Amusement arcade

• 1. Introduction

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  The amusement arcade has gone by many names over the decades: penny arcade, video arcade, amusements, or simply the arcade. Walk into one and you encounter a particular kind of sensory world, subdued lighting cutting down the glare on screens, the glow of cabinet displays, the clatter of a pinball machine, the electronic sounds of a racing game with a seat that shakes beneath you. But this venue has a history stretching back to before electricity was common in public entertainment, and understanding it means tracing a line from fortune-telling machines that took a penny to a Brooklyn bar that opened in 2004 and changed how a generation thought about old games.

  How did a collection of coin-operated novelties become a billion-dollar industry? What caused it nearly to collapse not once but twice? And why, after every technology in the arcade was surpassed by what people could buy for their living rooms, did the arcade refuse to disappear?

• 2. The Penny Arcade Era

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  The term "penny arcade" came into common use somewhere between 1905 and 1910, naming a place where the coin that powered the machine was often a single penny. The machines crammed into these spaces ranged widely in purpose and novelty. Bagatelles offered a game combining billiards and early non-electrical pinball. Mutoscopes let viewers flip through illustrated cards. Love tester machines, fortune-telling mechanisms, coin-operated Amberolas, and peep show machines in their original non-pornographic form all shared floor space. Coin-operated shooter games also appeared in this mix.

  Between the 1940s and 1960s, the mechanical foundations of these arcades gave way to electro-mechanical games, known in the industry as EM games. Sega's Periscope, released in 1965, and Rifleman in 1967 were popular examples of EM shooters in the 1960s. Racing games followed the same trajectory: Kasco's Indy 500 arrived in 1968, and Chicago Coin's Speedway in 1969. These machines were not video games. They used motors, lights, and physical components to simulate the action. But they set the stage for what came next, because the penny arcade lineage led directly to the video arcade that emerged in the 1970s.

• 3. The Golden Age

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  Space Invaders arrived in 1978 and Galaxian in 1979, but it was 1980 that marked the year video game arcades became widespread, with Pac-Man, Centipede, and other titles spreading to supermarkets, restaurants, liquor stores, and filling stations, not just bowling alleys and bars. The reason these games still hold appeal today, despite the advances in computing power since then, comes down to a constraint: late-1970s technology could deliver good graphics and sound but not realistic images or full motion video, so success depended entirely on gameplay that was simple and enjoyable.

  The number of video game arcades in North America more than doubled between 1980 and 1982, reaching a peak of 13,000 locations. By 1998 that number had fallen to 4,000, but in those golden years the growth was remarkable. Color games became more prevalent. Designers experimented across a wide range of genres while still working within hard limits on processor power and memory. The spread extended across North America, Western Europe, and Japan.

  On the 30th of November 1982, the Mayor of Ottumwa, Iowa, Jerry Parker, declared his city the "Video Game Capital of the World." What followed there included the birth of the Twin Galaxies Intergalactic Scoreboard and the U.S. National Video Game Team. Ottumwa also hosted the first video-game-themed parade on the 8th of January 1983, the first world championship on the 8th and the 9th of January 1983, the first study of brain waves of video-game champions on the 12th of July 1983, the first billion-point video-game performance on the 16th of January 1984, and the first official day to honor a video-game player on the 28th of January 1984.

  The boom ended in the mid-1980s in what was called "the great coin-op video crash of 1983."

• 4. Japan's Standardized Systems

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  High game turnover in Japanese arcades drove a particular kind of efficiency: quick game design required standardized hardware. Systems like JAMMA, Neo-Geo, and CPS-2 functioned essentially as arcade-only consoles where the video game ROM could be swapped out to replace a title without replacing the entire cabinet. That approach made development and game replacement easier.

  It also had a cost. Standardization discouraged the hardware innovation that would have been needed to stay ahead of an accelerating technology curve. In the United States, the intended benefit of these systems was rarely felt, because many games were never exported there. When they were, distributors typically refused to sell a bare ROM, preferring to package the ROM, console, and sometimes the cabinet as a complete unit. Several arcade systems, including Sega's NAOMI board, were in fact arcade versions of existing home systems rather than purpose-built arcade hardware. Meanwhile, many US arcades focused on quantity over quality, and as games scaled up their difficulty, casual players found them increasingly inaccessible while skilled players found them increasingly expensive.

