Chapter 1.1

Arcade (1971)

History

When looking back to the arcade’s heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, it’s easy to idyllically reminisce about the bustling crowds of eager young players with pockets full of quarters, mixed rows of familiar and newly placed flashing cabinets of every shape, size, and monitor orientation, and the random bleeps, bloops, and musical ditties that somehow came together in a pitch perfect symphony of sights and sounds. Of course, as with all trips of nostalgia, that journey back leaves out the unpleasant bits, like the cigarette smoke, juvenile delinquents and bullies, and occasional sensory overload when that symphony became a crescendo, but the fact remains that the classic arcade was indeed a special time and place, filled more with the positive than the negative.

For the purposes of this chapter, we define an arcade game as a mostly electronic, digital videogame you pay to play in a commercial setting such as a pizza parlor, bowling alley, or dedicated arcade. Typically, these games are designed for quick, but fulfilling play sessions, made to get you to put more money in the machine for just one more try, increasing the venue owner’s revenue, who in turn pays the vendor or supplier to get more games from the publisher. Of course, “arcade game” has been co-opted by everything from quick action games on consoles or handhelds to redemption machines, and, these days, you’re just as likely to find an arcade machine in a basement rec room as you are at the local restaurant.

The arcade’s origins began in the early 1900s at midways, or the area at circuses and fairs where the rides and entertainment booths are concentrated. In addition to the traditional ball tosses and shooting galleries, coin-operated mechanical and electro-mechanical machines began popping up with ever increasing regularity, with everything from automated fortune tellers to flip movies to bowling games to simple racing games that challenged players to see who could turn a crank the fastest to get their toy car across the finish line. Many of these creations featured beautiful Victo-rian designs, with specialized wooden cabinets and elaborate ornamentation. With all their moving parts, these mechanical beasts broke down often, but at least were relatively straightforward to fix.

By the 1930s, pinball machines were unleashed in force, quickly evolving into star attractions. In 1947, controllable flippers were introduced with Gottlieb’s Humpty Dumpty machine, an important innovation that is still with us today. Advances in pinball technology continued for several more decades, eventually introducing all of the elements we’re familiar with in today’s machines, such as solid-state electronic components, microprocessors, and digital sound.

Like today’s super competitive MMO and FPS gamers, pinball aficionados took the game very seriously. Even English rock band The Who got into the act, releasing a hit song called “Pinball Wizard” (1969) and later a 1975 companion movie for the album, Tommy, where pinball was featured most prominently. Unfortunately for the pinball industry and its legions of fans, they began to be passed over for the far more versatile arcade videogame in the 1970s. The first sign of trouble was Sega’s Periscope in 1966, a smash-hit electro-mechanical light gun target game that was the first to charge a quarter per play. Other electro-mechanical innovations would follow, including rear image projection and electronic sound, but these were evolutionary dead-ends. The games that would finally flip pinball into the drain were being developed by Nolan Bushnell and some talented, visionary engineers.

In the 1960s, Bushnell had been a student at the University of Utah, where he studied electrical engineering and played a lot of Spacewar!. He also spent summers working at Lagoon Amusement Park, repairing all those finicky moving parts in pinball and other electromechanical games. His time at the park gave him ample opportunity to study hawkers and the gamers they lured to their booths up close, learning the tricks of this unique trade. Bushnell knew that videogames like Spacewar! would appeal to the masses just as much (if not more) than tossing ping-pong balls into goldfish bowls, but it just wasn’t possible to drag a mainframe computer onto the midway—but perhaps a stripped-down version might still have appeal. He began reducing the game to its core elements, removing all frills to make it practical to produce.

Meanwhile, a similar idea was being formulated by students at Stanford University, only their version would incorporate an actual minicomputer, the DEC PDP-11/20 with vector displays. It was implemented at the Tressider Union at Stanford University in September 1971, at a cost of $20,000, or the equivalent of $100,000 today. It played a ported version of the real Spacewar! and was a campus hit at 10 cents a game, or 25 cents for three. Of course, despite its gee-whiz appeal, it was completely impractical for mass production.

Now we return to Bushnell, who by this time teamed up with the brilliant Ted Dabney. By using an array of readily available transistor-transistor logic (TTL) chips and diode arrays placed on three printed circuit boards (PCBs), the duo developed a multidirectional shooter, which, while no match for Spacewar!, created a unique, playable videogame experience, which, as Bushnell described in an interview with the authors, “could be built for about $400, and then of course it fit into the regular coin-operated game world, which was about $1000 for a coin-operated game.” The display was rendered to a modified General Electric 15-inch black and white television and placed in a remarkable colored fiberglass cabinet, complete with a control panel seemingly straight out of NASA.¹ Released two months after Galaxy Game, Computer Space cost 25 cents per single play.

