1975 in video games

1975 saw several critical influences in the history of video games, including the first commercial games utilizing large-scale integrated circuits and microprocessors, as well as the first role-playing video games.

On the back end of the Pong boom, the coin-operated video game industry achieved new expressions of gameplay and animation in arcade games. Racing games and competitive shooting games became particularly popular. Local multiplayer games accommodating more than four players were released by Atari, featuring advanced implementations of transistor-transistor logic hardware. Several games utilizing microprocessors debuted in coin-op, including the influential Gun Fight from Midway Mfg.

The console industry saw its first competitive environment in the United States with Magnavox, Atari, and smaller competitors introducing systems utilizing advanced circuit designs. Atari’s Pong home console featured a sophisticated custom chip created in-house. – Atari attends the New York Toy Fair to interest retailers to stock their forthcoming Pong home console. They fail to find any interest among toy buyers.

March 17 – Sears, Roebuck & Co. signs an agreement with Atari Inc. to distribute their Pong home console in their Sears retail stores. Sears creates the Tele-Games brand to market the game while also allowing Atari’s logo to appear on the product. Magnavox later sues Sears over infringement of their Odyssey patents.
September 16–19 – The first WESCON computer trade show is held in San Francisco, California. Premiering there is the MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor, which powers many future video game systems. Steve Mayer and Ron Milner of Atari's Cyan Engineering are convinced to use the 6502 in their prototype home video game system which develops into the Video Computer System.
October 29 – Stephen Bristow of Atari Inc. patents the technology behind the first hardware-enabled sprites for video games, dubbed Player/Missile Graphics by Atari.
November 26 – A market study evaluating the Alpex Computer home video game system using ROM cartridges is drafted by Gene Landrum for Fairchild Semiconductor, which convinces the company to create the Fairchild Video Entertainment System.'

Total Revenue (machine sales): $68–76 million.

|Midway Manufacturing

|Dave Nutting Associates

|Multi-directional shooter

|Wheels

|7,000

2,400

|Midway Manufacturing

|Taito Corp

|Racing

|Wheels II

|3,000

|Chicago Coin

|Model Racing

|Sports

|Crash 'N Score

|500 RePlay's charts were based only on a subset of operators and are not on imperial metrics such as earnings reports, but they give a strong indication of games which were of the most value to arcades and street locations.

The RePlay rankings included both video and electro-mechanical games which ran in close competition through the 1970s until video games became dominant. Outside of the top twenty ranked in order, forty-eight other games were also listed.

Total revenue (retail): $32–40 million.

{| class="wikitable sortable" style="text-align:center"

!Title

!Game console units (1975)

!Manufacturer

!Developer

|Odyssey

|80,000

October – RePlay magazine publishes its first issue. Edited by Eddie Adlum – previously editor for the coin machine section of publication Cash Box – the monthly magazine covers all aspects of coin-operated entertainment.

Notable releases

Arcade games

April – Indy 800 by Atari (published under the Kee Games label) begins production. The game features color graphics and an eight player cabinet powered by eight circuit boards. Despite its massive profile and price restricting the range of venues, the game is highly successful and proves the earning power of large, multiplayer games.
September – Western Gun is released by Taito in Japan. It features the first human-on-human combat in a video game as well as destructible environments.
October – Sega’s American marketing arm, Sega of America, releases their first video game in the United States, Bullet Mark.
Project Support Engineering releases Maneater. The game is noted for its special cabinet design which is molded in the shape of a great white shark with open jaws. It is one of several games capitalizing on the release of the movie Jaws – including Shark Jaws by Atari and Shark by U.S. Billiards. Steven Spielberg is photographed with the Maneater cabinet.
Atari introduces Steeplechase – a unique, six-player game. Controls are simplified to a single button which causes a horse to leap. It is the first graphical game featuring a character who can jump.
Electra Games releases Avenger. It is an early example of a scrolling shoot 'em-up.
November – Gun Fight is released by Midway Manufacturing, based on Western Gun by Taito. It is the preeminent video game to use a microprocessor as well as the first twin-stick shooter. The game is among the most successful of 1975 and its hardware is used for subsequent Midway-released games. The game is later modified to become Death Race (1976).
Fairchild employee Jerry Lawson creates the game Destruction Derby which he offers to Major Manufacturers. Though the game is never officially released, its creation leads to Lawson’s engineering leadership of the Fairchild Video Entertainment System console.

Computer games

August – The Dungeon (also known as pedit5) is developed by Reginald “Rusty” Rutherford for the PLATO IV system at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. It is an early computer role-playing game, adapting Dungeons & Dragons mechanics as a graphical dungeon crawl with randomly generated encounters. The game is also the first known video game to feature a high score table.
In response to the deletion of The Dungeon from PLATO, Paul Resch, Larry Kemp, and Eric Hagstrom of the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana create the game Orthanc.
Don Daglow develops the role-playing game Dungeon for the PDP-10 at Claremont University Center.

Hardware

Console

thumb|[[TV Tennis Electrotennis]]

April – The company Jolieb distributes the Odyssey console in Japan, the first home video game to be sold in the country.
May – Control Sales offers the Video Action II console for sale for $299. The console runs into difficulties with Federal Communications Commission restrictions, forcing the company to pull it from sale. It is the first Japanese-developed home video game console, with the unusual feature of a wireless connection to the television via a UHF antenna.
October – The Tele-Games home version of Pong (sometimes called Home Pong) is made available for purchase in Sears retail stores.
Television Tennis is released by Executive Games in the United States.
December – Philips releases the ES 2201 Tele-Spiel console in the Netherlands, an early console featuring interchangeable games similar to the original Odyssey.

Business

April 1 – San Diego Chargers football players Dennis Partee and Gary Garrison plus businessman Jim Pierce found the company Cinematronics Inc.
April 4 – Micro-Soft is founded in Albuquerque, New Mexico, by Bill Gates and Paul Allen to focus on software for microprocessors.
September 22 – Yasuhiro Fukushima founds the Eidansha Boshu Service Center in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo. The advertising business is later renamed Enix Corporation when they enter computer games.
November 1 – Sammy Industry is established in Japan by Hajime Satomi, a split of the coin-operated amusement assets from his company Satomi Corporation.