• 5. Crash and Resurgence

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  Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat led a brief recovery for arcades in the early 1990s. Sports titles like NBA Jam and NFL Blitz added to the momentum. New arcade locations opened across shopping malls and strip malls throughout North America.

  The recovery was short-lived. By mid-1994 the arcade industry had entered a major slump. Attendance fell and per-visit spending declined, though not as sharply as in 1983. Several of the largest arcade chains were put up for sale or declared bankruptcy. Large arcade machine manufacturers moved to exit the business. In the second quarter of 1996, video game factories reported 90,000 arcade cabinets sold, compared to 150,000 sold in 1990.

  The primary cause was console ports. In the 1980s, it typically took several years for an arcade game to reach a home console, and even then the port usually differed significantly from the arcade original. By the mid-1990s, publishers were releasing highly accurate ports of arcade games before those games had even peaked in popularity at the arcade, directly cutting into arcade owners' profits.

• 6. Reinvention and Hybrid Spaces

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  In the late 1990s, a bar called Barcode opened in the Crown Casino complex in Melbourne, Australia. It combined the latest arcade games with classics, pool tables, air hockey, and pinball, all accessible while drinking. The format proved popular, and more Barcode venues followed in King Street in Melbourne in the early 2000s. A Barcode opened in Times Square, New York in May 2000 and was featured on an episode of the television series Sex and the City. Barcode Times Square closed in March 2003. Barcode Crown Casino closed in 2006.

  In the mid-2000s, Madrid businessman Enrique Martinez took a different approach, refitting a theater at the Yelmo Cineplex in Spain for $390,000 into a high-tech gaming hall seating about 50 people, with fog, black light, flashing green lasers, high-definition digital projectors, vibrating seats, game pads, and dozens of 17-inch screens on individual chairs. In Germany, the CinemaxX movie theater company conducted a four-month trial with video games in 2007 to assess demand for gaming in a theater setting.

  On the hardware side, manufacturers added new features to machines in the 2000s. Konami used motion and position sensing in Police 911 in 2000 and Mocap Boxing in 2001. Sega introduced "Tuning cards" in the Initial D series, letting players save data on a card vended from the game; Namco followed with the Maximum Tune series. One of the most popular redemption games of the period, Deal or No Deal by ICE, simulated the television game show of the same name. Stacker by LAI Games offered players the chance to win prizes including iPods and video game consoles.

  The opening of Barcade in Brooklyn, New York in 2004 marked a different kind of turning point. Barcade combined a full bar with a strict focus on classic machines from the 1970s and 1980s. Its success prompted similarly themed businesses to open across the country. Ground Kontrol in Portland, Oregon, was among the arcades that began adding full bars. Regular bars began installing classic arcade games. The DNA Association coined the term "social-tainment" to describe these hybrid venues, also calling them "game bars."

• 7. The Arcade Today

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  In the United Kingdom, classic London arcades including Casino and Trocadero closed in the 2000s. Some machines from Trocadero found a new home at Heart of Gaming in North Acton. The Loading Soho Gaming Cafe features arcade machines manufactured by Bespoke Arcades. The UK also hosts what is recognized as the largest arcade in Europe: Arcade Club, located in Bury, Greater Manchester, with over 400 original arcade machines. Arcade Club opened a second venue in Leeds in May 2019 and announced a third for Blackpool, which was delayed from 2020 to 2022 due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

  The physical form of the arcade itself has shifted. American arcades today earn significantly more from deluxe driving games and ticket redemption games than from traditional upright cabinets, though Japanese arcades continue to perform well with traditional JAMMA video games. Chains like Dave and Busters and Chuck E. Cheese have moved away from coin-operated tokens toward refillable card systems. Retro arcades often charge admission at the door and set machines to free play. The ROUND1 entertainment chain pairs a large arcade with a full-service bowling alley, billiards, and karaoke.

  Cocktail-style tabletop machines, popularized in bars and pubs, persist as a distinct format. Machines like Ms. Pac-Man and Joust appear in smaller boxes with a flat glass top, where players sit and look down at the screen. Two-player games on these tables set the screen upside-down for one side, facing players across from each other, though both Joust and Gun Fight had versions where players sat side by side. The cabinet, in all its configurations, remains the defining object of a space that has been reinvented repeatedly since 1905.