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The games industry in the modern day is dominated by home consoles, be they of a portable variety or those that need to be hooked up to your TV. It all takes place at home though, save for some select mobile games. That’s a far cry from the more social aspects of arcade cabinets.
Arcades used to be a place you went to (and in some places, still are), a place to spent your hard-earned coins on a gaming experience you couldn’t get anywhere else. It was an industry that went through many highs-and-lows, though is mostly relegated to the past now. Let’s dig into that past a little bit and see just where it all started.
Did Home Consoles Or Arcades Come First?
Gaming as a whole started on computers. That makes sense, seeing as they are typically the most powerful pieces of machinery in a digital space. Back in the early days of computing however,they were prohibitively expensiveand not quite something the average person could engage with. The ideas for both arcades and home consoles spun-off from this.
Which came first though? While it’s an extremely tight competition, the veryfirst arcade cabinet was released in 1971, while the very first home console released a year later with theMagnavox Odyssey in 1972. That one year head-start, as well as amuch lower upfront cost, helped arcades secure their position over home consoles, though even this took a few years to solidify into something profitable.
What Was The Very First Arcade Game Ever Made?
In the earlier days of video games, they were incredibly proprietary, not able to run on anything other than the machine on which they were created. This changed with the development ofSpacewar!, the first game whose source code was able to run on other compatible computers. This was a massive push for the video games industry, and was the direct catalyst for the creation of the very first arcade cabinet.
After being invited to see Spacewar running on a Stanford computer, Nolan Bushnell was inspired to create a version of this game that everyone else could play. An early form of arcade games known asElectro-Machine gameshad become popular at this point as a successor to earlier games like pinball. Bushnell intended to make Spacewar into a successor of EM games.
This, alongside his colleague Ted Dabney, would lead to the creation ofComputer Space, a port of Spacewar inside a coin-operated terminal. This arcade was distributed across multiple locations in the US, and though it wasn’t exactly a runaway success, it proved that coin-operated games of a more complex nature was a market waiting to be built.
It was withPong in 1972, a game created by Bushnell and Dabney’snewly-formed Atari, that led to much greater success and laid the foundations for the greater arcade industry. Ironically, Pong was directly inspired by the games featured on the Magnavox Odyssey.
As a fascinating aside, the creator of the first arcade game, Nolan Bushnell, was alsothe founder of Atari and, um, Chuck E. Cheese.
Why Did Arcades Reduce In Popularity?
Arcades first appeared in 1971 with Computer Space, though didn’t start to hit international acclaim until the market itself was more populated.In 1978, Space Invaders was first released, and this was followed-up by Pac-Man in 1980. Though it was brief,arcades dominated the video game industry until 1983when the market became so flooded in the US that it crashed.
At this exact time, Nintendo released the NES in America and took preventative measures to ensure the video game crash would not affect them. Without other competition,home consoles grew steadily. At the same time, arcades began a slow recovery with new innovations such as motion simulator cabinets and newer, more complex game genres, though not at the same speed as home consoles.
One of Nintendo’s preventative measures was that a company could only release a set number of games on the NES each year to prevent flooding the market.
While home consoles kept growing in popularity, they were still expensive enough and limited enough to keep many at bay. Whilemany American companies struggled to keep up in the arcade business, Japanese companies began to flourish.Capcom released Street Fighter 2 for arcades in 1991, leading to another massive resurgence in the popularity of arcades, the biggest they had seen since their inception 20 years prior.
With Western companies failing to keep up, many of them pivoted away from arcade cabinet and home console manufacturing, and shifted to third-party video game development as it was a much more lucrative business. As a natural result of this,home consoles only grew in western territories, while it remained primarily Japanese companies creating arcade machines.
With home consoles now dominating the market, it became harder for any company to justify the release of arcade cabinets outside of their own countries, and sothe majority of arcade gaming fell back to Asia. By the early 2000’s, arcades were more of an oddity in the western world than a mainstay. By the 2010’s,arcades began dwindling massively in Japanas well. In the modern day, arcades primarily remain dominant in regions where consoles are comparatively expensive.
For many,the formal sale of Sega’s Akihabara arcade in 2020was seen by many as the final nail in the coffin for the popularity of arcades in Japan.
