Golden age of arcade video games

Business

The golden age was a time of great technical and design creativity in arcade games. The era saw the rapid spread of not only video arcades across North America, Europe, and Asia. The number of video game arcades in North America was doubled between 1980 and 1982; reaching a peak of 10,000 video game arcades across the region (compared to 4,000 as of 1998). Beginning with Space Invaders, video arcade games also started to appear in supermarkets, restaurants, liquor stores, gas stations, and many other retail establishments looking for extra income. Video game arcades at the time became as common as convenience stores, while arcade games like Pac-Man and Space Invaders appeared in most locations across the United States, including even funeral homes. The sales of arcade video game machines increased during this period from $50 million in 1978 to $900 million in 1981, with 500,000 arcade machines sold in the United States at prices ranging as high as $3,000 in 1982 alone. By 1982, there were 24,000 full arcades, 400,000 arcade street locations and 1.5 million arcade machines active in North America. The market was very competitive; the average life span of an arcade game was four to six months. Some games like Robby Roto failed because they were too complex to learn quickly. Qix was briefly very popular but, Taito's Keith Egging later said, "too mystifying for gamers...impossible to master and when the novelty wore off, the game faded". Around this time, the home video game industry (second-generation video game consoles and early home computer games) emerged as "an outgrowth of the widespread success of video arcades".

In 1980, the U.S. arcade video game industry's revenue generated from quarters tripled to $2.8 billion. By 1981, the arcade video game industry in the United States was generating more than $5 billion a year with some estimates as high as $10.5 billion for all video games (arcade and home) in the U.S. that year, which was three times the amount spent on movie tickets in 1981. The total revenue for the U.S. arcade video game industry in 1981 was estimated at more than $7 billion though some analysts estimated the real amount may have been much higher. By 1982, video games accounted for 87% of the $8.9 billion in commercial games sales in the United States. In 1982, the arcade video game industry's revenue in quarters was estimated at $8 billion surpassing the annual gross revenue of both pop music ($4 billion) and Hollywood films ($3 billion) combined that year. It also exceeded the revenues of all major sports combined at the time, earning three times the combined ticket and television revenues of Major League Baseball, basketball, and American football, as well as earning twice as much as all the casinos in Nevada combined. This was also more than twice as much revenue as the $3.8 billion generated by the home video game industry (during the second generation of consoles) that same year; both the arcade and home markets combined added up to a total revenue between $11.8 billion and $12.8 billion for the U.S. video game industry in 1982. In comparison, the U.S. video game industry in 2011 generated total revenues between $16.3 billion and $16.6 billion.

Prior to the golden age, pinball machines were more popular than video games. The pinball industry reached a peak of 200,000 machine sales and $2.3 billion revenue in 1979, which had declined to 33,000 machines and $464 million in 1982. In comparison, the best-selling arcade games of the golden age, Space Invaders and Pac-Man, had each sold over 360,000 and 400,000 cabinets, respectively, with each machine costing between $2000 and $3000 (specifically $2400 in Pac-Man's case). In addition, Space Invaders had grossed $2 billion in quarters by 1982, while Pac-Man had grossed over $1 billion by 1981 and $2.5 billion by the late 1990s. In 1982, Space Invaders was considered the highest-grossing entertainment product of its time, with comparisons made to the then highest-grossing film Star Wars, which had grossed $486 million, while Pac-Man is today considered the highest-grossing arcade game of all time. Many other arcade games during the golden age also had hardware unit sales at least in the tens of thousands, including Ms. Pac-Man with over 115,000 units, Asteroids with 70,000, Donkey Kong with over 60,000, Defender with 55,000, Galaxian with 40,000, Donkey Kong Junior with 35,000, Mr. Do! with 30,000, and Tempest with 29,000 units. A number of arcade games also generated revenues (from quarters) in the hundreds of millions, including Defender with more than $100 million in addition to many more with revenues in the tens of millions, including Dragon's Lair with $48 million and Space Ace with $13 million.

