Golden age of arcade video games

Relevant time period

Although the exact years differ, all timelines overlap in the early 1980s. Technology journalist Jason Whittaker, in The Cyberspace Handbook, places the beginning of the golden age in 1978, with the release of Space Invaders. Video game journalist Steven L. Kent, in his book The Ultimate History of Video Games, places it at 1979 to 1983. The book pointed out that 1979 was the year that Space Invaders – which he credits for ushering in the golden age – was gaining considerable popularity in the United States, and the year that saw the advent of vector display technology which in turn spawned many of the popular early arcade games. However, 1983 was the period that began "a fairly steady decline" in the coin-operated video game business and when many arcades started disappearing.

The History of Computing Project places the golden age of video games between 1971 and 1983, covering the "mainstream appearance of video games as a consumer market" and "the rise of dedicated hardware systems and the origin of multi-game cartridge based systems". 1971 was chosen as an earlier start date by the project for two reasons: the creator of Pong filed a pivotal patent regarding video game technology, and it was the release of the first arcade video game machine, Computer Space.

Sean Newton, 3D arcade model builder and author of the book Bits, Sticks and Buttons states that the defining transitional point which finally ended the first era of arcade gaming (known as the "Black and White Age") and subsequently ushered in the Golden Age was with the North American release of Midway's Space Invaders. The game brought forth with it the power of the microprocessor, as well as a cult phenomenon impact which had only been felt up to that point by Atari's Pong. Following Space Invaders, Atari's Asteroids and Namco's Pac-Man further solidified the strength of the Golden Age.

Other opinions place this period's beginning in the late 1970s, when color arcade games became more prevalent and video arcades themselves started appearing outside of their traditional bowling alley and bar locales, through to its ending in the mid-1980s. The golden age of arcade games largely coincided with, and partly fueled, the second generation of game consoles and the microcomputer revolution.

Business

The golden age was a time of great technical and design creativity in arcade games. The era saw the rapid spread of video arcades across North America, Europe, and Asia. The number of video game arcades in North America, for example, more than doubled between 1980 and 1982; reaching a peak of 10,000 video game arcades across the region (compared to 4,000 as of 1998). Beginning with Space Invaders, video arcade games also started to appear in supermarkets, restaurants, liquor stores, gas stations and many other retail establishments looking for extra income. Video game arcades at the time became as common as convenience stores, while arcade games like Pac-Man and Space Invaders would appear in most locations across the United States, including even funeral homes. The sales of arcade video game machines increased significantly during this period, from $50 million in 1978 to $900 million in 1981, with 500,000 arcade machines sold in the United States at prices ranging as high as $3000 in 1982 alone. By 1982, there were 24,000 full arcades, 400,000 arcade street locations and 1.5 million arcade machines active in North America. The market was very competitive; the average life span of an arcade game was four to six months. Some games like Robby Roto failed because they were too complex to learn quickly, and others like Star Fire because they were too unfamiliar to the audience. Qix was briefly very popular but, Taito's Keith Egging later said, "too mystifying for gamers ... impossible to master and when the novelty wore off, the game faded". At around this time, the home video game industry (second-generation video game consoles and early home computer games) emerged as "an outgrowth of the widespread success of video arcades" at the time.

In 1980, the U.S. arcade video game industry's revenue generated from quarters tripled to $2.8 billion. By 1981, the arcade video game industry in the United States was generating an annual revenue of over $5 billion with some estimates as high as $10.5 billion for all video games (arcade and home) in the U.S. that year, which would be three times the amount spent on movie tickets in 1981. The total revenue for the U.S. arcade video game industry in 1981 was estimated at more than $7 billion though some analysts estimated the real amount may have been much higher. By 1982, video games accounted for 87% of the $8.9 billion in commercial games sales in the United States. In 1982, the arcade video game industry's revenue in quarters was estimated at $8 billion surpassing the annual gross revenue of both pop music ($4 billion) and Hollywood films ($3 billion) combined that year. It also exceeded the revenues of all major sports combined at the time, earning three times the combined ticket and television revenues of Major League Baseball, basketball, and American football, as well as earning twice as much as all the casinos in Nevada combined. This was also more than twice as much revenue as the $3.8 billion generated by the home video game industry (during the second generation of consoles) that same year; both the arcade and home markets combined added up to a total revenue between $11.8 billion and $12.8 billion for the U.S. video game industry in 1982. In comparison, the U.S. video game industry in 2011 generated total revenues between $16.3 billion and $16.6 billion.

