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Joshua Stepnoski
Prof. Presnell
Engl. 1103
27 Oct. 2014

Into the Arcade: A Look into the Life and Death of the Videogame Arcade

Empty shut down places, or buildings repurposed into stores or restaurants. These are
the faces of a lost time, a time that has been stricken from the minds of todays youth.
Once upon a time these places were filled to the brim with electronic devices, with
children, running around after school, able to use these devices for their own
enjoyment. These electronic wonders are arcade games, and the place is an arcade. A
place that time has forgotten, though it was just 30 years ago that the arcades passed
away from the minds of many, they are still alive in the hearts of those that remember
them.
A Long Time Ago
Let us take a step back in time, to a time before video games, to a time where
Pinball machines and Gallery shooters filled the time of children and adults alike. The
1970s were a time of electronic revolution and it was a small group of men that would
send it blasting into the future of should I say bouncing with the invention of a single two
player game know as, PONG! Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney were two young exhippies of the 1970s living their lives after the Vietnam War. Nolan being car salesmen
and an engineer and Ted being an electrical engineer at the time decided to work

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together to created Pinball Machines for a man named Bally Midway, owner of Midway
manufacturing and later Midway Arcade, but as I was saying, these two men were to
build a Pinball Machine for Bally at the time, what they didnt know is that soon they
would open the door to electronic entertainment the likes of which were never fathomed
before. It all started with their base of operation and what Nolan had constructed, it was
an old vacuum tube TV put inside of a fiber glass case, as stated from the accounts of
Allan Alcorn, the third member of the team that worked with Ted and Nolan. What really
got to Allan was that on the TV was the first commercial video game ever created
Space Wars! yet there was no computer, this was there breakthrough their brain child
and Nolans creation the ability to show and play a video game without a computer.
Using the money Bally paid them which was thousands a month they began to work on
the true genius that would be the precursor for Arcades all over America.
15 bucks and Some Change Made History
As taken once again from the accounts of Allan Alcorn, Nolan gave me this
Challenge. He tasked me to make a ping-pong game on a TV screen and told me he
had a contract from General Electric to do a home video game. So it had to be very,
very cheap. It had to be a $15 cost of goods. After months of working and getting the
right components and testing it they finally made what they had been seeking, there
ping-pong video game projected on a TV in a wooden box titled simply, PONG! the
men at Atari decided to give it a test run in a place called Andy Capps Cavern. After the
first two weeks the owner called them back and said, Hey, it crapped out; stopped
working. Can you come down and fix it? I got people who want to play this thing. Little
did they know that the call they received to come fix it would be the next step towards

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the rest of their lives. When they went down to fix it they opened the box and quarters
spewed out of the machine like a broken hydrant. Allan quickly started filling a bag with
the quarters and said, I can fix this. The next day the money gain was reported to
Nolan who responded, Hmm, thats interesting. Which was then retorted with Nolans
idea of the future, Were going to build machines; were going to be a manufacturer.

An image of the first Pong machine ever built

before it was put into Andy Capps Cavern
Pong! A Not so Simple Game of Tennis
From here we see the beginning of a new age the age of the video game cabinet
and its new place in the world. At first it started out very small since the Pong machine
was the first of its kind and a very ingenious game design had people wanted to play it
all day. (http://www.ponggame.org/) (Here you can play a virtual version of the game
pong to get a feel for what people were playing) Pong was booming in sales the
machines only competition at the time was the Pinball machine, even the Pong was
leaving in the dust because of its design. Pong went into a lot of locations, places
where pinball games could not go. Pong had very subdued graphics. There were no
naked ladies, no explosions, ect. So it went into locations where you couldnt get a
pinball Machine in.-Allan Alcorn. This increased the revenues and made people more

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and more accustomed to video games and the video game scene and ready for the
future.
The Golden Oldies
The Next part of the story of the arcade, would take us to the aftermath of the
release of the Pong game. Atari had landed on top they had more money than they
knew what to do with, which they used to make even more video games, they also
began the first decline of a popular arcade game, Pinball machines simply by the fact
that it was easier to fix,

"Most of these games are basically a television, a power

supply, and a board," Benjamin Thoburn, who repairs old arcade cabinets, says. "If
theres a problem, its usually easy to make it playable again, sometimes in 10 minutes
or less." So with the easy of repair the arcade industry was booming and everyone
wanted to jump on board the money train that was video games. According to the article
The Life and death of the American arcade, By the end of 1974, there were more than
fifteen companies actively producing video game cabinets, and technological
innovations followed quickly, ushering in what became known as the golden age of the
arcade. The Golden age of the arcade was a really huge deal, this was the time that
the standard was set for video games of the time. We also see the first imported games
coming in from Japan and filling our markets, what started as an American ingenuity
had now become anyones game and the arcade was the battlefield. Even at this time
such companies that only specialized in electro mechanical games like pinball had
jumped on the video game bandwagon, Bally Midway had become the famous Midway
arcade and created its own games, which wouldnt see light until 1978, yet it was the
ever popular Space Invaders that took the scene, we see a number of games coming