The most successful arcade game companies of this era included Taito (who ushered in the golden age with the shooter game Space Invaders and produced other successful arcade action games such as Gun Fight and Jungle King), Namco (the Japanese company that created Galaxian, Pac-Man, Pole Position and Dig Dug) and Atari, Inc. (who introduced video games into arcades with Computer Space and Pong, and later produced Asteroids). Other companies such as Sega (who later entered the home console market against its former arch rival, Nintendo), Nintendo (whose mascot, Mario, was introduced in 1981's Donkey Kong as "Jumpman"), Bally Midway Manufacturing Company (which was later purchased by Williams), Cinematronics, Konami, Centuri, Williams and SNK also gained popularity around this era.

During this period, Japanese video game manufacturers became increasingly influential in North America. By 1980, they had become very influential through licensing their games to American manufacturers. Japanese companies eventually moved beyond licensing their games to American companies such as Midway, and by 1981 instead began directly importing machines to the North American market as well as building manufacturing facilities in the United States. By 1982–1983, Japanese manufacturers had more directly captured a large share of the North American arcade market, which Gene Lipkin of Data East USA partly attributed to Japanese companies having more finances to invest in new ideas.

Technology

Arcades catering to video games began to gain momentum in the late 1970s, with Space Invaders (1978) followed by games such as Asteroids (1979) and Galaxian (1979). Arcades became more widespread in 1980 with Pac-Man, Missile Command and Berzerk, and in 1981 with Defender, Donkey Kong, Frogger and others. The central processing unit (CPU) microprocessors in these games allowed for more complexity than earlier transistor-transistor logic (TTL) discrete circuitry games such as Atari's Pong (1972). The arcade boom that began in the late 1970s is credited with establishing the basic techniques of interactive entertainment and for driving down hardware prices to the extent of allowing the personal computer (PC) to become a technological and economic reality.

While color monitors had been used by several racing video games before (such as Indy 800 and Speed Race Twin), it was during this period that RGB color graphics became widespread, following the release of Galaxian in 1979. Galaxian introduced a tile-based video game graphics system, which reduced processing and memory requirements by up to 64 times compared to the previous framebuffer system used by Space Invaders. This allowed Galaxian to render multi-color sprites, which were animated atop a scrolling starfield backdrop, providing the basis for the hardware developed by Nintendo for arcade games such as Radar Scope (1980) and Donkey Kong followed by the Nintendo Entertainment System console.

The golden age also saw developers experimenting with vector displays, which produce crisp lines that can't be duplicated by raster displays. A few of these vector games became great hits, such as 1979's Asteroids, 1980's Battlezone, 1981's Tempest and 1983's Star Wars from Atari. However, vector technology fell out of favor with arcade game companies due to the high cost of repairing vector displays.

Several developers at the time were also experimenting with pseudo-3D and stereoscopic 3D using 2D sprites on raster displays. In 1979, Nintendo's Radar Scope introduced a three-dimensional third-person perspective to the shoot 'em up genre, later imitated by shooters such as Konami's Juno First and Activision's Beamrider in 1983. In 1981, Sega's Turbo was the first racing game to feature a third-person rear view format, and use sprite scaling with full-colour graphics. Namco's Pole Position featured an improved rear-view racer format in 1982 that remained the standard for the genre; the game provided a perspective view of the track, with its vanishing point swaying side to side as the player approaches corners, accurately simulating forward movement into the distance. That same year, Sega released Zaxxon, which introduced the use of isometric graphics and shadows; and SubRoc-3D, which introduced the use of stereoscopic 3D through a special eyepiece.

This period also saw significant advances in digital audio technology. Space Invaders in 1978 was the first game to use a continuous background soundtrack, with four simple chromatic descending bass notes repeating in a loop, though it was dynamic and changed tempo during stages. Rally-X in 1980 was the first game to feature continuous background music, which was generated using a dedicated sound chip, a Namco 3-channel PSG. That same year saw the introduction of speech synthesis, which was first used in Stratovox, released by Sun Electronics in 1980, followed soon after by Namco's King & Balloon.

Developers also experimented with laserdisc players for delivering full motion video based games with movie-quality animation. The first laserdisc video game to exploit this technology was 1983's Astron Belt from Sega, soon followed by Dragon's Lair from Cinematronics; the latter was a sensation when it was released (and, in fact, the laserdisc players in many machines broke due to overuse). While laserdisc games were usually either shooter games with full-motion video backdrops like Astron Belt or interactive movies like Dragon's Lair, Data East's 1983 game Bega's Battle introduced a new form of video game storytelling: using brief full-motion video cutscenes to develop a story between the game's shooting stages, which years later became the standard approach to video game storytelling. By the mid-1980s, the genre dwindled in popularity, as laserdiscs were losing out to the VHS format and the laserdisc games themselves were losing their novelty.