Prior to the golden age, pinball machines were more popular than video games. The pinball industry reached a peak of 200,000 machine sales and $2.3 billion revenue in 1979, which had declined to 33,000 machines and $464 million in 1982. In comparison, the best-selling arcade games of the golden age, Space Invaders and Pac-Man, had each sold over 360,000 and 400,000 cabinets, respectively, with each machine costing between $2000 and $3000 (specifically $2400 in Pac-Man's case). In addition, Space Invaders had grossed $2 billion in quarters by 1982, while Pac-Man had grossed over $1 billion by 1981 and $2.5 billion by the late 1990s. In 1982, Space Invaders was considered the highest-grossing entertainment product of its time, with comparisons made to the then highest-grossing film Star Wars, which had grossed $486 million, while Pac-Man is today considered the highest-grossing arcade game of all time. Many other arcade games during the golden age also had hardware unit sales at least in the tens of thousands, including Ms. Pac-Man with over 115,000 units, Asteroids with 70,000, Donkey Kong with over 60,000, Defender with 55,000, Galaxian with 40,000, Donkey Kong Junior with 35,000, Mr. Do! with 30,000, and Tempest with 29,000 units. A number of arcade games also generated revenues (from quarters) in the hundreds of millions, including Defender with more than $100 million in addition to many more with revenues in the tens of millions, including Dragon's Lair with $48 million and Space Ace with $13 million.

The most successful arcade game companies of this era included Taito (which ushered in the golden age with the shooter game Space Invaders and produced other successful arcade action games such as Gun Fight and Jungle King), Namco (the Japanese company that created Galaxian, Pac-Man, Pole Position and Dig Dug) and Atari (the company that introduced video games into arcades with Computer Space and Pong, and later produced Asteroids). Other companies such as Sega (who later entered the home console market against its former arch rival, Nintendo), Nintendo (whose mascot, Mario, was introduced in 1981's Donkey Kong), Bally Midway Manufacturing Company (which was later purchased by Williams), Cinematronics, Konami, Centuri, Williams and SNK also gained popularity around this era.

Technology

Arcades catering to video games began to gain momentum in the late 1970s with games such as Space Invaders (1978), Asteroids (1979), and Galaxian (1979), and became widespread in 1980 with Pac-Man, Missile Command, Berzerk, Defender, and others. The central processing unit in these games allowed for more complexity than earlier discrete circuitry games such as Atari's Pong (1972). The arcade boom that began in the late 1970s is credited with establishing the basic techniques of interactive entertainment and for driving down hardware prices to the extent of allowing the PC to become a technological and economic reality.

While color monitors had been used by several racing video games before (such as Indy 800 and Speed Race Twin), it was during this period that RGB color graphics became widespread, following the release of Galaxian in 1979. Namco's Rally-X in 1980 featured multi-directional scrolling, and introduced a radar tracking the player position. Sega's Space Tactics that year was a space combat game allowing multi-directional scrolling from a first-person perspective. The following year, Namco's Bosconian allowed the player's ship to freely move across open space that scrolls in all directions. By the early 1980s, scrolling had become popular among arcade video games and would make its way to third-generation consoles, where it would prove nearly as pivotal as the move to 3D graphics on later fifth-generation consoles.

The Golden Age also saw developers experimenting with vector displays, which produced crisp lines that couldn't be duplicated by raster displays. A few of these vector games became great hits, such as 1979's Asteroids, 1980's Battlezone and Tempest and 1983's Star Wars from Atari, as well as 1982's Star Trek from Sega. However, vector technology fell out of favor with arcade game companies due to the high cost of repairing vector displays.

