⋆｡˚⋆☽ A R C A D E ☾⋆˚｡⋆

Due to the nature itself of arcade machines it is difficult to really separate its history from its hardware and its notable games, thus I kinda merged all together lol.

Games of skill (and a bit of chance, sometimes also tied to physical rewards) have been a thing for centuries, eventually also proving that selling amusement was a reliable market. This leads to a whole, branching history of things like Carnival Games and Pinball Machines that will begin to pop up in dedicated arcade parlours (alongside places like Restaurants, Bars, etc) by the early 20th century and would eventually evolve into Electro-Mechanical Games by the 1940's, which would modestly grow in reach and popularity throughout most of the post-war era.

Several companies dedicated to the design, manufacture and distribution of these games would be created around this era, most notably Sega, Namco, Nintendo, Taito and Midway would all begin to dedicate at least some of their efforts into the creation of these games throughout most of the 60's and 70's.

It wouldn't be until 1971 where the very first true Arcade video games would pop up in the form of Galaxy Game and Computer Space, the latter being the very first game created by the newly founded Atari (named Syzygy Engineering by then) and both being inspired by 1962's Spacewar!, a simple shooting game where you control a spaceship floating about in a 2D space and have to engage in dogfights with other spaceships. Both of these games would be rather stand-offs in what the industry would become due to basically being a modification of the hardware of the PDP-11 computer put inside arcade cabinets (Computer Space specifically having a really funky one just to really sell that futuristic vibe.)

A market for entirely electronic video games quickly established itself specially following the runaway success of Atari's Pong in 1972, a simple table tennis arcade game inspired by game from the Magnavox Odyssey console which released the same year, being considered by many the hatching point of the video game industry.

Now, despite the fact that microprocessors (or better known as CPUs nowadays) had been a thing since the release of the Intel 4004 in 1971, most of the games developed during a good chunk of this decade would be entirely based around Transistor-Transistor Logic or TTL, where basically instead of having a single programmable chip that could handle all the logic operations in order to make the programming of the game work, such job would be divided into several transistor chips handling different functions.

Not only was this hardware approach much more limited and time consuming but complex games would also require a metric fuck ton of chips that could get pretty expensive and a pain in the ass to replace, and thus games utilizing microprocessors instead began to pop up by the mid 70's with Midway's Gun Fight released in 1975 and making use of the Intel 8080 processor.

Another game that made use of such processor was none other than Taito's Space Invaders, released in 1978 and very quickly becoming the biggest success the still small industry had seen in its history, not only putting video games in the radar for an enourmous amount of people in Japan and the world but the title credited for kickstarting an era now defined as "The Golden Age of Arcade Video Games", a roughly 5-7 year period marked by technical improvement and competition at a breakneck speed while also growing the customer base of the industry by the hundreds of thousands and the total grossings by the billions.

One of the things I think fueled such advancements was the mere wish to mimic the success of the games that hit it big by establishing a new formula, the case of Space Invaders being how pretty much everyone did variations of it following its success, which go from straight up clones (Invinco (1979) and Space Attack (1979) by Sega, Space Fever (1980) by Nintendo, Space King (1978) by Konami, Space Fighter (1978) by Data East, etc) to more creative and succesful variations such as Namco's Galaxian and Galaga released in 1979 and 1981 respectively (the former being also acknowledged as one of the first succesful games to feature colorful graphics), Williams' Defender and Konami's Scramble both released in 1981 with different takes in a side-scrolling shooter and Atari's Asteroids being the one to put the genre back into a multidirectional floaty perspective similar to Computer Space.

This model of trying out new things and then copying the homework of the succesful pioneers but improving on it as a way to end up as the better game (alongside the usage of newer and more powerful processors such as the Zilog Z80 or the MOS 6502) is what pretty much the gist of this era and what led to the development of many different genres such as the shooter, platformer, racing and maze games. Also giving place to many franchises that would become deeply ingrained in pop culture such as Namco's Pac-man (1980), Konami's Frogger (1981), Gottlieb's Q*Bert (1982) and of course Donkey Kong (1981) and Mario Bros. (1983) by Nintendo

The industry continued to grow exponentially throughout most of the early 80's as the big companies we still recognize to this day started to settle in and new technology became accessible, Atari began spearheading the creation of many succesful games using Vector graphics (which directly modifies the electron beam of the monitor to form smooth but primitive shapes instead of forming rougher but more colorful Raster graphics through a pixel grid as done by other games.) such as Asteroids, Lunar Lander, Tempest, Battlezone and Star Wars. Namco implemented the first continuous soundtrack in their game Rally-X in 1980 with the use of a dedicated sound chip. Speech Synthesis in games also becoming a thing that year with Sunsoft's Stratovox

16-bit processors started getting used in games like Namco's Pole Position from 1982 with the Zilog Z8000 or GCC's Food Fight in 1983 with the legendary Motorola 68000. The usage of LaserDisc technology for integrating full motion video also became a trend for a few years getting most popular with Cinematronic's Dragon's Lair in 1983. Shit, Atari made a full-ass 3D rendered game in the form of I, Robot in 1984. But by 1983 or so the interest in arcade games and the video game industry in general began to decline at least in the US due to several factors including a saturation of the market, widespread moral panic regarding the influence of video games and Atari shitting the bed with the 2600 in the home console market leading to a steady decline during the following years.

The Arcade video game market, alongside the video game industry in general, recovered soon enough. Arcade conversion systems which allowed you to swap around the games loaded onto the same board and cabinet (Initially pioneered by Data East with the DECO Cassette System in 1979.) like Sega's Convert-A-Game or Nintendo's VS. System (which was also just a repackaged NES, more on that console here) became quite popular with both Arcade parlor owners and players. Beat 'em ups like Irem's Kung Fu Master (from 1984) or Technos' Double Dragon series rose up quickly in popularity and made the genre a staple for much of the late 80's to early 90's. Sega's Super Scaler games like Space Harrier, Out Run and After Burner not only set themselves apart thanks to their cutting-edge graphics for the time but the implementation of "full body sensation" cabinets, which would become one of the new focal points of Arcade games to come to set themselves apart from a Home Console market that was slowly beginning to outgrow them and catch up to their technological advancements.

Arcade video games found one last renaissance (or swan song) in the form of Capcom's Street Fighter II, releasing in 1991 (alongside a gazillion variations and revisions during the following years) and not only establishing the blueprint for the modern fighting game genre but bringing out a slew of other franchises still prevalent today such as Mortal Kombat, Fatal Fury, Virtua Fighter and Tekken. The latter two also being one of the big catalysts for the arms race between Sega and Namco for the implementation of real-time 3D rendered graphics in arcade games during most of the mid to late 90's, being quite the novelty up until around the release of the first Playstation in late 1994 which brought inexpensive 3D to the home and making a lot of people not really give much of a shit about it anymore even if the more advanced arcade machines would stay at the cutting edge of technology for the rest of the decade.

By the 2000's the home console market had already taken the crown, becoming the largest segment of the video game market around 1998 and leaving the Arcade industry to mostly live off its legacy and using gimmicks that would be hard to recreate as home media, including light-gun shooters such as Sega's House of the Dead or rhythm games like Konami's Dance Dance Revolution (alongside their whole Bemani franchise from there onwards.)