The World of the Arcade
I have been fascinated with coin-op arcade games every since I was a kid, playing them at Coney Island. I still love to visit those arcades, despite them being a little more glitzy and sticky by turns these days. It might interest you to know that coin operated games have been big for years, and my-home-away-from-home Coney Island got its start in the 1920’s with coin-op games. Many of these were fairly simplistic. You toss in a penny, you get to watch a little movie, or have your fortune read.
Around 1930 pinball came onto the scene, and it was here that the world fell in love with the game arcade. Pinball is a game that requires skill, excellent reflexes, and combines speed and flashing lights with interactivity. The original games were made out of wood, and didn’t have much of what we consider standard in a pinball setup today: plungers or lift-up bonus areas for instance. I’m hunting for one of those original pinball machines, and when I manage to track one down, it will be one of the crown jewels in my collection, I can tell you.
Spacewar is considered the first actual arcade video game, the commercialized version of Galaxy Game, made by those clever kids at Stanford. The 1970’s saw the birth of the incredibly popular Computer Space, the first video game to be mass produced, which means a LOT of people had access to it. Of course, the king of all Arcade games is Pong, created by Atari, and it still holds America’s imagination as the first video game, despite that not being the case.
If Pong is the king of the arcade then Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, and Space Invaders are the royal family. I cannot say how many hours I spent in the arcade down the street feeding quarters into Space Invaders. God that game was addictive. These games were so popular that arcade cabinets were popping up outside the arcades, in restaurants and movie theaters. Businesses began to see the draw of arcade video games. In fact, in the 90’s there were even restaurants built entirely as arcades, Chuck-E-Cheez’s and Gatti’s Pizza being the two most famous examples. I was a little old to visit these when they came around, but I do remember taking nieces and nephews for birthdays and I still to this day enjoy a good game of air hockey or skee ball.