Several developers at the time were also experimenting with pseudo-3D and stereoscopic 3D using 2D sprites on raster displays. In 1979, Nintendo's Radar Scope introduced a three-dimensional third-person perspective to the shoot 'em up genre, later imitated by shooters such as Konami's Juno First and Activision's Beamrider in 1983. In 1981, Sega's Turbo was the first racing game to feature a third-person rear view format, and use sprite scaling with full-colour graphics. Namco's Pole Position featured an improved rear-view racer format in 1982 that would remain the standard for the genre; the game provided a perspective view of the track, with its vanishing point swaying side to side as the player approaches corners, accurately simulating forward movement into the distance. That same year, Sega released Zaxxon, which introduced the use of isometric graphics and shadows; and SubRoc-3D, which introduced the use of stereoscopic 3D through a special eyepiece;

This period also saw significant advances in digital audio technology. Space Invaders in 1978 was the first game to use a continuous background soundtrack, with four simple chromatic descending bass notes repeating in a loop, though it was dynamic and changed pace during stages. Rally-X in 1980 was the first game to feature continuous background music, which was generated using a dedicated sound chip, a Namco 3-channel PSG. That same year saw the introduction of speech synthesis, which was first used in Stratovox, released by Sun Electronics in 1980, followed soon after by Namco's King & Balloon, which was an early example of multiple CPUs, using two Z80 microprocessors, the second to drive a DAC for speech. Multi-CPUs were used by several arcade games the following year, including Frogger, which used two Z80 microprocessors and an AY-3-8910 PSG sound chip, and Scramble, which used two Z80 microprocessors and two AY-3-8910 sound chips. In 1983, Gyruss, known for its stereo sound and musical score, utilized multi CPUs, which included two Z80 microprocessors, one 6809 microprocessor, and one 8039 microprocessor, along with five AY-3-8910 sound chips and a DAC for the sound. That same year, the Namco Pole Position system used two Z8002 microprocessors and one Z80 microprocessor, along with a Namco 6-channel stereo PSG sound chip for the sound.

Developers also experimented with laserdisc players for delivering full motion video based games with movie-quality animation. The first laserdisc video game to exploit this technology was 1983's Astron Belt from Sega, soon followed by Dragon's Lair from Cinematronics; the latter was a sensation when it was released (and, in fact, the laserdisc players in many machines broke due to overuse). While laserdisc games were usually either shooter games with full-motion video backdrops like Astron Belt or interactive movies like Dragon's Lair, Data East's 1983 game Bega's Battle introduced a new form of video game storytelling: using brief full-motion video cutscenes to develop a story between the game's shooting stages, which would years later become the standard approach to video game storytelling. By the mid-1980s, the genre dwindled in popularity, as laserdiscs were losing out to the VHS format and the laserdisc games themselves were losing their novelty, due to their linearity and, in many cases, depending less on reflexes than on memorizing sequences of moves.

Gameplay

With the enormous success of the early games, dozens of developers jumped into the development and manufacturing of video arcade games. Some simply copied the "invading alien hordes" idea of Space Invaders and turned out successful imitators like Namco's Galaxian, Galaga, and Gaplus, though they took the shoot 'em up genre further with new gameplay mechanics, more complex enemy patterns, and richer graphics. Galaxian introduced a "risk-reward" concept, while Galaga was one of the first games with a bonus stage. Sega's 1980 release Space Tactics was an early first-person space combat game with multi-directional scrolling as the player moved the cross-hairs on the screen.

Others tried new concepts and defined new genres. Rapidly evolving hardware allowed new kinds of games which allowed for different styles of gameplay. In 1980, Namco released Pac-Man, which popularized the maze chase genre, and Rally-X, which featured a radar tracking the player position on the map. Games such as the pioneering 1981 games Donkey Kong and Qix in 1981 introduced new types of games where skill and timing are more important than shooting as fast as possible, with Nintendo's Donkey Kong in particular setting the template for the platform game genre. Namco's Bosconian in 1981 introduced a free-roaming style of gameplay where the player's ship freely moves across open space, while also including a radar tracking player & enemy positions. Bega's Battle in 1983 introduced a new form of video game storytelling: using brief full-motion video cutscenes to develop a story between the game's shooting stages. Other examples of innovative games are Atari Games' Paperboy in 1984 where the goal is to successfully deliver newspapers to customers, and Namco's Phozon where the object is to duplicate a shape shown in the middle of the screen. The theme of Exidy's Venture is dungeon exploration and treasure-gathering. One innovative game, Q*Bert, played upon the user's sense of depth perception to deliver a novel experience.

