Present Situation of Video Arcade Games: Part 1

Video arcade games have a great history, in the 1980s they were very popular. They even created popular video game cultures, so to speak, and cultural icons. What is the present situation of video arcade games? Did the arcades become extinct? No, of course they didn’t. It is true that the time of arcades has passed, but the video arcade game industry does still exist today. Just on a significantly reduced level.

In order to facilitate porting a video arcade game to a home system, the modern video arcade game hardware is often based on home game consoles. Some home consoles have the video arcade versions:

PlayStation 2 – System 246

Microsoft Xbox – Chihiro

Dreamcast – NAOMI, Atomiswave

Nintendo GameCube – Triforce

The survival of some video arcade games is caused by their expanding into ticket-based prize redemption. Others have survived by expanding into more physical games which haven’t equivalents among home game consoles. Some examples of the latter would be skee-ball and whack-a-mole.

Immense Popularity of Pac-Man

The period of the beginning of 1880-ies was the great time when a lot of wonderful video arcade games were released. Some of these arcade games gained the immense popularity. In result, they entered the popular culture.

One of the representatives of such video arcade games is the legendary Pac-Man, which was made by Namco in 1980. Its release caused such a sensation that it initiated what is now referred to as Pac-Mania.

This video arcade game spawned numerous clones, Pac-Man-branded foods, animated television series, and a hit pop song, Pac-Man Fever. There are anecdotes about the Pac-Man that there is a need to empty the game's coin bucket every hour by some game owner in order to prevent the game's coin mechanism from jamming of having too many coins in the receptacle.

The word Pac-Mania was later used as the title to the last coin-operated game of the series. Final part of this arcade game was released in 1987.

World of Pac-Man

The world of Pac-Man is pretty simple, but its gameplay is very exciting. The “hero” of this video arcade game is yellow creature in the form of circle, which is called Pac-Man. The game area represents a maze. There are also other creatures which patrols the area.

The goal of the game is to eat dots which are placed all over the maze. Other creatures are the enemies which pursuit a gamer and which should be avoided.

No one can tell for sure what the game creatures represented. The “hero” represents a mouth or something like this. The enemies are sometimes referred to as ghosts, monsters or goblins.

This video arcade game gained a huge popularity. It is impossible to describe all the excitement of playing this wonderful arcade game. It isn’t surprising that it became a legend. Even now, more than thirty years after the release of Pac-Man, it is still popular and is still played by a lot of fans and ordinary gamers.

Experiments of Arcade Game Developers

At the end of 70-ies – 80-ies arcade game developers were experimenting with new hardware. For example, they were creating video arcade games with non-video technology such as vector displays. Vector displays, unlike the raster displays, produced crisp lines.

Some of these arcade games gained a big popularity. Among them are created by Atari in 1980 Battlezone and Tempest and 1983’s Star Wars, also from Atari.

But vector technology fell out of favor with arcade game companies. This happened because the vector displays are very expensive in repairing.

In order to provide games with movie-quality animation, arcade game developers were also experimented with laserdisc players. The very first video arcade game that used this technology is Dragon's Lair. It was released in 1983. The whole process of creation of this game took three years.

The release of Dragon's Lair was true sensation. But, in result, the popularity of the genre was dwindled. The reasons for this were the following:

• these arcade games were fairly linear;
• they depended less on reflexes than on memorizing sequences of moves.