Entertainment Software Publishing
"Grandia", which ESP released in 1997, was the first third-party Saturn title to breach 500,000 units in sales. Afterwards, ESP released titles including "Giren's Ambition" and "Baroque", later extending footholds into the Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 platforms with titles like "" and "Abarenbo Princess".
Computer Space
At the beginning of the 1970s, video games existed almost entirely as novelties passed around by programmers and technicians with access to computers, primarily at research institutions and large companies. One of these games was "Spacewar!", created in 1962 for the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-1 minicomputer by Steve Russell and others in the programming community at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The two-player game has the players engage in a dogfight between two spaceships, set against the backdrop of a starfield, with a central star exerting gravitational force upon the ships. The game was copied to several of the early minicomputer installations in American academic institutions after its initial release, making it potentially the first video game to be available outside a single research institute. "Spacewar" was extremely popular in the small programming community in the 1960s and was widely recreated on other minicomputer and mainframe computers of the time, later migrating to early microcomputer systems. Early computer scientist Alan Kay noted in 1972 that "the game of "Spacewar" blossoms spontaneously wherever there is a graphics display connected to a computer," and contributor Martin Graetz recalled in 1981 that as the game initially spread it could be found on "just about any research computer that had a programmable CRT". Although the game was widespread for the era, it was still very limited in its direct reach: the PDP-1 was priced at US$120,000 and only 55 were ever sold, most without a monitor, which prohibited the original "Spacewar" or any game of the time from reaching beyond a narrow, academic audience. The original developers of "Spacewar" considered ways to monetize the game, but saw no options given the high price of the computer on which it ran. The first commercial video game based on "Spacewar" would not be released until "Computer Space" in 1971.