16-bit processors began appearing in several arcade games during this era. Universal's Get A Way (1978) was a sit-down racing game that used a 16-bit CPU, for which it was advertised as the first game to use a 16-bit microcomputer. Another racing game, Namco's Pole Position (1982), used the 16-bit Zilog Z8000 processor. Atari's Food Fight (1983) was one of the earliest games to use the Motorola 68000 processor.

3D computer graphics began appearing in several arcade games towards the end of the golden age. Funai's Interstellar, a laserdisc game introduced at Tokyo's Amusement Machine Show (AM Show) in September 1983, demonstrated pre-rendered 3D computer graphics. Simutrek's Cube Quest, another laserdisc game introduced at the same Tokyo AM Show in September 1983, combined laserdisc animation with 3D real-time computer graphics. Star Rider, introduced by Williams Electronics at the Amusement & Music Operators Association (AMOA) in October 1983, also demonstrated pre-rendered 3D graphics. Atari's I, Robot, developed and released in 1984, was the first arcade game to be rendered entirely with real-time 3D computer graphics.

Gameplay

Space Invaders (1978) established the "multiple life, progressively difficult level paradigm" used by many classic arcade games. Designed by Tomohiro Nishikado at Taito, he drew inspiration from Atari's block-breaker game Breakout (1976) and several science fiction works. Nishikado added several interactive elements to Space Invaders that he found lacking in earlier video games, such as the ability for enemies to react to the player's movement and fire back, with a game over triggered by enemies killing the player (either by getting hit or enemies reaching the bottom of the screen) rather than a timer running out. In contrast to earlier arcade games which often had a timer, Space Invaders introduced the "concept of going round after round." It also gave the player multiple lives before the game ends, and saved the high score. It also had a basic story with animated characters along with a "crescendo of action and climax" which laid the groundwork for later video games, according to Eugene Jarvis.

With the enormous success of Space Invaders, dozens of developers jumped into the development and manufacturing of arcade video games. Some simply copied the "invading alien hordes" idea of Space Invaders and turned out successful imitators like Namco's Galaxian and Galaga, which extended the fixed shooter genre with new gameplay mechanics, more complex enemy patterns, and richer graphics. Galaxian introduced a "risk-reward" concept, while Galaga was one of the first games with a bonus stage. Sega's 1980 release Space Tactics was an early first-person space combat game with multi-directional scrolling as the player moved the cross-hairs on the screen.

Others tried new concepts and defined new genres. Rapidly evolving hardware allowed new kinds of games which allowed for different styles of gameplay. The term "action games" began being used in the early 1980s, in reference to a new genre of character action games that emerged from Japanese arcade developers, drawing inspiration from manga and anime culture. According to Eugene Jarvis, these new character-driven Japanese action games emphasized "character development, hand-drawn animation and backgrounds, and a more deterministic, scripted, pattern-type" of play. Terms such as "action games" or "character games" began being used to distinguish these new character-driven action games from the space shooters that had previously dominated the video game industry. The emphasis on character-driven gameplay in turn enabled a wider variety of subgenres. In 1980, Namco released Pac-Man, which popularized the maze chase genre, and Rally-X, which featured a radar tracking the player position on the map. Games such as the pioneering 1981 games Donkey Kong and Qix introduced new types of games where skill and timing are more important than shooting as fast as possible, with Nintendo's Donkey Kong in particular setting the template for the platform game genre.

The two most popular genres during the golden age were space shooters and character action games. While Japanese developers were creating a character-driven action game genre in the early 1980s, American developers largely adopted a different approach to game design at the time. According to Eugene Jarvis, American arcade developers focused mainly on space shooters during the late 1970s to early 1980s, greatly influenced by Japanese space shooters but taking the genre in a different direction from the "more deterministic, scripted, pattern-type" gameplay of Japanese games, towards a more "programmer-centric design culture, emphasizing algorithmic generation of backgrounds and enemy dispatch" and "an emphasis on random-event generation, particle-effect explosions and physics" as seen in arcade games such as his own Defender (1981) and Robotron: 2084 (1982) as well as Atari's Asteroids (1979).

