Arcade video game

• 1. Introduction

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  Arcade video games have a surprising ancestor: the coin-operated pinball table. Pinball gained electric lights and display panels in 1933. Player-controlled flippers did not exist yet; they would not appear until 1947. Without flippers, many cities and states treated pinball as a game of pure luck rather than skill. They banned the machines outright, in some places into the 1960s and 1970s.

  This documentary follows how that suspect novelty gave way to an industry that, for years, built some of the most technologically advanced entertainment machines around. It also asks why arcades still thrive in some countries while emptying out in others. And it asks what happened inside these coin-operated cabinets that turned a few of them into some of the best-selling machines of their era.

• 2. From Novelty To Circuits

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  Sega released an electro-mechanical novelty called Periscope in 1966, part of what turned arcades into a testing ground for audio-visual gadgets. That renaissance of electro-mechanical, or EM, games set the stage for video games to enter arcades commercially in the early 1970s.

  In the late 1960s, a college student named Nolan Bushnell took a part-time job at an arcade. He watched customers play the EM machines, helped maintain them, and learned the business from the floor up.

  Spacewar!, a mainframe game from 1962, became the direct inspiration for Bushnell's own creation. Bushnell and Ted Dabney built Computer Space and released it through Nutting Associates in 1971. Nutting demonstrated the machine at the Amusement & Music Operators Association show in October 1971. A month later, in November 1971, a second Spacewar-inspired machine called Galaxy Game appeared at Stanford University.

  Bushnell and Dabney's next project, built with engineer Allan Alcorn, was a simple table tennis game called Pong. Released in 1972, Pong became a commercial success. Its success drew a wave of competing coin-op manufacturers into the business.

  Within just a few years, those competitors would begin trading discrete circuit boards for an entirely new kind of chip.

• 3. Boom, Bust, And Rebound

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  Taito released Space Invaders in 1978, and the game had sold roughly 750,000 hardware units by 1979. That release opened what became known as the arcade industry's golden age.

  Between 1978 and 1982, companies including Namco, Atari, Williams Electronics, Stern Electronics, and Nintendo turned out one blockbuster after another. Namco's Pac-Man, released in 1980, sold about 400,000 units by 1982 and quickly turned into a genuine pop culture icon. Nintendo's Donkey Kong followed in 1981, selling roughly 132,000 units by 1982 as dedicated video-game arcades opened across North America and Japan.

  The novelty wore off sharply after 1982. Arcades and arcade games had become oversaturated, and a moral panic over video games echoed the earlier fears once raised about pinball.

  The market recovered by 1986, helped along by software-conversion kits that let cabinets run new games on old hardware. New beat 'em up games arrived too, including Kung-Fu Master in 1984 and Renegade in 1986-87. Sega added motion-simulator 'taikan' cabinets such as Hang-On and Space Harrier, both from 1985, and Out Run in 1986. Even so, the rise of home systems like the Nintendo Entertainment System pushed arcades into another brief decline by the end of the 1980s.

  One fighting game from Capcom, released in the early 1990s, was about to pull arcades into an entirely new kind of contest.

• 4. The Renaissance And The Race

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  Capcom's Street Fighter II, released in the early 1990s, sold more than 221,000 arcade hardware units by 1999. It set the template for modern fighting games. Rivals followed quickly: Mortal Kombat, Fatal Fury, Killer Instinct, Virtua Fighter, and Tekken all built on the same formula. Mortal Kombat itself sold about 24,000 units by 2002, and its sequel, Mortal Kombat II, sold roughly 27,000 units by the same year. SNK's The King of Fighters '97 found its own audience, moving around 150,000 units by 1998.

  Realism became the other battleground of the decade. Arcade makers pushed from 2D and pseudo-3D graphics toward true real-time 3D polygon graphics, driven by a race in technology between Sega and Namco. Sega's Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter, both from the early 1990s, popularized 3D-polygon technology inside arcades. 3D graphics reached home consoles and computers by the mid-1990s, yet Sega's Model 3 hardware stayed well ahead of home systems into the late 1990s. Arcade video games remained the largest segment of the global industry until about 1996. Consoles overtook them for the first time around 1997-98.

  That handover to consoles would soon split the arcade's fortunes in two, one path forming in the United States and a very different one in Japan.

• 5. Diverging Paths East And West

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  In the United States, arcades became a niche business competing directly against home consoles. Operators adapted by adding other entertainment options or prize redemption machines to stay afloat.

  Japan took a different route, and its arcades continued to flourish. Games such as Dance Dance Revolution and The House of the Dead offered experiences players could not easily get at home. China and South Korea likewise kept a robust arcade industry running.

  Behind both economies sat the same evolving hardware, the chips and displays that had defined every cabinet since Bushnell's first machines.

• 6. TTL Chips To Custom Silicon

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  Computer Space and Galaxy Game were exceptions, both built around small, mainframe-style computers rather than the discrete logic chips used elsewhere. Most early arcade machines instead combined transistor-transistor logic, or TTL, chips to produce whatever effect appeared on screen. More ambitious gameplay simply demanded more TTL components.

  By the mid-1970s, inexpensive programmable microprocessors reached the market. Midway's Gun Fight, a 1975 conversion of Taito's Western Gun, became the first microprocessor-based arcade video game. Once Space Invaders arrived and the golden era took hold, microprocessor-based hardware became the industry standard.

  Early cabinets displayed raster graphics on cathode-ray tube monitors. Many machines from the late 1970s and early 1980s instead rendered vector graphics, a technique that faded by the mid-1980s as CRT displays improved. Before color CRT or vector displays existed, some cabinets faked color and extra graphics using angled monitors, one-way mirrors, and clear plastic overlays.

