The New millennium is the millennia, of PC games. But much before PCs became a household phenomenon, the only games of its kind that kids knew, and a whole generation of Americans have grown up playing, are the arcade games.
By the looks of it, arcade games consist of a simple, yet bulky machine, with a colourful screen, and some sticks or buttons to play with, and a device to put coins in, which allows the game to be played for a particular period of time.
Today, you can find arcade games that run on computers. But before that happened, arcade games were typically found in restaurants, malls and movie halls. Kids and grown ups alike played mainly three types of arcade games — the famed pinball, video games or redemption games.
Yet, the ancestry of arcade games could be traced to the hugely popular games commonly known as the ‘amusement park midway games,’ like ball toss game and shooting galleries that were popular at the beginning of the 20th century.
The 1930s saw the first coin-operated binball machines. Though made of wood with all functions mechanical rather than electornic and a far cry from the electronic ones that came much later, they were still quite a hit. The late seventies would see these mechanical pinballs replaced by electronic games.
The change in fortunes of arcade games happened with the formation of a company called Atari in 1972. This company created the coin-operated machines, beginning with the electronic ping pong game, called Pong. Pong was a huge hit, and led to the entry of a lot of imitators. This was the time when arcade game machines sprung up everywhere, from big shopping malls to the ‘corner arcades.’.
Many games like Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and Space Invaders became huge hits in the late seventies and early eighties, paving the way to a revolution that would last until the end of the millennium. The last breath taken by arcade games was the emergence of two player fighting games like Street Fighter II , Mortal Kombatxb8 Fatal Fury, King of fighters etc in the early 90s. However, this was not to redeem the fate of arcade games completely, as the growth in computers and video technology saw the emergence of new type of games, including PC games and games that ran on special consoles such as the Playstation, Gameboy and the X-box pushing arcade games into the sidelines — almost ending their existence.
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