Computer Space

This is the game that was briefly shown in Soylent Green. This has to be the bad-ass arcade cabinet of all time!

This was the game that Nolan Bushnell designed before Pong. Pong was so much more successful, and spawned so many home versions, that most people still recognize it. Meanwhile, hardly anybody remembers Computer Space. In the history of game play sounds like it was sort of a transition between PDP-1 Spacewar! and Atari's later (and wildly popular) Asteroids.

I'd always figured that the game shown in Soylent Green was Spacewar!

Compared to Computer Space, Pong was damn primitive. Either the general public wasn't ready for a space shooter game yet, or Pong was just cheaper to manufacture. Probably some of both.