  By the 1990s and 2000s, coin-operated games ran on custom hardware with multiple CPUs and specialized sound and graphics chips. That hardware often outpaced the video game consoles and personal computers sold in the same years. Since the 2000s, many arcade games instead run on modified console hardware, such as Sega's NAOMI and Triforce systems. Others run on gaming PC components, such as the Taito Type X.

  Arcade controls set the machines apart from anything at home. Cabinets offered force-feedback controls, dedicated lightguns, rear-projection displays, mock automobile or airplane cockpits, motorcycle- or horse-shaped controllers, dancing mats, and fishing rod controllers. Most of these accessories were too bulky, costly, and specialized for an ordinary home PC or console.

  Arcade makers have also experimented with virtual reality technology. Machines have shifted from coin payments to smart cards that store credits as a form of virtual currency. Modern cabinets use flat panel displays instead of cathode-ray tubes. Online services such as ALL.Net, NESiCAxLive, e-Amusement, and NESYS let cabinets download updates, host online multiplayer, save progress, unlock content, or earn credits.

  Those same dancing-mat controllers hint at how arcades would soon sort their games, not by hardware, but by genre and feel.

• 7. Built For The Coin Slot

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  Arcade racing cabinets let cars turn sharply with no braking or understeer, while rival drivers were sometimes programmed with a rubberband effect that kept them close to the player. These cabinets favored motion simulators, a simplified physics engine, and a shorter learning curve than realistic racing simulations.

  A player at an arcade cabinet is, in effect, renting the game for as long as their character survives or their tokens last. The classic formula for a successful arcade game came down to "easy to learn, difficult to master," paired with multiple lives and gradually climbing difficulty. Games on home consoles or PCs can still earn the label "arcade game" if they share those qualities or serve as direct ports. Music and rhythm games, along with mobile and casual titles, borrowed the same intuitive controls and short play sessions.

  The label "arcade game" can also describe a fast, reflex-driven action title with little room for puzzle-solving or strategy. That category includes fighting games often played on an arcade-style controller, plus beat 'em up brawlers built around fast hack and slash combat. It also includes light gun rail shooters and "bullet hell" shooters, both known for rapidly climbing difficulty. Combat flight simulation games leaned on sophisticated hydraulic motion cabinets paired with simplified physics and handling. Console flight games such as Crimson Skies, Ace Combat, and Secret Weapons Over Normandy signaled a shift away from manual-heavy flight simulators toward instant arcade-style action.

  Hideki Kamiya, creator of the Devil May Cry and Bayonetta franchises, largely defined a modern subgenre known as hack and slash or character action games. That subgenre is sometimes treated as a branch of the beat 'em up brawler.

  That reflex-driven design would soon need somewhere to earn its keep, in restaurants, bowling alleys, and shopping malls where every machine had only minutes to prove itself.

• 8. The Business Behind The Cabinet

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  Arcade cabinets turned up in restaurants, bowling alleys, college campuses, video rental shops, dormitories, laundromats, movie theaters, supermarkets, shopping malls, and airports. They thrived anywhere people had free time to spend. Much of their profitability came from licensing games onto home platforms. In 1997, WMS Industries, the parent company of Midway Games, reported a pattern in home licensing. Selling more than 5,000 arcade units could lead to at least 100,000 home version units sold.

  The American Amusement Machine Association, founded in 1981, represents the American coin-operated amusement industry, including 120 arcade game distributors and manufacturers. Japan's arcade industry is represented instead by the Japan Amusement Machine and Marketing Association. Standardized connectors such as JAMMA and JVS let operators quickly swap game boards or systems inside a cabinet.

  Before the 2000s, a hit arcade game was often converted for a home console or computer. Many of the earliest Atari VCS games were conversions of Atari's own arcade hits. Manufacturers outside the console business instead licensed their games, and rival console makers competed for the rights to the most popular ones. Coleco famously beat Atari to the rights for Nintendo's Donkey Kong, then used it as a pack-in game to challenge the VCS on the ColecoVision.

  The VCS conversion of Space Invaders became the console's killer application; VCS sales quadrupled in 1980 partly as a result. The 1982 VCS conversion of Pac-Man went the other way, criticized for flickering ghosts and simplified gameplay. It was still the best-selling game on the VCS, but it eroded consumer confidence and helped bring on the 1983 crash.

  As Nintendo, Sega, and SNK entered the home console market themselves, using similar technology to their arcade machines, conversions needed fewer concessions. One still remained: the Super Nintendo conversion of Mortal Kombat removed much of the arcade version's gore to meet Nintendo's quality control standards.

  Emulators such as MAME now run exact copies of old arcade games on modern devices, translating the original software in real time. Emulated arcade games first appeared commercially on the Macintosh in 1994, distributed on Williams floppy disks. They reached the Sony PlayStation in 1996 and the Sega Saturn in 1997. Sega Saturn compilations arrived on CD-ROM, including Williams Arcade's Greatest Hits and Arcade's Greatest Hits: The Atari Collection 1. The PlayStation 2 and GameCube later got DVD-ROM compilations such as Midway Arcade Treasures. The Nintendo Wii Virtual Console began offering downloadable arcade emulation starting in 2009.

  Companies such as Arcade1Up have since built at-scale and reduced-scale recreations of classic cabinets using LCD monitors and lightweight construction. These recreations are designed to resemble the original arcade cabinets, though some support several related games at once. They come in styles as varied as table-mounted and wall-mounted versions.

  A table-mounted Arcade1Up cabinet, running the same code that once filled a noisy 1980s arcade, now fits on a shelf in someone's living room.