By the mid-1980s “arcade game” had stopped meaning only a game found in an arcade. In the British computer press it also named a way of playing: instant to start, reflex-driven, scored, and structured in lives, not chapters. Personal Computer Games printed a type or category at the head of each review, and in February 1984 it labelled Ultimate’s Lunar Jetman and Timescape’s Wild West Hero “ARCADE”, though neither had ever been a coin-op. The word described how a game behaved, not where it came from.
It started, of course, in the arcades, and the arcade sense never went away. The home sense sat alongside it, and the arcade conversion, a home version of a real coin-op machine, was a separate category judged in its own way.
Fast facts
- First coin-operated video games: Computer Space and Galaxy Game, both 1971, both versions of the computer game Spacewar!.
- First coin-op hit: Atari’s Pong (1972).
- Core loop: immediate action, rising difficulty, a high score.
- Session length: short. In the arcades a game had to hold a player for the two minutes one coin bought.
- Failure model: a few lives, no saving, back to the start.
- Opposite of: the adventure game, and anything else that asked for reading and patience.
Out of the computer lab
The first coin-operated video games were both attempts to sell Spacewar!, the space duel written at MIT in 1962 that ran on university minicomputers. In 1971 Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney built Computer Space, and Nutting Associates made and sold it. “We built 1,500 and had to sell some by force,” Bill Nutting told Video Games in 1982. Players put a coin in and stood baffled at its thrust, fire and rotate buttons. At Stanford University that same autumn, Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck took a different route with Galaxy Game: a DEC PDP-11 minicomputer and its vector display in a cabinet, “a mini-computer with a coin slot” in Retro Gamer’s words. Later accounts date its installation at the university’s student union to November 1971. It never went into production.
Which came first depends on what counts. Electronic Games put Computer Space “shortly before” Galaxy Game in 1982, though the same article wrongly called both Pitts and Bushnell MIT students. Computer Space was the first to be made and sold in numbers.
The lesson Bushnell took from it shaped the whole genre: his next game would be one people already knew how to play. Atari’s Pong (1972) carried a single line of instructions on the cabinet, “Avoid missing ball for high score.” More than 25 companies copied it. The boom that followed Space Invaders in 1978 is the subject of the golden age of arcade games entry.
What made an arcade game
The conventions came from the coin slot. When Nintendo of America studied the arcades in 1980, David Sheff writes, it found that a successful game had to capture a player “within the first thirty seconds”, and “there could be no letup in the intensity for two minutes, the time that one quarter lasted”. From that followed the rest:
- No preamble. Play began at once, and the machine explained itself by playing a demonstration of itself between games, the attract mode.
- Score as the point. The high-score table was the progression system, and players competed for records (see Twin Galaxies).
- Lives as a budget. Most games gave the player a fixed number of lives, and losing the last ended the game, however far the player had got.
- Difficulty that ramps. The same enemies came back faster, in greater numbers or with new tricks, until the player lost.
On home computers
Home computer games inherited the conventions and the name. The magazines used “arcade” for original games written for home machines as readily as for conversions. Personal Computer Games’s February 1984 reviews put “TYPE: ARCADE” over Salamander’s Gridrunner and Traxx and “CATEGORY: ARCADE” over Wild West Hero and Lunar Jetman, and “PUZZLE” over Virgin’s Lojix. That November it described Beyond’s Mr Robot, a Commodore 64 original, as “an arcade game with a design and play your own screen facility”.
The broad label had a partner at the other end of the shelf. Virgin Games Centres advertised in Computer & Video Games in 1985 that they stocked “Arcade Games, Adventure Games, War Games, Classic Games, Family Games, Sports Games”. Games that mixed exploration with action got a combined name: Sinclair User called Ultimate’s Sabre Wulf an “Arcade-Adventure” in August 1984, and Personal Computer Games gave Underwurlde the same label.
Arcade game was an umbrella. Shoot-’em-ups, maze games, platform games and most driving games sit inside it, and reviewers used the broad and the narrow terms as a sentence needed.
Later
The 16-bit computers and consoles of the late 1980s and early 1990s brought home versions closer to the cabinets without ever quite matching them; the arcade conversion entry follows that story. The coin-op business had its own second wind in 1991, when Capcom’s Street Fighter II started what Capcom called the “Street Fighter II boom”.
Sources
- Electronic Games vol. 1 no. 2, March 1982, pp. 20 and 22, “A decade of video”: Computer Space and Galaxy Game in 1971, the order of the two, and the error about MIT.
- Steve Bloom, “The incredible, incredible story of Atari”, Video Games vol. 1 no. 3, December 1982, pp. 40-41: Bill Nutting on Computer Space.
- Video Games Player vol. 1 no. 1, September 1982, p. 18: Computer Space’s controls; more than 25 companies making Pong-type games.
- Marty Goldberg, “The Making of Star Castle”, Retro Gamer issue 112, March 2013, p. 84: Pitts and Tuck’s Galaxy Game, “a mini-computer with a coin slot”.
- “Galaxy Game”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): installation at Stanford’s Tresidder Union in November 1971, citing Tristan Donovan, Replay: The History of Video Games (2010). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_Game
- David Sheff, Game Over (GamePress edition, 1999), chapter 5, “Coming to America”: thirty seconds and two minutes. Chapter on Atari: the instruction line on the Pong cabinet.
- Personal Computer Games issue 3, February 1984, p. 46: reviews of Gridrunner, Traxx, Wild West Hero, Lojix and Lunar Jetman with their type and category labels.
- Personal Computer Games issue 12, November 1984, p. 17: news of Underwurlde (“an arcade adventure”) and Mr Robot (“an arcade game”).
- Sinclair User issue 29, August 1984, p. 39: Sabre Wulf, Ultimate’s “latest Arcade-Adventure”.
- Computer & Video Games issue 47, September 1985, p. 95: Virgin Games Centres advertisement.
- Capcom, company history (web): the “Street Fighter II” boom of 1991. https://www.capcom.co.jp/ir/english/company/history.html