The gaming industry these days is dominated by home consoles, both portable and connected to a television. But it's all at home, except for some select mobile games. It's a far cry from the more social aspects of an arcade cabinet.
Arcade games used to be places where you went (and in some places, still are), where you spent your hard-earned coins on a gaming experience that you couldn't get anywhere else. It's an industry that has gone through many ups and downs, even though it has now been relegated to the past. Let's dig into that past and see where it all began.
Did Home Console or Arcade Come First?
The whole game started with the computer. This makes sense, as they are the most powerful tools in the digital space. In the early days of computing, however, they are very expensive and it's not something that the common man can do. The idea for arcades and home consoles came from this.
But who came first? Although it was a very tough competition, really The first arcade cabinet was released in 1971while the very first home console was released a year later with the 1972 Magnavox Odyssey. The beginning of a year, as well as a the amount paid is much lowerhelped arcades secure their place in home entertainment, although it took a few years to establish itself as something profitable.
What was the first Arcade game ever made?
In the early days of video games, they were very proprietary, unable to run on anything other than the machine they were created on. This changed with the development of Spacewar!, the first game whose source code can run on other compatible computers. This was a huge push for the video game industry, and led directly to the creation of the very first arcade cabinet.
After being asked to watch Spacewar run on the Stanford computer, Nolan Bushnell was inspired to create a version that anyone could play. An early version of the arcade game known as Electro-Machine Game has become popular today as a successor to previous games such as pinball. Bushnell planned to make Spacewar a successor to the EM games.
This, along with his partner Ted Dabney, will lead to creation Computer Space, a port of Spacewar inside a coin operated terminal. This arcade was distributed in many places in the United States, and although it was not a complete success, it proved that coin-operated games of a more complex nature were a market waiting to be established.
Along with Pong in 1972game created by Bushnell and Dabney's Atari was just formedwhich led to greater success and laid the foundation for a larger arcade industry. Ironically, Pong was directly inspired by the games featured in the Magnavox Odyssey.
Amazingly, the creator of the first arcade game, Nolan Bushnell, is too
the founder of Atari and, um, Chuck E. Cheese
.
Why Has Arcade's Popularity Declined?
Arcades appeared for the first time in 1971 with Computer Space, although it did not begin to gain international popularity until the market was very populated. In 1978, Space Invaders was first releasedand this was followed by Pac-Man in 1980. Although it was short-lived, Arcades dominated the video game industry until 1983 when the market in the United States was flooded and collapsed.
At that time, Nintendo released the NES in America and took precautionary measures to ensure that the crash of video games would not affect them. If there is no other competition, Home consoles have continued to grow. At the same time, the arcades began to slowly catch up with new innovations such as moving simulator cabinets and more complex types of games, although not at the same speed as home consoles.
One of Nintendo's preventive measures is that a company can release several games on the NES each year to avoid flooding the market.
Although home consoles have grown in popularity, they are still too expensive and limited to keep many. if many American companies struggled with the arcade businessJapanese business began to flourish. Capcom released Street Fighter 2 for arcades in 1991led to another great revival in the arcade's popularity, the biggest it has seen since its inception 20 years ago.
With Western companies unable to keep up, many of them have moved away from arcade cabinet and home console production, and moved into third-party video game development as a more profitable business. . As a result, home consoles only grew in western territorieswhile remaining the first Japanese company to create arcade machines.
With home consoles now dominating the market, it has become difficult for any company to justify releasing arcade cabinets outside their country, and therefore most of the arcade games went back to Asia. In the early 2000s, arcades were more exotic in the Western world than mainstream. In 2010, Arcades began to decline dramatically in Japan too. In modern times, arcades remain dominant in areas where consoles are expensive.
For many,
the official store of the Akihabara Sega arcade in 2020
considered by many to be the final nail in the coffin for the popularity of arcades in Japan.