Unfortunately, despite being beautiful enough to serve as a futuristic prop in the 1973 sci-fi film Soylent Green, and being cheap enough to mass produce, Computer Space’s appeal was mostly limited to those same college campuses that Bushnell and the nascent industry needed to break out of. Computer Space was just too sophisticated for its own good. Bushnell, disheartened by the lukewarm response and then unable to come to an agreement on a next game for Nutting Associates, broke ties to form Syzygy Engineering with Dabney.

Because the hottest machine in the arcade at the time was Chicago Coin’s electromechanical, projection-based racing game Speedway (1969), Bushnell wanted Syzygy’s first arcade title to be a racer. However, he thought such a task would be too challenging for new engineer Al Alcorn’s first game, so he looked for a simpler alternative. Fortuitously, he knew just what that should be after seeing the demo for the Odyssey’s Table Tennis at a Los Angeles Magnavox dealership in May 1972.

Table Tennis had the now iconic layout pretty much nailed, but also featured the ability to put English (spin) on the ball and had no top or bottom walls, allowing the ball to be knocked off the invisible table. From Bushnell’s design and Alcorn’s several months of engineering and refinements, Pong distilled this crude approximation of table tennis down even further, with a few new innovations. The paddles were elongated, the ball’s trajectory was determined only by where it hit the paddle, and sound effects were added for each time the ball hit a paddle or one of the now enclosed top and bottom virtual walls. Perhaps most important, however, was the implementation of automatic scoring, which was perfect for inspiring heated two-player battles.

Their prototype’s design proved so compelling that Bushnell and Dabney put the game into production under the Atari Inc. banner (the change in incorporation becoming necessary in June 1972 due to a naming conflict). Using a refined version of the same type of TTL-based technology as Computer Space, Pong’s internals were paired with a small black-and-white television inside a wooden cabinet. This was joined on the front panel by two spinners (rotatable knobs), one for each player, and a coin slot, which, when detecting a quarter, would start the ball’s motion. “Avoid Missing Ball for High Score” was all the guidance would-be players needed before pumping quarters into this immediately accessible and compelling creation.

So, it was Pong, rather than Spacewar! or Computer Space that gave birth to the classic arcade—and the inevitable cavalcade of clones. This sea of Pong knock-offs, variations, and minor updates became so pervasive so quickly that even Atari themselves got in on the act to help stem some of the losses. In fact, there would be eerie similarities in the consumer market after Sears unleashed Atari’s home Pong in 1975.² In both cases, after the novelty of sometimes interesting competitive variations wore off, the market soon became glutted with too-similar and often cheap products, and consumer demand waned sharply. This was a precarious situation for a fragile, nascent industry, but in both cases, instead of leading to something like the Great Videogame Crash of the mid-1980s, they instead led to depressions, pulled each time from the brink of oblivion by new product and innovations that reinvigorated consumer demand. And for Bushnell, Atari, and fans of the arcade, the innovation didn’t stop at the paddle.

In 1974, Atari introduced Gran Trak 10, a single-player, single-track overhead car race against the clock. It was the first game that stored graphical data (sprites) in a diode-based ROM for the in-game graphics, and also featured a steering wheel, gear shifter, and accelerator, and brake pedals. In that same year, Atari’s Kee Games³ released Tank, which improved on Gran Trak 10’s technology by storing graphical data in more reliable IC-based (solid state) ROMs. Tank featured a pair of dual joysticks, offering realistic dueling tank controls. Both games launched many spiritual successors and clones of their own, including Kee Games’ oversized Indy 800 (1975), which cleverly huddled pairs of players around a square tabletop cabinet, where they could look down at the shared color display. Strategically placed mirrors on the cabinet’s canopy let spectators keep track of the frenzied competition, as well as get a good look at that first implementation of real color.

Of course, Atari was far from the only game-maker in town by this time. Midway released Taito’s influential Gun Fight (1975), a western-themed one-on-one duel between two cowboys, which, among its other firsts, included the fact that it was powered by an actual microprocessor. Sega released its early sports title Heavyweight Champ in 1976, which, along with its innovative and oversized side-view perspective monochrome visuals, was the first game to feature hand-to-hand fighting and was controlled via unusual boxing glove-like controllers.

