The Golden Age of Arcades, 1978 to 1983

Pong got people used to the idea of a video game in the early '70s. But the stretch where arcade games went from a curiosity in the corner of a bar to something in every mall, pizza place and convenience store was short: roughly 1978 to 1983. In about five years, arcades invented most of the ideas games still run on.

This is my quick field guide to that stretch, and the first stop in a thread about the hardware of old games.

It starts with Space Invaders

Space Invaders came out in 1978, made by Taito in Japan and licensed to Midway for the United States. It was a phenomenon. It pretty much set the template for the shooter, it put the high score on screen for everyone to chase, and it showed the industry how much money a single video game could make.

After that, things moved quickly. Atari's Asteroids (1979) used vector graphics for crisp, rotating shapes and a more involved control scheme. Namco's Pac-Man (1980) brought the maze chase and the first video game character that everybody recognized.

The technology, year by year

Idea	Where you saw it
Vector graphics	Asteroids, Tempest and Star Wars. Sharp lines, smooth rotation and scaling that raster screens of the day couldn't touch.
Color	Replaced the black-and-white screens and colored overlays of the earliest games.
Digitized speech	Berzerk was talking at players in 1980, and voices became common after that.
Pseudo-3D	Zaxxon's angled, scrolling view.
Laserdisc	Dragon's Lair, with full hand-drawn animation.

Every one of those was a reason to walk into an arcade, because you couldn't get it at home.

Five games that tell the story

Game	Year	Why it matters
Pac-Man	1980	Toru Iwatani's maze game at Namco. The first real mascot, and a game that drew in people who'd never cared about shooting aliens. It turned into merchandise, a Saturday morning cartoon and a hit song.
Donkey Kong	1981	Nintendo's first big arcade hit, and Shigeru Miyamoto's introduction to the world. Several stages, a little story, and the carpenter who became Mario.
Defender	1981	Eugene Jarvis at Williams. A joystick and five buttons, a scrolling world, and a difficulty curve that proved players would master something complicated.
Ms. Pac-Man	1982	Often called better than the original: new mazes, smarter ghosts, and a female lead. One of the best-selling arcade machines ever.
Dragon's Lair	1983	Cinematronics and animator Don Bluth. Laserdisc animation, and the first big game to charge 50 cents a play.

Try this

Play Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man back to back. The ghosts in the original follow fixed rules you can learn and exploit. Ms. Pac-Man added randomness, and you feel the difference within a couple of minutes.

Everywhere, all at once

At the peak, arcade games were making billions of dollars a year in quarters in the United States alone. They spread from dedicated arcades into malls, restaurants, bowling alleys and corner stores. Nolan Bushnell, who founded Atari, also started Chuck E. Cheese's pizza-and-games idea. Companies that had made pinball for decades, like Williams, Gottlieb and Stern, moved into video games.

The culture came with it. High-score rivalries turned players into minor celebrities (the 2007 documentary The King of Kong is about the long tail of exactly that). Electronic Games magazine started in 1981, more or less inventing games journalism. Tron put a video game world on the big screen in 1982, and "Pac-Man Fever" made the Billboard Top 10 the same year. For a lot of teenagers, the arcade was the place to be, the way the malt shop had been a generation earlier.

The crash

It fell apart around 1983:

• Too many arcades chasing the same quarters.
• A flood of rushed, weak games as everyone tried to cash in.
• Home consoles and computers that were good enough to keep people home.
• The wider North American video game crash, which hit arcades and home consoles alike.

Arcades didn't vanish. The fighting game boom of the early '90s was still ahead. But they never got back to being quite that central.

Note

A lot of what came after grew straight out of these five years: the high score, the mascot, the multi-stage game, the difficulty curve, even charging more for a flashier machine.

Playing them now

Most of these games are easy to play today, through official collections on modern consoles, through MAME, or on a real cabinet. My own is the 4:3 arcade cabinet running CoinOPS, and the 4:3 screen is exactly because of games like these. If you want to go further and change one, arcade ROM hacking starts with exactly the early boards from this era. The arcade story carries on in the '90s and 2000s through the PlayStation's arcade ports.