End of Golden Age of Video Arcade Games: Video Game Consoles: Part 1

It is well known that in the 1980s video arcade games were very popular. That time period is a part of an era known as The Golden Age of video arcade games. However, by the second half of the 1980's they were almost completely eradicated from the market; such sad results for arcades. This harsh yet unavoidable ending was caused by the always present progress in the field of technology. In the 1990's new generations of home video game consoles and home computers resulted in the significant reduction of the interest to arcade games.

Early consoles, such as the Mattel's Intellivision and the Atari 2600, were very general-purpose, they were built in order to give users the ability to play a variety of games. They often, however, could not measure up to video arcade game hardware, which was single-purpose and was built in order to run only a single game and to run it exceptionally well.

In fact, good home video game systems are the things which have always been lacking for the arcade game industry. In the 1980s the arcade market was filled with a lot of poor-quality home video game systems. This problem played an important role in the video game crash in the 1983.

End of Golden Age of Video Arcade Games: Copies of Popular Games

During the late 1970's technology made it possible to create video games with much better quality graphics and sound in comparison to previous years. It was still  a very far cry from what future technologies would have to offer, with realistic images and full motion video. This is why arcade game developers had to compensate for the lack of quality, by making the game play even more fun or entertaining. Many consider the late 1970's the golden age of the video arcade games. A lot of wonderful video arcade games were created then.

Unfortunately, this wonderful time didn’t last to terribly long, arcade games continued to be popular till the beginning of 1990's, but then there time had passed.  So, what happened, there are several reasons for it, and one of them is that the arcade market started to be filled with the numerous copies of these popular arcade games. These copies killed the interest to video arcade games, the development of something new became a rarity. Even though there were still new genres being explored by arcade game developers, the overwhelming majority of created games were maze type games, shooting games, and other such variations of these well-known themes.

Appearance of New Arcade Game Controls

Arcades catering for video games began to gain momentum in the end of 70-ies with such video games as 1978’s Gee Bee and Galaxian of 1979. And it became widespread in 1980 with the release of such video arcade games as King and Balloon, Tank Battalion, Pac-Man, and others.

The central processing unit in games of those times allowed for more complexity in comparison with the earlier discrete circuitry games, such as Pong that was created by Atari in 1972.

At that time several games were released that came with some new controls. For example, Football from Atari, released in 1978, came with the trackball, Hogan's Alley used tethered light guns, Paperboy included a bicycle handlebar, and racing wheel was included in Night Driver.

Other specialty controls, such as crossbow-shaped light gun in Crossbow and pedals in racing games, also were introduced to the arcade market during this period of time.

But, despite of the appearance of new arcade game controls, most manufacturers continued to prefer the buttons and joysticks.