In 1977, Cinematronics’ Space Wars had the good fortune of appearing around the same time as George Lucas’ blockbuster Star Wars movie, which fanned the flames of the space craze sensation lit by the original Star Trek television series in syndication. Space Wars, which was available in three different cabinet styles, was that long sought-after interpretation of Spacewar! for the masses, and featured a clever vector-based graphics engine, forgoing the blocky pixilation of standard raster-based graphics for cleaner and brightly lit points, lines, and curves.

Japan had been a factor in US arcades since Sega’s mid-1960s hit Periscope, but it was Midway’s release of Taito’s 100-yen- and quarter-devouring Space Invaders that established Japan’s reputation for brilliant game designs. The game became so popular that the 1980 release of an official home port for the Atari 2600 quadrupled system sales and jumpstarted the home market. But all those gamers merely wanted to replicate the thrills of the arcade version. Tomohiro Nishikado’s offense-oriented and much copied design immediately resonated, with iconic alien graphics and killer, bass-filled sound. As Bethesda’s Todd Howard put it in an interview with the authors,

What was fun about Space Invaders? Here are aliens that are going to kill you. For what it was it became a very, very different kind of shooting gallery that you had never seen before. The primal beat of shooting things in a game, doot… doot… doot… that was the first time.

Capping off the decade-ending space craze was perhaps the most famous and influential vector-based arcade game, Atari’s Asteroids,⁴ released in 1979. Asteroids was the first arcade game that let you pair initials with your high score, where it stayed until it was beaten by a better player or was anticlimactically lost in a power outage.

Several other key vector-based titles would be released through the 1980s, with color vectors available by the early part of the decade. Unfortunately for fans of the clean and bright vector look, raster-based graphics of ever increasing detail and complexity rendered vectors obsolete by the mid-part of the decade.

In October 1980, a new craze was unleashed: the maze game. While there had been maze games and even dot collecting games before, most notably Sega’s Head On from the previous year, none had put together that special combination of colorful characters and tight, approachable gameplay of Namco’s Pac-Man. As game developer John Romero put it in an author interview,

Everything was shoot the alien. Shoot, shoot, shoot. When Pac-Man came out, it was this awesome color game. Funny music. Funny character eating dots. Instead of shooting you are running away from the things, the opposite. What a crazy game idea! Pac-Man really stood out. It was the future and the promise of what game design could be.

Instead of simply copying existing paradigms, Pac-Man’s designer Tōru Iwatani created something both unique and infinitely playable.

Indeed, soon enough, everyone got Pac-Man fever and loved every minute of it. This was the first breakout arcade game since Pong that knew no age or gender boundaries. Anyone could grab the joystick, become enchanted by the breakthrough cutscenes, or identify with one of the enemy ghosts, each of whom seemed to exhibit distinct personalities. It was one of the first games that could truly be said to have character(s). Unsurprisingly, ports, clones, and knock-offs, both cheap and inspired, followed in droves, although few were as charming and endearing as Pac-Man.

With the cult of personality set by Pac-Man, other colorful, character-driven games were soon added to the already stellar mix of driving and shooting titles. These games included Konami’s Frogger (1981), where the titular amphibian just wants to cross the road and stream; Exidy’s Venture (1981), where you play Winky, an arrow-slinging, dungeon crawling smiley face; Atari’s isometric gem collecting maze game, Crystal Castles (1982), starring Bentley Bear; Sega’s Pengo (1982), where the titular red penguin needs to crush the blob-like Sno-Bees by sliding blocks of ice; Konami’s Pooyan (1982), where Mama Pig has to protect her piglets by shooting arrows with slabs of meat attached at wolves from her elevator basket; Stern’s Bagman (1983), where you play a thief collecting bags of gold in an abandoned mine; and Midway’s Mappy (1983), where the titular police cat is chased by no-good cats. The list goes on and on, culminating in the mascot wars of the Generation Two and Generation Three home systems, where characters like Mario, Sonic, Bonk, and Crash Bandicoot battled it out for mind and market share.

Although there was the occasional brilliant port, such as BurgerTime (1983, Mattel) on the Intellivision, Satan’s Hollow (1984, Commodore) on the Commodore 64, or Root Beer Tapper (1984, Coleco) on the ColecoVision, most arcade translations to Generation One home platforms could only hope at best to capture the feel of the arcade game rather than the complete package.

