In Computer Space, you control the Space Rocket, a combat spaceship armed with an infinite supply of missiles. Your enemies are the Space Saucers, a crafty pair of flying saucers possessing an equally deadly missile arsenal. Your objective is to shoot and destroy the Space Saucers more times than they shoot your rocket within the time limit. You earn a point every time you take out a saucer, and the saucers earn a point whenever they hit your rocket. A single round of gameplay can last anywhere from 60 seconds to 150 seconds, with a default setting of 90 seconds. If you have a higher score than the saucers at the end of a round, the colors of the graphics will invert, and you will be rewarded with an additional round.
Computer Space's strongest feature is, without a doubt, the quality of its graphics. Most first-generation video games, such as Pong or Breakout, used simple lines and blocks to represent a variety of different objects, due to the restrictions of the hardware that the games ran on. With Computer Space, the developers wanted the graphics to resemble those of the game's minicomputer-based precursors as closely as possible. The Space Rocket and the Space Saucers are rendered in dotted lines, and the former spaceship's bulky, cartoonish appearance harkens back to one of the two ships featured in Spacewar!. The developers of Computer Space deserve credit for doing something new with the Spacewar! formula and turning it into a decent single-player experience. Computer Space may have been forgotten, but it helped Atari to get their foot in the door.