Post-war America was peaceful.
A strong economy, festooned in more modern conveniences than ever before - an endless
summer captured in Kodachrome beauty.
Space travel was the reserve of sci-fi: idle dreams of distant worlds.
Project Vanguard was the closest America had to a space program: tasked with getting a
satellite in orbit.
Its schedule was relatively unhurried - until a rude awakening.
The starting pistol of the space age had a strange report: commencing not with a bang,
but with a beep.
In October 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 into orbit: the very first artificial
satellite.
It wasn't much to look at: a silver sphere with four trailing antennae, a little over
half a metre in diameter - but was it was the first man-made object to pierce the sky.
If anyone had any doubts about Soviet capability, the evidence was overhead.
Its radio transmitter emitted a steady beep as it orbited the earth, a simple message
broadcast to all: The Space Race had begun.
The 'Sputnik Crisis' triggered a massive technology investment within America, ordained by President
Eisenhower.
Science budgets bloomed and new initiatives were born - such as the Advanced Research
Projects Agency, or ARPA, who would later be responsible for the precursor to the internet.
The same year, space agency NASA was founded with one simple mission: to wrest space superiority
from the Soviets.
The red's momentum carried them to a number of space firsts: Laika in 1957, the first
dog in orbit;
Luna 2 in 1959, the first spacecraft to reach the moon;
and 1961: Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space.
A final goal line was drawn: one that would prove the culmination of the space age, proposed
in JFK's 1962 speech:
"We choose to go to the Moon"
American progress kicked into a high gear.
Billions of dollars poured into education, and no expense spared on technology.
Computers were now an essential part of academia, and a new generation of programmers could
get to grips with these machines.
Many early games spawned in an academic setting: a fertile mix of bright mind and accessible
hardware.
Spacewar!
was a product of this 'hacker culture' at MIT in 1962.
A two player game played on the circular CRT display of a DEC PDP-1 - a minicomputer which
cost the equivalent of nearly one million dollars today.
Its gameplay was simple: two ships, "the needle" and "the wedge", embroiled in a space dogfight.
A star in the centre of the display complicates things, with its gravitational pull altering
the trajectory of anything passing nearby.
Avoid crashing into the star, projectiles, or your opponent - and land a successful shot
to win.
Spacewar!
was an on-campus hit, proving popular with those able to play it - but the high cost
of the hardware prohibited any commercial exploitation.
Nevertheless, the game was particularly influential - a prototype for future arcade games.
Meanwhile, time was ticking.
The Apollo project's first launch was in 1966, testing the Saturn rocket needed for a lunar
mission.
1968, Apollo 7.
The first manned test of the platform.
Apollo 8.
The first manned flight to the moon.
Every mission a step closer to the goal - every delay an invitation for the Soviets to slip
ahead.
July, 1969.
Apollo 11.
After years of planning, it was time to shoot for the moon.
One small step for man.
One giant leap for mankind.
In 1950, 9 percent of American homes had a television.
By 1962, it was 90 percent - a rapid transformation from rare luxury to true mass media.
An estimated half a billion people worldwide witnessed the moon landings live - 14 percent
of the world's population at the time.
Space was firmly lodged in the public consciousness.
It was around this time that the very first coin-operated arcade machines began to appear:
a chance to take video games outside of their academic setting, and rake in a few coins
in the process.
The first was a game from Stanford University named Galaxy Game: a clone of the earlier
Spacewar!
running on a PDP-11/20 minicomputer.
It was popular, but with only one machine its impact was limited - a mass produced game
was needed.
Computer Space was the first: yet another version of Spacewar!
brought to market by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney.
Some 1500 units were sold, although Computer Space proved too complex to be real commercial
success: while the general public might have been fascinated with new technology, few had
any experience with video games.
Bushnell and Dabney's next game in 1972 would fare much better - as would their company,
Atari.
Pong is a definitive video game - the first to really break into public view, and proof
that there was a market for this new form of entertainment.
It wasn't space-themed, but it was definitely space-age - and by emulating a familiar sport
Pong was far more accessible than any other video game that came before.
Its instructions were distilled into three simple lines:
Deposit Quarter.
Ball will serve automatically.
Avoid missing ball for high score.
Around 35,000 arcade units were sold, with countless more clones - and home console versions
designed for domestic televisions sold by the hundreds of thousands.
Atari became a household name - and video games a permanent cultural artefact.
As arcades started to flourish, this space age sentiment was perfectly encapsulated on
film by the 1977 release of Star Wars.
A translation of the recent space mania into a fictional realm, and a runaway success that
shaped pop culture for years to come.
This renewed interest in sci-fi sparked a golden age of the arcade: with more advanced
hardware offering a wider variety of games.
Space or sci-fi themed cabinets were incredibly popular early on: with games like 1978's Space
Invaders an alternative amongst dwindling interest in pong clones.
Space shoot-em-ups were the next big thing: the empty background of space perfect for
the spartan graphics of the age, and with high-score led single player gameplay.
Asteroids, Lunar Lander, Galaxian, Defender.
These games defined the golden age of the arcades: a heady space-age mix of an Apollo
afterglow and Star Wars fantasy.
Space will forever remain a part of gaming's roots.
Exploration is a major theme of space games: a satisfaction of the desire to travel to
worlds beyond our own,
and a bridge to span the seemingly insurmountable gap between the stars.
Elite from 1984 is the perfect example of the sort of freedom such a game can offer.
It kickstarted the space trader genre - just you, your ship and a cargo bay full of interstellar
profit.
A chance to retell tales of pirates on a new frontier: and a surprisingly comfortable seat
at the helm of your craft.
Some titles seek to inspire the same sense of drama and danger of the real space race.
Games like Buzz Aldrin's Race Into Space serve as an educational means to convey the difficulties
of a lunar landing.
Even the light-hearted challenge of running your own Kerbal Space Program is fraught with
danger:
The cold vacuum of the cosmos is an unforgiving place.
Simply reaching outer space is one challenge - to forge a world anew is another entirely.
The colonisation of space is a common sci-fi extension of strategy games: what better place
to explore, expand, exploit - and exterminate.
A chance to fix the faults of the old world - but all the violent baggage that mankind
insists on carrying leads to an inevitable descent into space war.
A longing for an investment lost.
A chance to imagine humanity free from its cradle, free from petty dispute - but fraught
with challenge anew.
Even after all these years, there's something magical about space.
A certain hope.
An aspiration for the future.
A trancendental leap to a new era for mankind.
We might have been born to early to explore the universe -
but we can still dream.
Coming up in part three: the doomsday clock advances; and a nuclear sword of Damocles
that cast a cloud over the world.
Thanks for watching - and until next time, farewell.