Namco's Bosconian in 1981 introduced a free-roaming style of gameplay where the player's ship freely moves across open space, while also including a radar tracking player & enemy positions. Bega's Battle in 1983 introduced a new form of video game storytelling: using brief full-motion video cutscenes to develop a story between the game's shooting stages. Other examples of innovative games are Atari Games' Paperboy in 1984 where the goal is to successfully deliver newspapers to customers, and Namco's Phozon where the object is to duplicate a shape shown in the middle of the screen. The theme of Exidy's Venture is dungeon exploration and treasure-gathering. Q*bert plays upon the user's sense of depth perception to deliver a novel experience.

Popular culture

Some games of this era were so widely played that they entered popular culture. The first was Space Invaders, released in 1978. A widely believed, yet false, urban legend held that its popularity caused a national shortage of 100 yen coins in Japan. Its release in North America led to hundreds of favorable articles and stories about the emerging medium of video games printed in newspapers and magazines and aired on television. The Space Invaders Tournament held by Atari in 1980 was the first video game competition and attracted more than 10,000 participants, establishing video gaming as a mainstream hobby. By 1980, 86% of the 13–20 year old population in the United States had played arcade video games, and by 1981, there were more than 35 million gamers visiting video game arcades in the United States.

The game that most affected popular culture in North America was Pac-Man. Its release in 1980 caused such a sensation that it initiated what is now referred to as "Pac-Mania" (which later became the title of the last coin-operated game in the series, released in 1987). Released by Namco, the game featured a yellow, circle-shaped creature trying to eat dots through a maze while avoiding pursuing enemies. Though no one could agree what the "hero" or enemies represented (they were variously referred to as ghosts, goblins or monsters), the game was extremely popular. The game spawned an animated television series, numerous clones, Pac-Man-branded foods, toys, and a hit pop song, "Pac-Man Fever". The game's popularity was such that President Ronald Reagan congratulated a player for setting a record score in Pac-Man. Pac-Man was also responsible for expanding the arcade game market to involve large numbers of female audiences across all age groups. Though many popular games quickly entered the lexicon of popular culture, most have since left, and Pac-Man is unusual in remaining a recognized term in popular culture, along with Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, Mario and Q*bert.

Seen as an additional source of revenue, arcade games began popping up outside of dedicated arcades, including bars, restaurants, movie theaters, bowling alleys, convenience stores, laundromats, gas stations, supermarkets, airports, even dentist and doctor offices. Showbiz Pizza and Chuck E. Cheese were founded specifically as restaurants focused on featuring the latest arcade titles.

In 1982, the game show Starcade premiered. The program focused on players competing to achieve high scores on the latest arcade titles, with the chance to win the grand prize of their own arcade machine if they could hit a target score within a specific time frame. The show ran until 1984 on TBS and syndication.

In 1983, an animated television series produced for Saturday mornings called Saturday Supercade featured video game characters from the era, such as Frogger, Donkey Kong, Q*bert, Donkey Kong Jr., Kangaroo, Space Ace, and Pitfall Harry.

