For about twenty years the best-looking video games were usually found in public. You played them standing up, in an arcade or an amusement hall or at the back of a fish and chip shop, with strangers watching over your shoulder and someone waiting for the next go. The machines were better than anything at home, every game cost money, and every good player had an audience. That combination made the arcade a social place in a way the bedroom never was, and it shaped how the games themselves were designed.
Pong in a bar
The arcade video game began in a tavern. In the autumn of 1972 Atari put a prototype of Pong into Andy Capp’s in Sunnyvale, California. Ralph Baer, whose home console had come first, put the date plainly in 1983: “Nolan Bushnell started in the arcade business in the fall of ’72 with the first Pong machine.” Within a few years video games had places of their own. Space Invaders in 1978, Pac-Man in 1980 and their many successors filled arcades on both sides of the world.
Ten pence a go
In Britain the price of a game was the period’s shorthand for the whole experience. Space Invaders, as Zero reminded its readers in 1992 when Domark brought out a home version, had “cost 10p a go”. By the end of the 1980s 20p was common: Computer & Video Games grumbled in April 1990 that “you can stick anything in an arcade box if people are willing to pay 20p a go”.
The machines were not only in arcades. A reader’s letter to Edge in December 2002 remembered his A-level years, when “a single pound would get me a bag of chips, a can of coke and still leave 20p for the arcade machines, out the back, to the left of the fryers”. Ten pence was enough for a game of RoboCop. By Christmas, the writer recalled, it was “a mad dash to get to the machine first, as by then we were all masters”.
The rules of the room
An arcade had manners, and players learned them by watching. Video Games Player set them out, tongue in cheek, in its first issue in September 1982, under the title “A Lesson In Arcade Etiquette”. American players reserved the next game by leaving a coin on the cabinet: “Putting a quarter on the machine is a signal that you have the next game. Do not take advantage of this courtesy. Putting one quarter on the glass is cool. Putting on two quarters is pushing it. Three quarters is grounds for execution.” Other rules followed: don’t hog the machine, don’t jostle or give “a running commentary” on another player’s game, and accept defeat gracefully, because “nobody ever beats a video game. The better you get, the better the machine gets.”
The audience was the point. The same issue’s guide to judging a game ended with the question it called “most important”: “How do you inscribe your name or initials on the screen of the machine in order to proclaim yourself as the greatest video star to play it?” A high-score table turned a solo game into a public contest with whoever had played before you, and by the early 1980s American arcades were running championships and keeping national records; see esports origins and Twin Galaxies.
The coin slot as a designer
Every arcade game was built to earn money from short plays, and players and critics knew it. ACE, a British magazine for home computer owners, admitted in a March 1988 editorial that “there’s nothing so heart-stoppingly satisfying as a quick blast on a state-of-the-art arcade console. Whether you’re punching the pads in Streetfighter or leaning into the bends in Super Hang On, it’s an experience that Pong-sters could never have imagined even in their wildest dreams.”
Then it turned on the arcade’s influence at home. “The 10p-a-go design concept of arcade games spills over all too often into computer entertainment and when the big league companies seem to concentrate so strongly on arcade licenses and game formats we’ve a good reason to start feeling uneasy.” Against it the magazine set “the intricacies of Sentinel, the wit of Infocom, and the pleasing perplexities of Xor”, and asked for “more originality, more long-term challenge”. A game meant to end in a few minutes and take another coin was a different thing from one meant to last a winter in a bedroom. British publishers’ appetite for arcade licences produced plenty of conversions that showed the difference; see bad ports.
Where the new technology was
The arcade was also where people first saw what games could become. In April 1994 Edge reported that Namco’s Ridge Racer was “a major attraction throughout the country” after stealing the show at the Amusement Trade Exhibition International in London, with “some machines’ takings of £1500 per weekend”, and that its “texture-mapped images” outclassed even Sega’s Virtua Racing (texture mapping). Fighting games put the audience back at the cabinet: in Street Fighter II, from 1991, the opponent was whoever put a coin in beside you.
Decline, and Japan
Home machines caught up during the 1990s. In November 2002 Edge traced how the arcade 3D boards of Sega and Namco led straight to home consoles that bridged “the power gap”, and asked whether those developments were “responsible for the ultimate decline of the arcade industry”. Answering a reader the next month, the magazine called “the decline of the arcade sector” “certainly regrettable”, while noting that showing off survived “particularly in Japanese arcades, where head-to-head gaming is commonplace”. Elsewhere, it said, multiplayer games had moved home, to small circles of friends “rather than the large crowds that used to be drawn by coin-op ostentation.”
Japan’s game centres outlasted most of the rest. Even there the business changed hands: Sega sold its Japanese arcade operator to the amusement company Genda in stages between November 2020 and January 2022, according to public accounts of the company’s history.
Sources
- Steve Bloom, interview with Ralph Baer, Video Games vol. 1 no. 5, February 1983, p. 81: Bushnell and the first Pong machine, autumn 1972.
- Zero issue 31, May 1992: review of Domark’s Super Space Invaders, “cost 10p a go”.
- Computer & Video Games issue 101, April 1990: “20p a go”.
- “A Lesson In Arcade Etiquette” and the guide to judging a game, Video Games Player vol. 1 no. 1, September 1982, pp. 28-32.
- ACE issue 6, March 1988, p. 5: editorial on arcade games and “the 10p-a-go design concept”.
- Edge issue 7, April 1994: Ridge Racer in British arcades.
- Edge issue 116, November 2002: arcade 3D hardware and the decline of the arcade industry.
- Edge issue 117, December 2002: readers’ letters, the chip-shop machine and Edge’s reply on the arcade sector and Japanese arcades.
- Wikipedia, “Sega Entertainment” (web, secondary): the sale to Genda, November 2020 and January 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Entertainment