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About Arcade games:
The first popular "arcade games" were early amusement
park midway games such as shooting galleries, ball toss games, and the
earliest coin-operated machines, such as those which claim to tell a
person their fortune or played mechanical music. Although none of
these were coin-operated games themselves, the old midways of
1920s-era amusement parks (such as Coney Island in New York) provided
the inspiration and atmosphere of later arcade games.
In the 1930s, the earliest coin-operated pinball machines were made.
These early amusement devices were distinct from their later
electronic cousins in that they were made of wood, did not have
plungers or lit-up bonus surfaces on the playing field, and used
mechanical instead of electronic scoring readouts. By around 1977,
most pinball machines in production switched to using solid state
electronics for both operation and scoring.
In 1972, Atari was formed by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. Atari
essentially created the coin-operated video game industry with the
game Pong, the smash hit electronic ping pong video game. Pong proved
to be popular, but imitators helped keep Atari from dominating the
fledging coin-operated videogame market. Nonetheless, video game
arcades sprang up in shopping malls and small, "corner arcades"
appeared in restaurants, grocery stores, bars and movie theaters all
over the United States and other countries during the late 1970s and
early 1980s. Games such as Space Invaders (1978), Galaxian (1979),
Pac-Man (1980), Battlezone (1980), and Donkey Kong (1981) were
especially popular.
By the late-1980s, the arcade video game craze was beginning to fade
due to the reputation of arcades as being seedy, unsafe places as well
as the advances in home video game console technology. The last gasp
of the youth arcade subculture, as it once was, may have been the
advent of two-player fighting games such as Street Fighter II (1991)
by Capcom, Mortal Kombat (1992) by Midway Games, and Fatal Fury(1992)
and King of Fighters (1994-2005) by SNK.
By 1996, 32-bit home video game consoles and computers with 3D
accelerator cards had reached technological parity with arcade
equipment—arcade games had always been based on commodity technology,
but their advantage over previous generations of home system was in
their ability to customize and use the latest graphics and sound chips,
much as PC games of today do. Declines in arcade sales volume meant
that this approach was no longer cost-effective. The arcades also lost
their status as the forefront of new game releases. Given the choice
between playing a game at an arcade three or four times (perhaps 15
minutes of play for a typical arcade game), and renting, at about the
same price, the exact same game—for a video game console—the console
was the clear winner. Fighting games were the most attractive feature
for arcades, since they offered the prospect of face-to-face
competition and tournaments, which correspondingly led players to
practice more (and spend more money in the arcade), but they couldn't
support the business all by themselves.
To stay in business, the arcades themselves were reinvented as "fun
centers" such as Chuck E. Cheese's, with arcade games being
supplemented by a variety of other attractions, most notably the
redemption game. Many old video game arcades have long since closed
and classic coin-operated games have become largely the province of
dedicated hobbyists.
Today's arcades have found a niche in games that use special
controllers largely inaccessible to home users. An alternative
interpretation (one which includes fighting games, which continue to
thrive and require no special controller) is that the arcade game is
now a more socially-oriented hangout, with games that focus on an
individual's performance, rather than the game's content, as the
primary form of novelty. Examples of today's popular genres are rhythm
games such as Dance Dance Revolution (1998) and DrumMania (1999), and
rail shooters such as House of the Dead (1998) and Time Crisis.
However, with the increase of Internet cafes opening (which also
provide gaming services), the need for video arcades and such arcade
games are reduced, and many have been shut down or merged with the
cafes as a result.