Arcade games at the time affected the music industry, revenues for which had declined by $400 million between 1978 and 1981 (from $4.1 billion to $3.7 billion), a decrease that was directly credited to the rise of arcade games at the time. Successful songs based on video games also began appearing. The pioneering electronic music band Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO) sampled Space Invaders sounds in their 1978 self-titled album and the hit single "Computer Game" from the same album, the latter selling over 400,000 copies in the United States. In turn, YMO had a major influence on much of the video game music produced during the 8-bit and 16-bit eras. Other pop songs based on Space Invaders soon followed, including "Disco Space Invaders" (1979) by Funny Stuff, "Space Invaders" (1980) by Player One (known as Playback in the US), and the hit songs "Space Invader" (1980) by The Pretenders and "Space Invaders" (1980) by Uncle Vic. The game was also the basis for Player One's "Space Invaders" (1979), which in turn provided the baseline for Jesse Saunders's "On and On" (1984), the first Chicago house music track. The song "Pac-Man Fever" reached No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 and sold over a million singles in 1982, while the album Pac-Man Fever sold over a million records, with both receiving Gold certifications. That same year, R. Cade and the Video Victims also produced an arcade-inspired album, Get Victimized, featuring songs such as "Donkey Kong". In 1984, former YMO member Haruomi Hosono produced an album entirely from Namco arcade game samples entitled Video Game Music, an early example of a chiptune record and the first video game music album. Arcade game sounds also had a strong influence on the hip hop, pop music (particularly synthpop) and electro music genres during the early 1980s. The booming success of video games at the time led to music magazine Billboard listing the 15 top-selling video games alongside their record charts by 1982. More than a decade later, the first electroclash record, I-F's "Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass" (1997), has been described as "burbling electro in a vocodered homage to Atari-era hi-jinks", particularly Space Invaders which it was named after.

Arcade games also influenced the film industry; beginning with Space Invaders, arcade games began appearing at many movie theaters. Early films based on video games were also produced, most notably Tron, which grossed over $33 million in 1982 which began the Tron franchise which included a video game adaptation that grossed more than the film. Other films based on video games included the 1983 films WarGames (where Matthew Broderick plays Galaga at an arcade), Nightmares, and Joysticks, the 1984 films The Last Starfighter, as well as Cloak & Dagger (in which an Atari 5200 cartridge implausibly containing the eponymous arcade game becomes the film's MacGuffin). Arcades also appeared in many other films at the time, such as Dawn of the Dead (where they play Gun Fight and F-1) in 1978, and Midnight Madness in 1980, Take This Job and Shove It and Puberty Blues in 1981, the 1982 releases Rocky III, Fast Times At Ridgemont High, Koyaanisqatsi and The Toy, the 1983 releases Psycho II, Spring Break, Strange Brew, Terms of Endearment and Never Say Never Again, the 1984 releases Footloose, The Karate Kid (where Elisabeth Shue plays Pac-Man), The Terminator, Night of the Comet and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, the 1985 releases The Goonies, The Heavenly Kid, Pee Wee's Big Adventure, The Boys Next Door and Ferris Bueller's Day Off as well as the 1986 films Something Wild, The Color of Money, River's Edge and Psycho III (where Norman Bates stands next to a Berzerk cabinet). Over the Top, Can't Buy Me Love, Light of Day and Project X showcase arcade game cabinets as well. Coin-operated games (both video and mechanical) are central to the plots of the 1988 films Big and Kung-Fu Master and also appear in Miracle Mile.

In more recent years, there have been critically acclaimed documentaries based on the golden age of arcade games, such as The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (2007) and Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade (2007). Since 2010, many arcade-related features or films incorporating 1980s nostalgia have been released including Tron: Legacy (2010), Wreck-It Ralph (2012), Ping Pong Summer (2014), Pixels (2015), Everybody Wants Some!! (2016), Summer of 84 (2018) and Ready Player One (2018) which is based upon the novel by Ernest Cline and directed by Steven Spielberg. Television shows have exhibited arcade games including The Goldbergs and Stranger Things (both of which feature Dragon's Lair among other games).

Strategy guides

The period saw the emergence of a gaming media, publications dedicated to video games, in the form of video game journalism and strategy guides. The enormous popularity of video arcade games led to the very first video game strategy guides; these guides (rare to find today) discussed in detail the patterns and strategies of each game, including variations, to a degree that few guides seen since can match. "Turning the machine over" - making the score counter overflow and reset to zero - was often the final challenge of a game for those who mastered it, and the last obstacle to getting the highest score.

Some of these strategy guides sold hundreds of thousands of copies at prices ranging from $1.95 to $3.95 in 1982 (equivalent to between $7.00 and $13.00 in 2025). That year, Ken Uston's Mastering Pac-Man sold 750,000 copies, reaching No. 5 on B. Dalton's mass-market bestseller list, while Bantam's How to Master the Video Games sold 600,000 copies, appearing on The New York Times mass-market paperback list. By 1983, 1.7 million copies of Mastering Pac-Man had been printed.

List of popular arcade games

The games below are some of the most popular and/or influential games of the era.

