History of Arcade Games

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The first popular "arcade games" were early amusement park midway games such as shooting galleries, ball toss games, and the earliest coin-operated machines.

The arcade video games are presented in choronological order. This is by no means a complete list. I have selected the most commercially successful games and games which had some technical innovations or new game idea or some other important reason to deserve to be mentioned here. 

Computer Space, Nutting Associates, 1971

Computer Space was the first commercial arcade video game released to the public. It was designed by Nolan Bushnell. It had many technological innovations, but the gameplay was confusing and it didn't become a commercial success. Using the profits from the game Nolan Bushnell left Nutting Associates and formed Atari Inc.
Pong, Atari Inc., 1972
 

Pong was the first succesful arcade video game. It was designed by Nolan Bushnell and Alan Alcorn. The game play was extremely simple. It has two players, both which controlled a vertical bar which could bounce back a moving dot which moving between the vertical bars. Nolan placed the first game machine in a local gas station. When he became back the machine ceased to operate which it was full of money. Pong became an instant success and it created the arcade video game industry.

Tank, Kee Games/Atari Inc., 1974

 

Tank was the first arcade video game which used ROM chips to store graphic data. It had on-screen characters that actually looked like recognizable objects. Before that video games used simple block graphics like in Pong, or collections of dots as in Computer Space.

Gunfight, Taito/Midway, 1975

 

Gunfight was a two-player game in style of Western movies. It was the first Japanese title to be licensed for release in America. Midway redesigned it to allow more varied game play. The redesigned version was the first video arcade game to utilize a microprocessor.

Night Driver, Atari Inc., 1976

 

Night Driver was the first arcade racing game with "first person" perspective, showing the road as if actually seen from the car. Before Night Driver there had been many racing games with bird perspective (seen from above), e.g. the popular Atari game called "Sprint 2" from 1976. The night theme was chosen to hide the limitation of the hardware to create more complicated images. For many years, most 3D games built on the basic concept of Night Driver, using computer hardware to "scale" flat images called "sprites" in order to simulate movement in the 3D.

Breakout, Atari Inc., 1976
 

Breakout was designed by Atari's fortieth employee Steve Jobs and his friend Steve Wozniak. A year later these two persons founded Apple Computer.

 

Space Invaders was the first blockbuster video game. It brought the video games out of arcades and bars into restaurants, corner stores an brought video games into the public conciousness. It was translated to Atari 2600 video home game system and the home versio was also a huge commercial hit.

Football, Atari Inc., 1978

 
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