Arcade hardware still had a clear edge over home platforms, able to throw in more memory, extra hardware like additional sound processors, or fancy controls that could take a beating—simply put, their custom engineering was impractical for the living room.

This arcade advantage was never more apparent than with the 1983 release of the laserdisc classic from Cinemaware, Dragon’s Lair. Instead of a quarter, it cost 50 cents per play, but it was worth it just to impress the large crowds who gathered around to watch Dirk the Daring rescue the fair Princess Daphne from the clutches of Singe the dragon in the evil wizard Mordroc’s castle. It was a rare case in which watching someone else play was almost as fun as playing it yourself!

Unfortunately, the feature-film-quality cartoon visuals masked limited interactivity. A surge of laserdisc games followed in the wake of Dragon’s Lair’s success. Despite the initial enthusiasm, games that played similarly to Dragon’s Lair, like Cliff Hanger (1983, Stern), Road Avenger (1985, Data East), and even Cinematronics’ own 1984 encore, Space Ace, failed to make anywhere near the same impact. Others still, like shooters Bega’s Battle (1983, Data East), Astron Belt (1983, Bally Midway), MACH 3 (1983, Mylstar), and Firefox (1984, Atari), overlaid traditional graphics on top of mostly non-interactive video backgrounds to up the level of interactivity while still keeping the pizazz. These efforts didn’t do much to sustain consumer interest and the persnickety nature of the laserdisc players frustrated arcade operators, who had trouble keeping the machines operational.

Years later, for later Generation Two home systems, the introduction of the CD-ROM triggered a similar rush of consumer enthusiasm followed by almost complete disinterest in games with Full-Motion Video (FMV). By the time Generation Three was underway, the shift in favor to far more versatile polygon-based 3D models over live video was all but complete. Nevertheless, more reliable technology did lead to a short-lived renaissance of FMV arcade games in the first half of the 1990s thanks in part to the efforts of American Laser Games and their series of popular light gun shooters, starting with the release of Mad Dog McCree in 1990. Stuart Horvath recalled the thrill of having 20 people cheering him on in the arcade as he played. “I used to go back and kill Mad Dog for the 15th time just because I had the reflexes to do it and it made me feel almost like a celebrity,” he reminisced.

Despite the sharp shooting, FMV proved that it once again had limited ammunition. Even when the brains behind Dragon’s Lair, Rick Dyer, teamed up with Sega for a stereoscopic laser-disc game in 1991, Time Traveler, which convincingly faked holographic technology, it was still not enough to overcome FMV’s ever-present limitations, let alone change the format’s ultimate destiny.⁵

With laser-disc’s inability to spark long-term relief, the decline in arcade revenue continued apace. A February 3, 1984, article in The Philadelphia Inquirer entitled, “Can Lasers Save Video Arcades?” pegged 1983 arcade revenue at $5 billion, compared to a high of $8 billion in 1981. Many of the same problems that were affecting the home market, including a glut of inferior product, were also affecting the arcade. The Great Videogame Crash played no favorites.

Despite the financial gloom and doom, fantastic new arcade games continued to be released throughout the 1980s even as more and more arcade locations closed. These included Namco’s action-packed digging game Dig Dug (1982); Williams Electronics’ flying dueler Joust (1982); Namco’s high-speed Pole Position (1982); Gottlieb’s charismatic hopper Q*bert (1982); Bally Midway’s dazzling movie license Tron (1982), and licensed to thrill Spy Hunter (1983); Konami’s button mashing Track & Field (1983); Atari’s lushly produced crossbow light gun shooter Crossbow (1983) and bicycle handlebar equipped newspaper delivery game Paperboy (1984); Capcom’s scrolling shoot-’em-up 1942 (1984); and Nintendo’s energetic and visually arresting, Punch-Out!! (1984). It’s little wonder this period is considered the Golden Age of video arcade games.

Many more classics and breakthroughs would follow throughout the 1980s, but it would take Capcom’s release of Street Fighter II: The World Warrior in 1991 for the fighting games craze to make the arcade truly profitable again. Predated by classics like Karate Champ (1984, Data East), and side-scrolling beat-’em-up, Double Dragon (1987, Taito), Street Fighter II set the standard for competitive fighting games for years to come and is still the primary influence for fighting games today, even as they’ve moved to advanced 3D engines. Notable games in this vein include Mortal Kombat (1992, Midway Games), which thrilled with its over-the-top fatalities; Virtua Fighter (1993, Sega), which was the first 3D fighting game; and Killer Instinct (1994), which was the first arcade game to incorporate a hard drive, which it leveraged to stream high quality pre-rendered graphics.

