Nutting Associates

~ the obituary ~

Bill Nutting was a buyer at a San Francisco department store when his father-in-law pointed him at an educational technology company called Edex, which had built a coin-operated trivia machine called the Knowledge Computer in 1964. Nutting became a partner, marketed the machine, and bought the rights to it outright after Raytheon acquired Edex in 1965. Nutting Associates followed in Mountain View, selling the Knowledge Computer and then a redesign called Computer Quiz, which went solid-state in 1968. The business was bar trivia in a cabinet, and it did well enough.

Around 1970 an engineer named Nolan Bushnell was building something at home with Ted Dabney: a coin-operated version of Spacewar!, running not on a minicomputer they could never afford but on custom hardware designed to play one game and nothing else. Bushnell went looking for a manufacturer while the proof of concept was still rough, and Nutting Associates took it on. Computer Space ran its first location test in August 1971 and went in front of distributors at the MOA Expo that October.

Nutting ordered a production run of 1,500 units on the expectation of a hit. Something between 1,300 and 1,500 went out, which made it the first video game anybody ever sold commercially and also a disappointment against what the company had built for. Bushnell asked Nutting for a 33 percent stake in the company to keep making games there. He did not get it, and in June 1972 he and Dabney left to incorporate Atari.

Nutting kept manufacturing for five more years without them, including a two-player Computer Space in July 1973 built by Steve Bristow, who would shortly go and design Tank for Atari's fake competitor. The last machine to carry the name was Ricochet, shown at the October 1977 AMOA convention, a clone of an Exidy cabinet from 1974.

~ the case file ~

~ the cabinet nobody could play ~

Computer Space is a beautiful object and a difficult product. Bushnell designed the cabinet himself in molded fiberglass with a swooping futuristic shape, because he wanted it to look like nothing else in the room, and it worked so well that a white one was used as set dressing in Soylent Green in 1973. That was the first appearance of a video game in a film. The controls were four buttons, two of them for rotation, with inertia physics underneath and an instruction card nobody read. In a bar full of people who had been operating pinball flippers for twenty years, the machine frequently just sat there.

What reached me is the prop. Computer Space stopped being manufactured more than a decade before I was in front of any arcade cabinet at all, and the machine exists for me the way it exists for nearly everybody now, as a photograph of a fiberglass shell and a still frame from a 1973 film. It is one of the few dead objects in this archive that is rarer than the story told about it.

~ the slot machine ending ~

By the mid-seventies Nutting Associates had no answer to Atari and no design staff worth the name. In 1977 Bill Nutting sold the company to William "Si" Redd, a Nevada slot machine manufacturer whose interest, by the account of Nutting engineer Dale Frey, had less to do with arcade games than with having a California-registered company to route gray-area gambling machines through toward California, Hawaii and Guam. In July 1977 Nutting Associates of California was merged into a Nevada entity of the same name.

In the fall of 1979 Redd folded it together with his A-1 Supply operation into a new company called Sircoma, and hired Bill Nutting as production manager. Sircoma later became International Game Technology, which is today one of the largest gambling machine manufacturers on earth.

Nutting himself did not stay long. He left to fly for a small Nevada airline and then for Mission Aviation Fellowship, and spent 1981 to 1985 in Nairobi.

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