You don’t have to have seen the movie to know that Soylent Green is not made from plankton — nor is it made from a mix of soy and lentils, the original source of the name.
I’ve seen bits and pieces of Soylent Green over the years, but I finally sat down to watch the whole thing, and I was soon shocked by a scene where the rich man’s young mistress — who comes with the “furnished” apartment — is playing a video game. Is she playing Asteroids? In 1973? No, she’s playing Computer Space, which I hadn’t even heard of before, a bridge between Spacewar! and Asteroids:
Computer Space is a video arcade game released in November 1971 by Nutting Associates. Created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, who would both later found Atari, it is generally accepted that it was the world’s first commercially sold coin-operated video game — and indeed, the first commercially sold video game of any kind, predating the Magnavox Odyssey by six months, and Atari’s Pong by one year.
I can’t believe they were able to make a game with this hardware:
Computer Space utilizes no microprocessor, RAM or ROM. The entire computer system is a state machine made of discrete 74 series TTL logic elements. Graphic elements are held in diode arrays. Physical configuration is made up of 3 PCBs interconnected through a common bus. Display is rendered on a General Electric 15″ black-and-white portable television vacuum tube set specially modified for Computer Space.
The video game isn’t the only interesting bit of trivia:
Charlton Heston’s tears at Sol’s death were real, as Heston was the only cast member who knew that Edward G. Robinson was dying of terminal cancer. This was the 90th and last movie in which Robinson appeared. He died nine days after the shooting was done, on January 26, 1973.