By this time, the Generation Two home systems were playing host to far more accurate ports than was previously possible. Conversions such as Popeye (1986, Nintendo) on the Nintendo Entertainment System, Golden Axe (1990, Sega) on the Sega Genesis, or Street Fighter II Turbo (1993, Capcom) on the Super Nintendo, strongly rivaled the audiovisuals and speed of their arcade counterparts. Arcade hardware was starting to lose its edge. Nevertheless, before the 1990s were out, the arcade would influence home videogames greatly one more time, and again briefly make the few arcades that remained the places to be.

In early 1999, Konami unveiled their Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) dance and rhythm game in North America. Unlike the American arcade sector, the Japanese arcade scene had remained vibrant, and in fact played host to several earlier and successful music and rhythm games. Still, there was something special about DDR that allowed it to succeed even in the finicky North American arcade market. The premise is simple: play a game of Simon Says with your feet, stepping on the correct arrow or arrows on the dance platform to the beat of eclectic dance music. Two players could dance side-by-side and often did, to the delight of the types of crowds that hadn’t gathered since the heights of Dragon’s Lair and Street Fighter II’s popularity. In many ways, it was a return to the exquisite simplicity and fun competition of games like Pong and Pac-Man.

Generation Three home systems were not content to let the arcades have all the dancing fun, of course. The novelty of the arcade experience again started to wear off as gamers were able to dance to the beat or play on plastic instruments in the comfort (and privacy) of their homes. It also became more common to find the same types of technology found within Generation Three systems powering arcade machines. Further, as online connection speeds improved, so too did the experience of playing multiplayer games long distance. While some players seem to enjoy the spectacle of performing at a crowded arcade, the majority seems to think there’s no place like home.

With home systems now firmly in control of the modern gamer, today’s arcades are just as likely to play host to prize ticket redemption machines and ride-like simulators than anything of note. In fact, it’s often the home systems that influence what few games are released in the arcade the most these days, a trend evidenced by Global VR’s ports in the mid-2000s of a series of console favorites like Madden NFL Football, Need for Speed Underground, EA Sports PGA Tour Golf Challenge Edition, and Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII. It was clear this trend was going to be the norm when even smartphones and tablets started getting in on the reverse port, as seen with unusual touchscreen translations Infinity Blade FX and Fruit Ninja FX, both released by Adrenaline Amusements in 2011.

The Arcade Community Then and Now

Today’s arcades have replaced the simple joys of laying down a quarter for next play with emotion-less swipe cards—which, coincidentally, make it much harder to keep track of how much you’re spending. But nothing has swayed the arcade enthusiast’s nostalgia for classic arcade games and vintage machines. One of the most popular rallying points is the website for the International Arcade Museum (www.arcade-museum.com), which consists of a database, calendar of events, active discussion forums, and more that cater to the buying, trading, and general enjoyment of everything related to the arcade. However, it’s interesting to note that many other videogame websites, whether they’re specific to arcade games or not, readily welcome arcade discussions. It seems that, unlike every other platform in this book, which practically encourage an “us versus them” attitude, the love of the arcade knows no borders or dividing lines, except maybe when it comes to what the best arcade game of 1987 was.⁷

What was special at the arcade of yesteryear still lives on in the occasional local hole-in-the-wall with limited hours and maybe a dozen classic machines or so. There’s also the occasional destination worth a cross-country pilgrimage. A few of these destinations include two New Hampshire arcades, Funspot in Laconia, which was named “Largest Arcade in the World” by Guinness World Records in 2008, and the Pinball Wizard Arcade in Pelham; three Las Vegas strip arcades at the New York-New York, Excalibur, and Circus Circus casinos; and San Francisco’s Musee Mecanique, which throws some of the amazing electro-mechanical antiques discussed earlier in this chapter into its mix of playable amusements. It may take a bit of searching, but you should find a decent arcade or two beyond the Dave & Busters or Chuck E. Cheese’s chains. At least at Chuck E. Cheese’s you can still plunk tokens instead of swiping cards, even if it can be a struggle to find working machines worth playing.