Popular culture

Some games of this era were so popular that they entered popular culture. The first to do so was Space Invaders. The game was so popular upon its release in 1978 that an urban legend blamed it for a national shortage of 100 yen coins in Japan, leading to a production increase of coins to meet demand for the game (although 100 yen coin production was lower in 1978 and 1979 than in previous or subsequent years, and the claim does not withstand logical scrutiny: arcade operators would have emptied out their machines and taken the money to the bank, thus keeping the coins in circulation). It would soon have a similar impact in North America, where it has appeared or is referenced in numerous facets of popular culture. Soon after the release of Space Invaders, hundreds of favourable articles and stories about the emerging video game medium aired on television and were printed in newspapers and magazines. The Space Invaders Tournament held by Atari in 1980 was the first video game competition and attracted more than 10,000 participants, establishing video gaming as a mainstream hobby. By 1980, 86% of the 13–20 population in the United States had played arcade video games, and by 1981, there were more than 35 million gamers visiting video game arcades in the United States.

The game that most affected popular culture in North America was Pac-Man. Its release in 1980 caused such a sensation that it initiated what is now referred to as "Pac-Mania" (which later became the title of the last coin-operated game in the series, released in 1987). Released by Namco, the game featured a yellow, circle-shaped creature trying to eat dots through a maze while avoiding pursuing enemies. Though no one could agree what the "hero" or enemies represented (they were variously referred to as ghosts, goblins or monsters), the game was extremely popular. The game spawned an animated television series, numerous clones, Pac-Man-branded foods, toys, and a hit pop song, "Pac-Man Fever". The game's popularity was such that President Ronald Reagan congratulated a player for setting a record score in Pac-Man. Pac-Man was also responsible for expanding the arcade game market to involve large numbers of female audiences across all age groups. Though many popular games quickly entered the lexicon of popular culture, most have since left, and Pac-Man is unusual in remaining a recognized term in popular culture, along with Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, Mario and Frogger.

Arcade games at the time affected on the music industry, revenues for which had declined by $400 million between 1978 and 1981 (from $4.1 billion to $3.7 billion), a decrease that was directly credited to the rise of arcade games at the time. Successful songs based on video games also began appearing. The pioneering electronic music band Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO) sampled Space Invaders sounds in their 1978 self-titled album and the hit single "Computer Game" from the same album, the latter selling over 400,000 copies in the United States. In turn, YMO would have a major influence on much of the video game music produced during the 8-bit and 16-bit eras. Other pop songs based on Space Invaders soon followed, including "Disco Space Invaders" (1979) by Funny Stuff, "Space Invaders" (1980) by Playback, and the hit songs "Space Invader" (1980) by The Pretenders and "Space Invaders" (1980) by Uncle Vic. The game was also the basis for Player One's "Space Invaders" (1979), which in turn provided the bassline for Jesse Saunders' "On and On" (1984), the first Chicago house music track. The song "Pac-Man Fever" reached No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 and sold over a million singles in 1982, while the album Pac-Man Fever sold over a million records, with both receiving Gold certifications. That same year, R. Cade and the Video Victims also produced an arcade-inspired album, Get Victimized, featuring songs such as "Donkey Kong". In 1984, former YMO member Haruomi Hosono produced an album entirely from Namco arcade game samples entitled Video Game Music, an early example of a chiptune record and the first video game music album. Arcade game sounds also had a strong influence on the hip hop, pop music (particularly synthpop) and electro music genres during the early 1980s. The booming success of video games at the time led to music magazine Billboard listing the 15 top-selling video games alongside their record charts by 1982. More than a decade later, the first electroclash record, I-F's "Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass" (1997), has been described as "burbling electro in a vocodered homage to Atari-era hi-jinks", particularly Space Invaders which it was named after.

Arcade games also influenced the film industry; beginning with Space Invaders, arcade games began appearing at many movie theaters, while early films based on video games were also produced, most notably Tron, which grossed over $33 million in 1982 which began the Tron franchise which included a video game adaptation that grossed more than the film. Other films based on video games included the 1983 films WarGames (where Matthew Broderick plays Galaga at an arcade), Nightmares, and Joysticks, the 1984 film The Last Starfighter, and the anime Super Mario Bros.: Peach-Hime Kyushutsu Dai Sakusen! in 1986. Arcades also appeared in many other films at the time, such as Dawn of the Dead (where they play Gun Fight and F-1) in 1978, Used Cars and Midnight Madness in 1980, Take This Job and Shove It and Puberty Blues in 1981, the 1982 releases Rocky III, Fast Times At Ridgemont High, Koyaanisqatsi and The Toy, the 1983 releases Psycho II, Spring Break and Never Say Never Again, the 1984 releases Footloose, The Karate Kid (where Elisabeth Shue plays Pac-Man), The Terminator and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, the 1985 releases Back to the Future, The Goonies and The Boys Next Door and Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Something Wild in 1986.

