Video game arcades at the time became as common as convenience stores, while arcade games like Pac-Man and Space Invaders appeared in most locations across the United States, including even funeral homes. Beginning with Space Invaders, video arcade games also started to appear in supermarkets, restaurants, liquor stores, gas stations, and many other retail establishments looking for extra income. The number of video game arcades in North America was doubled between 19 reaching a peak of 10,000 video game arcades across the region (compared to 4,000 as of 1998). The era saw the rapid spread of video arcades across North America, Europe, and Asia. The golden age was a time of great technical and design creativity in arcade games. It defines the era as covering the "mainstream appearance of video games as a consumer market" and "the rise of dedicated hardware systems and the origin of multi-game cartridge based systems". One outlier is the History of Computing Project website, which says the era began in 1971, when the creator of Pong filed a pivotal patent regarding video game technology and when the first arcade video game machine, Computer Space, was released. The golden age of arcade games largely coincided with, and partly fueled, the second generation of game consoles and the microcomputer revolution. RePlay magazine in 1985 dated the arcade industry's "video boom" years from 1979 to 1982. Walter Day of Twin Galaxies places this period's beginning in the late 1970s, when color arcade games became more prevalent and arcade video games started appearing outside of their traditional bowling alley and bar locales, through to its ending in the mid-1980s. Kent says the period ended in 1983, which saw "a fairly steady decline" in the coin-operated video game business and arcades. Kent argues in his book The Ultimate History of Video Games that it began the following year, when Space Invaders gained popularity in the United States and when vector display technology, first seen in arcades in 1977's Space Wars, rose to prominence via Atari's Asteroids. Technology journalist Jason Whittaker, in The Cyberspace Handbook, places the beginning of the golden age in 1978, with the release of Space Invaders. The arcade game sector revitalized later during the early 1990s particularly with the mainstream success of fighting games.Īlthough the exact years differ, most sources agree the period lasted from about the late 1970s to early 1980s. This fall occurred during the same time as the video game crash of 1983 but for different reasons, though both marred revenues within the North American video game industry for several years. The golden age of arcade games began to wane in 1983 due to a plethora of clones of popular titles that saturated arcades, the rise of home video game consoles, both coupled with a moral panic on the influence of arcades and video games on children. The 1982 film Tron was closely tied to an arcade game of the same name. ![]() Games began starring named player characters, such as Pac-Man, Mario, and Q*bert, and some of these characters crossed over into other media including songs, cartoons, and movies. ![]() ![]() ![]() Video game genres were still being established, but included space-themed shooter games such as Defender and Galaga, maze chase games that followed the design established by Pac-Man, driving and racing games which more frequently used 3D perspectives such as Turbo and Pole Position, character action games such as Pac-Man and Frogger, and the beginning of what would later be called platform games touched off by Donkey Kong. Video game arcades became a part of popular culture and a primary channel for new games. Arcade video games switched from black-and-white to color, with titles such as Frogger and Centipede taking advantage of the visual opportunities of bright palettes. The release of Space Invaders in 1978 led to a wave of shoot-'em-up games such as Galaxian and the vector graphics-based Asteroids in 1979, made possible by new computing technology that had greater power and lower costs. The golden age of arcade video games was the period of rapid growth, technological development, and cultural influence of arcade video games from the late 1970s to the early 1980s.
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