Collecting and Emulating Arcade Games

Used arcade machines are still readily available from the hundreds to the thousands of dollars. There are even new creations that either play one or even multiple, officially licensed games. Arcade cabinets come in a huge range of form factors, be it standard upright, cocktail, candy, deluxe, cockpit and environmental, mini, bartop, and more, so finding some type of solution for your home arcade enjoyment shouldn’t be too difficult.

Various standards were introduced starting in the mid-1980s, including JAMMA, and SNK’s Neo Geo in 1990, just to name two. This standardization has made it easier than ever to acquire replacement parts and components cheaply and easily. Parts, accessories, and add-ons are readily available to both restore the classics, as well as create custom computer-based emulation machines. As mentioned earlier, there is a plethora of information online and generally helpful communities that make getting started in any way you choose easy.

MAME, or the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, is the undisputed king of emulators. It was introduced in 1997 and has enjoyed continuous development and refinement ever since. Originally limited to PCs running the DOS operating system, the emulator has now been ported to every feasible platform, including today’s smartphones and tablets. To have the ability to play thousands of classic arcade games in the comfort of your home and with a variety of devices is something that those of us who grew up with a joystick in our hands never could have dreamed possible.

For those with more limited space or budgets for full-sized machines, solutions like the X-Arcade from Xgaming, Inc., offers arcade quality controls that work with PCs and consoles. With the prevalence of officially licensed emulators and themed game packs for today’s platforms, it’s easier than to ever to re-experience the classics in just the way you’d like.

Such was the allure of the arcade aura that great pains have been taken to virtually recreate the experience. Some recent examples include Microsoft’s mostly failed arcade experiment for the Xbox 360 and Windows PC’s, Game Room, a sub-set of the wildly successful and somewhat misnamed Xbox Live Arcade, and Sony’s Home for the PlayStation 3, complete with a misguided recreation of the arcade experience, which unfortunately included waiting virtually in a line for your turn to play. Concepts like achievements, gamer scores, virtual trophies, and online leaderboards have been far more successful in capturing the elusive competitive spirit of the classic arcade.

Some of the classic arcade manufacturers, or, in many cases, the present rights holders, continue to release new products based on the classics, either direct recreations or emulations, or new games or variations inspired by the well-worn legends. Someone who is rather cynical might say that’s because there was more creativity back then. Instead, perhaps there was simply more opportunity to try something new since not that much came before, and, as such, few rules to adhere to. In fact, such pioneering spirit is often seen from today’s indie development scene, although it’s harder for that group of developers to get the same type of recognition that the past masters did, since the sea of games is now a veritable galaxy, on its way to becoming a seemingly limitless universe. Through all of the industry’s ups and downs, now is still the best time to be a gamer.

¹  Single-players cabinets were available in blue metalflake, red metalflake, white, and yellow, with two-player cabinets featuring larger control panels only coming in green metalflake.

²  In April 1974 Magnavox filed suit against Atari, Bally Midway, Allied Leisure, and Chicago Dynamics. Bushnell and Atari settled out of court in June 1976, becoming a Magnavox licensee for $700,000 and turning over rights to new products for one year. Thereafter, other companies producing Pong clones would have to pay royalties, with Magnavox continuing to pursue legal actions for years to come. All of this worked to Atari’s favor, which was able to avoid further litigation and simply delay release of new products for one year.

³  Kee Games was a wholly owned subsidiary of Atari, used to get around the era’s distributor-set exclusivity (single vendor) deals. Roughly a decade later, Nintendo would set similar restrictions for its third-party game-makers after the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System, resulting in companies resorting to similar workarounds to release more games.

⁴  Lunar Lander, which came out the same year, was Atari’s first use of this vector technology. Though not a commercial success, Lunar Lander was an amazing, influential simulation with clever controls. It also predicted other unexpectedly detailed arcade simulations of the future, including full flight and racing simulators.

⁵  Cecropia’s unreleased 2007 interactive cartoon arcade game, The Act, was one of the few games to make excellent use of FMV. Rather than worrying about real-time interaction, the game asks players to properly guide the emotions of a bumbling window washer trying to win the heart of a beautiful nurse. Fortunately, Chillingo developed authentic ports of the game for iOS and Macin-tosh platforms in 2012.

⁶  Parker Brothers had the home rights to the Star Wars series license and produced a mix of games from all three original films, primarily for the Atari 2600. The company even ported Atari’s arcade Star Wars to various home platforms of the era, with mostly positive results considering the inherent technological differences and limitations.

⁷  It definitely wasn’t Bally Midway’s Spy Hunter II.