In more recent years, there have been critically acclaimed films based on the golden age of arcade games, such as The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters and Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade in 2007. Since 2010, many arcade-related films have been released including Wreck It Ralph (2012) and Pixels (2015 film) (2015). Steven Spielberg is slated to direct Ready Player One another arcade-themed film based upon the novel by Ernest Cline.

Strategy guides

The period saw the emergence of a gaming media, publications dedicated to video games, in the form of video game journalism and strategy guides. The enormous popularity of video arcade games led to the very first video game strategy guides; these guides (rare to find today) discussed in detail the patterns and strategies of each game, including variations, to a degree that few guides seen since can match. "Turning the machine over"—making the score counter overflow and reset to zero—was often the final challenge of a game for those who mastered it, and the last obstacle to getting the highest score.

Some of these strategy guides sold hundreds of thousands of copies at prices ranging from $1.95 to $3.95 in 1982 (equivalent to between $5.00 and $10.00 in 2017). That year, Ken Uston's Mastering Pac-Man sold 750,000 copies, reaching No. 5 on B. Dalton's mass-market bestseller list, while Bantam's How To Master the Video Games sold 600,000 copies, appearing on the The New York Times mass-market paperback list. By 1983, 1.7 million copies of Mastering Pac-Man had been printed.

List of popular arcade games

The games below are some of the most popular and/or influential games of the era.

List of best-selling arcade games

For arcade games, success was usually judged by either the number of arcade hardware units sold to operators, or the amount of revenue generated, from the number of coins (such as quarters or 100 yen coins) inserted into machines, and/or the hardware sales (with arcade hardware prices often ranging from $1000 to $4000). This list only includes arcade games that have sold more than 10,000 hardware units.

Decline and aftermath

The golden age cooled around the mid-1980s as copies of popular games began to saturate the arcades. Arcade video game revenues in the United States had declined from $8 billion in 1981 and $7 billion in 1982 to $5 billion in 1983, reaching a low of $4 billion in 1986. Despite this, arcades would remain commonplace through to the early 1990s as there were still new genres being explored. In 1987, arcades experienced a short resurgence with Double Dragon, which started the golden age of beat 'em up games, a genre that would peak in popularity with Final Fight two years later. In 1988, arcade game revenues in the United States rose back up to $6.4 billion, largely due to the rising popularity of violent action games in the beat 'em up and run and gun shooter genres. After yet another relative decline, U.S. arcade video game revenues had fallen to $2.1 billion by 1991, by which time the sales of arcade machines had declined, with 4000 unit sales being considered a hit at the time.

One of the causes of decline was new generations of personal computers and video game consoles that sapped interest from arcades. In the early 1990s, the Genesis (Mega Drive outside most of North America) and Super NES (the Super Famicom in Japan) greatly improved home play and some of the technology was even integrated into a few video arcade machines.

Legacy

The Golden Age of Video Arcade Games spawned numerous cultural icons and even gave some companies their identity. Elements from games such as Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Frogger, and Centipede are still recognized in today's popular culture.

Pac-Man and Dragon's Lair joined Pong for permanent display at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. for their cultural impact in the United States. No video game has been inducted since.

The success of these early video games has led many hobbyists who were teenagers during the Golden Age to collect some of these classic games. Since few have any commercial value any longer, they can be acquired for US$200 to US$750 (though fully restored games can cost much more).

Some fans of these games have companies devoted to restoring the classic games, and others, such as Arcade Renovations, which produces reproduction art for classic arcade games, focus solely on one facet of the restoration activity. Many of these restorers have set up websites full of tips and advice on restoring games to mint condition. There are also several newsgroups devoted to discussion around these games, and a few conventions, such as California Extreme, dedicated to classic arcade gaming.