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out filling the arcades and cashing in serious funds for the video game creator of the
time. The way things went there was no stopping the every expanding video game
craze.
Yellow Pizza, and Space Stuff
It would be inappropriate to not go over the wonder years of the video game arcade
the years of 1978 to 1982. The history of video games to most is truly only the
expansion of these 4 years. In 1978 as stated before we see the drop of the first big
name Space Invaders, (http://www.webpacman.com/) (select space invaders) made by
Taito games in Japan but published by Midway in America, this game was the first of
the big games to come out and showed that the industry had plenty of kick left with this
game came Ataris response, which was the ever popular 1979 game Asteroids
(http://www.freeasteroids.org/), Asteroids was that ever popular game of the little
triangle shooting rocks endlessly and Americans loved it. After these two space based
games were released, America was on the brink of the best selling arcade game ever
made. In 1980 Namco developed a new and fresh game with a new genre that
everyone could enjoy, and with the help of Midway games they were able to ship it to
America for its popularity to begin. The game was Pac-Man, my personal all time
favorite game and possibly everyone elses, Pac-man for video games is what the
Beatles is to music. It was the video game, everyone wanted to play Pac-man, he was
the 80s icon everyone knew and loved, he even had a top listed song made after him
titled Pac-Man Fever But Pac-man flooded the video game arcades and made the
year of 1980 the year of the second Golden Age.

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(http://www.webpacman.com/)

Kong: The 8th Wonder of the World

The next event in video game history happened the following year however, A man
know too many in the video game world and yet foreign to the outsiders, Shigeru
Miyamoto, the father of almost every modern famous video game character, releases
one of the worlds most famous games and with it the worlds most famous character.
Donkey Kong was released in 1981, and features a small red man jumping over barrels
to save a woman from a large ape. Silly from that description but the birth of the
character Mario, although that would not be his official name until Mario bros. would be
released, came with the creation of this game and with it the rise of the monolithic
company Nintendo. This game and Pac-man were at each others throats in sales,
which brought about the final big push in the release of video games for arcades before
anyone would start to see the decline that was to befall them.

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(http://www.silvergames.com/donkey-kong)
The Death of a Titan

After the good old golden years of 1978-1982, the rest of the arcade history seems
to fall into obscurity. No one around me knew anything about where they were or where
the old arcades went. It was my mission to uncover this mystery for myself but before I
could talk about its death I first had to tell my reader about the wonderful life of the video
game arcade, and all the joy and amazing innovation it brought people. Now we must
go down another path and talk about what really caused the crash of the video game
arcade. In the article that I obtained on The Verge, it says that there were too many
arcades in the 1980s and by 1982 cracks were beginning to show. dud games bring in
no money at all.-Time magazine. One of the first issues was the attention span of the
gamer in question. A lot of the kids actually playing the games eventually beat or got
tired of the same game, and moved on by 1981 Space Invaders was no longer wanted
by players they were looking for the next big that, the game industry relied on novelty
and on games that challenge its players. The next part of it all were the rising concerns
with the connection of children, video games and bad behavior, In November of 1982,
the US Surgeon General C. Everett Koop gave a speech in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on

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the subject of domestic violence and child abuse. After concluding his remarks, he
fielded a question about the harmful effects of video games on children. Koop said that
while there wasnt yet scientific evidence of any harm, children were becoming
"addicted" to video games, "body and soul." Though Koop quickly released a statement
following up to curtail fears, an AP story, wired out to newspapers across the country,
had done its damage. By February of 1983, psychologists were positing that the
"intensity of the experience" of video games was worrisome, as was the fact that the
games "seem[ed] to be real." Because of this parents were in outcry to destroy arcades
alike as places, that promote gambling and violence on our children, as was quoted by
a New York mother. From this we also see the 1985 rise of the Nintendo entertainment
system in America, which I originally thought was the major cause of the arcades death
and yet, Ive come to learn that the arcade was in a much deeper hole than I thought, it
wasnt technology that killed off the arcade, not to begin with. Its fair to concede that the
arcade, already dying, was allowed to stay dead because we were all happily gaming at
home by the time anybody noticed that all of the actual arcades were disappearing, and
fast. So with the release of the NES, everyone just decide that a home console was a
better choice and let the arcades die.

See You Space Cowboy

In conclusion I found out why all the arcades died, it was the lack of carrying from the
players and the lack of caring from the people running them, trying to cash in on all the

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video game hype killed the once magnificent video game arcade, even the modern
resurgence of arcades is just a ploy to take money much like gambling without gain. So
the arcades of the past and there long and wondrous history is to stay in the past while
its offspring the home console is the one who gets to live and prosper.

Works Cited

Alcorn, Allan. "First-Hand:The Development of Pong: Early Days of Atari and the Video Game
Industry." - GHN: IEEE Global History Network. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Nov. 2014.

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Creasey, Gary L., and Barbara J. Myers. Video Games and Children: Effects on Leisure Activities,
Schoolwork, and Peer Involvement. S.l.: S.n., 1986. Print.

Laura, June. "For Amusement Only: The Life and Death of the American Arcade." The Verge. N.p., 16
Jan. 2013. Web. 11 Nov. 2014.

Wolf, Mark J. P. Before the Crash: Early Video Game History. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2012. Print.

Wolf, Mark J. P. The Video Game Explosion: A History from PONG to Playstation and beyond.
Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2008. Print.