List of best-selling arcade games

For arcade games, success was usually judged by either the number of arcade hardware units sold to operators, or the amount of revenue generated, from the number of coins (such as quarters or 100 yen coins) inserted into machines, and/or the hardware sales (with arcade hardware prices often ranging from $1000 to $4000). This list only includes arcade games that have sold more than 10,000 hardware units.

• Space Invaders (750,000)
• Pac-Man (400,000)
• Donkey Kong (132,000)
• Ms. Pac-Man (125,000)
• Asteroids (100,000)
• Defender (70,000)
• Centipede (55,988)
• Galaxian (50,000 in the US)
• Hyper Olympic (Track & Field) (38,000 in Japan)
• Donkey Kong Jr. (30,000 in the US)
• Karate Champ (30,000 in the US)
• Mr. Do! (30,000 in the US)
• Tempest (29,000)
• Q*bert (25,000)
• Robotron: 2084 (23,000)
• Dig Dug (22,228 in the US)
• Pole Position (21,000 in the US)
• Popeye (20,000 in the US)
• Missile Command (20,000)
• Jungle Hunt (18,000 in the US)
• Dragon's Lair (16,000)
• Berzerk (15,780)
• Scramble (15,136 in the US)
• Battlezone (15,122)
• Champion Baseball (15,000 in Japan)
• Stargate (15,000)
• Star Wars (12,695)
• Super Cobra (12,337 in the US)
• Space Duel (12,038)
• Atari Football (11,306)
• Gee Bee (10,000)

Decline and aftermath

The golden age cooled around the mid-1980s as copies of popular games began to saturate the arcades. Arcade video game revenues in the United States had declined from $8 billion in 1981 to $5 billion in 1983, reaching a low of $4 billion in 1984. The arcade market had recovered by 1986, with the help of software conversion kits, the arrival of popular beat 'em up games (such as Kung-Fu Master and Renegade), and advanced motion simulator games (such as Sega's "taikan" games including Hang-On, Space Harrier, Out Run and After Burner).

Arcades remained commonplace through to the 1990s as there were still new genres being explored. In 1987, arcades experienced a short resurgence with Double Dragon, which started the golden age of beat 'em up games, a genre that peaked in popularity with Final Fight two years later. In 1988, arcade game revenues in the United States rose back to $6.4 billion, largely due to the rising popularity of violent action games in the beat 'em up and run and gun shooter genres. However, the growth of home video game systems such as the Nintendo Entertainment System led to another brief arcade decline toward the end of the 1980s. In the early 1990s, the Genesis (Mega Drive outside most of North America) and Super NES (Super Famicom in Japan) greatly improved home play and some of their technology was even integrated into a few video arcade machines.

In the early 1990s, the release of Capcom's Street Fighter II established the modern style of fighting games and led to a number of similar games, resulting in a renaissance for the arcades. Another factor was realism, including the "3D Revolution" from 2D and pseudo-3D graphics to true real-time 3D polygon graphics. This was largely driven by a technological arms race between Sega and Namco.

By the early 2000s, the sales of arcade machines in North America had declined, with 4,000 unit sales being considered a hit by the time. One of the causes of decline was new generations of video game consoles and personal computers that sapped interest from arcades.

Since the 2000s, arcade games have taken different routes globally. In the United States, arcades have become niche markets as they compete with the home console market, and they adapted other business models, such as providing other entertainment options or adding prize redemptions. In Japan, some arcades continue to survive in the early 21st century, with games like Dance Dance Revolution and The House of the Dead tailored to experiences that players cannot easily have at home.

Legacy

The Golden Age of Video Arcade Games spawned numerous cultural icons and even gave some companies their identity. Elements from games such as Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Frogger, and Centipede are still recognized in today's popular culture, and new entries in the franchises for some golden age games continued to be released decades later.

Pac-Man and Dragon's Lair joined Pong for permanent display at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. for their cultural impact in the United States. No other video game has been inducted since.

Emulators such as the Internet Archive Virtual Arcade are able to run these classic games inside a web browser window on a modern computer. The speed difference between current hardware and the original platforms is so great that JavaScript emulators can now run copies of the original arcade ROMs, making them available in their original form rather than as a port.