different from the PDP-1 game, though – for one thing, the players' scores are not displayed in octal (base-8) in the arcade game version.

I first encountered SPACE WARS at an arcade in Trolley Station – a shopping complex down in Salt Lake City, UT. which did, in fact, used to be a trolley yard (or so I'm told).  I always thought it was a very cool game... although finding people to play it with could sometimes be a challenge inside a fully-stocked arcade.  The one I came across later, in a Ft. Wayne grocery store, was easier to recruit opponents for since there was only one or two other games next to it.

This was the second game (TRON being the first) added to my collection, acquired at a Commercial Liquidators auction down in San Marcos, TX, back in 1996 (I forget the exact date) for $50.  Like many of the games in my collection, this game was in "unknown" condition when I bought it...  and this is the game which prompted me to invest in a fire extinguisher before powering up unknown-condition games again; when I plugged SPACE WARS into the wall and turned it on, the monitor made this horrible screeching noise and then one of the tantalum capacitors on the board burst into flames! 

After quickly unplugging the power cord and blowing out the flame (which was just a little one, really), I tried powering the game up a second time with the monitor disconnected, and verified that the logic board worked, at least – the game plays "blind", with all the appropriate sounds.  I decided to set this aside until I could find some technical data, and turned my attention to getting TRON up and running instead.  Technical data on this monitor turned out to be a little harder to find than I thought, since this revision was apparently used only in this game, so I couldn't do much with it until I managed to get hold of an original manual with readable schematics.  Alas, it turns out that someone else killed the monitor before me; from the looks of it, they tried to upgrade the electronics from Rev.A to Rev.B by hack-and-tacking the additional components into place, and botched the job rather thoroughly.

At this point, I decided to punt and just keep an eye out for a replacement monitor, which I eventually acquired from another collector who was parting out a severely water-damaged Cinematronics cabinet.  The dead monitor from this game didn't go to waste, though; some components like the CRT itself were still salvageable, so it eventually became an organ donor to help get a couple other machines up and running.

Each player has their own set of controls – Left, Right, Forward, Fire, and Hyperspace.  These controls operate your ship in an ASTEROIDS-like fashion, allowing you to rotate and thrust around the screen, fire missiles at your opponent, and try to escape certain death with the Hyperspace panic button – which should only be used as a last resort, since you have a 1-in-4 chance of self-destructing when you re-emerge.

Printed over the controls is the list of options you can use to configure the game, using the 10-key keypad in the center.  The GAMES are chosen once, when you first insert the quarters; MODIFICATIONS can be entered any time thereafter.  The RESET key, located underneath the keypad, can be used to immediately start a new round of play if the current contest ends in a draw (for example, if both players have used up their inventory of fuel and missiles), rather than waste valuable game time (you only get so many seconds of play per quarter) drifting aimlessly around the screen until the computer figures it out.

When you first insert a coin, the game will display how much time you've bought.  (This was common to a lot of the early B&W video games; your quarter got you a certain number of minutes of playing time, rather than a fixed number of lives.)  The operator can set this to 30, 60, 90, or 120 seconds per coin via DIP switches on the board.  If you want to play longer, you can insert more quarters.  Picking one of the GAMES options via the numeric keypad starts the game.  Note that whichever GAMES option is picked will be in force throughout, until the clock runs down to zero.

Each player's remaining fuel and missiles are shown in the top corners of the screen, and the remaining game time in the upper middle.  You start out on opposite sides (the "Enterprise" has moved in this picture), and have to maneuver towards each other to get into firing position.  The sun in the center exerts gravity – or not, depending on the MODIFICATIONS you select – which can either pull your ships towards it or, if you select the "negative gravity" option, push you away.  You can also elect to have ships and bullets bounce off the edges or maneuver beyond the edges of the screen, and you can turn the central sun into a black hole instead.  Of course, the black hole's "invisible" threat would be a little more credible if it weren't for the little asterisk-shaped burn-in mark on the monitor that every SPACE WARS machine develops after it's been in operation for a few months.   MODIFICATIONS can be changed at any time during game play.

The orbital mechanics and thrust-vector physics in SPACE WARS are actually quite sophisticated; ships have inertia (how much depends on the GAMES option selected at startup), and it's even possible to use the central sun to slingshot your missiles (or yourself) around it to hit the other player... although if you cut it too close, or run out of fuel before you get out of range, you'll death-spiral right into the sun instead.   The unlucky "Enterprise" ship has just spiraled into the sun, above, and is about to explode.

If your shot should happen to only clip the edge of your opponent's ship, rather than striking head on, the game may only inflict partial damage rather than a complete "kill".  Depending on the amount of damage, this can either hamper his maneuverability, or leave him immobilized, able only to rotate and/or fire.  For such an early-generation game, SPACE WARS has quite a lot to it.

The winner is whoever has inflicted the greater number of kills on his opponent when the timer runs out.  Additional quarters can be inserted at any time before the timer reaches zero to extend the game, if desired.  SPACE WARS does not save the high scores or allow players to enter their initials.

Here is the game with the back removed – with the back missing, in fact; once I get this game fixed, I'll have to make a new one out of particleboard.  Fortunately, it's just a big sheet of board painted black on the outside.  As you can see, there's quite a lot of empty space inside.  People are often surprised to discover how little there actually is inside most of these games...  It does seem like there ought to be a lot more inside, considering the size and weight of a typical arcade upright, but most of the weight is in the particleboard cabinets, and in the monitor itself.

Oh – and needless to say, that little red heart-shaped plastic tray on top of the coin box is not original equipment. It's a leftover Valentine's-Day candy tray, which works nicely as holding trays for tiny screws and parts since all the little dividers help keep things separated.

Unlike most other games of the late-1970s era, the Cinematronics main-logic board did not have a single-chip microprocessor onboard.  Instead, this entire board full of chips is the microprocessor – a custom "bitslice" processor designed specifically for the task of running a vector game, built out of the simpler logic gates and flip-flops contained within these dozens of small IC chips.  It seems a primitive design, even by the standards of the day, but it served well enough that Cinematronics used the same system, with only minor modifications, for every vector game it produced.  Because of this, in theory almost any Cinematronics vector game can be played on any other game cabinet just by swapping the ROM's, and in fact some collectors have made "multigame" retrofits which allow several games to coexist inside one cabinet using a modern, high-capacity EPROM with images from the original ROM sets copied into it.  (In practice, though, different player-control wiring, and Cinematronics' use of custom sound boards for each game, make this kind of conversion a little more complicated.)  When it worked, it was a wonderful system; when anything went wrong, though, not only was (and is) the board fiendishly difficult to debug, but if the board quits feeding digital coordinates to the monitor it can potentially cause the monitor to self-destruct.

The troublesome, cranky, and pyrotechnical Cinematronics "Vectorbeam" monitor that came with the machine.  Unlike Atari and Sega's vector games, Cinematronics put the DACs and line-drawing circuitry right on the monitor board, and fed digital coordinates up that red ribbon cable, so you can't even substitute another kind of vector monitor for it (which you can sometimes do with the Atari & Sega games).