1973 in video games

Events

 * March 19 – Kagemasa Kōzuki establishes Konami Industry Co., Ltd. Formerly the owner of a jukebox repair/rental business in Osaka, Japan, Kozuki launches Konami to manufacture amusement machines for video arcades.
 * May – Hudson Soft Ltd. is established in Sapporo, Japan for the purpose of marketing telecommunications devices and art photographs.
 * Taito, an electro-mechanical arcade game manufacturer, enters the video game industry and opens a North American branch.
 * Sega, an electro-mechanical arcade game manufacturer, enters the video game industry with Pong clones.
 * Computer Space makes appearances in the films Soylent Green and Sleeper.
 * Empire versions I, II and III are developed for the PLATO system by John Daleske. Possibly the first team game ever, the first fifty-player game ever, and numerous other innovations.
 * Silas Warner takes over PLATO Empire version I and renames it Conquest.
 * Lemonade Stand is developed for the first time.
 * Maze War, an ancestor of the first-person shooter genre and an early network game, begins development for the Imlac PDS-1 computer.

Best-selling arcade video games in the United States
The following titles were the best-selling arcade video games of 1973 in the United States, according to annual arcade cabinet sales estimates provided by Ralph H. Baer.

Arcade games

 * Midway Manufacturing Co. licenses Pong from Atari to produce Winner, their first video game arcade game.
 * Atari releases Gotcha, the first commercial maze game, to video arcades.
 * Atari releases Pong Doubles to video arcades. A variation on the wildly successful Pong, Pong Doubles is the first video arcade game to include four-player gameplay.
 * Atari releases Space Race, the first Arcade Racing game ever.
 * Williams Electronics releases Paddle Ball, an unlicensed duplicate of Pong, as their first arcade game.

Computer games

 * Steve Colley, Howard Palmer, and Greg Johnson develop Maze War on the Imlac PDS-1 at the NASA Ames Research Center in California. It is recognized as an ancestor of the first-person shooter genre.
 * BASIC Computer Games was first published. It included 101 games written in BASIC.