Arcade video game
Improvements in computer technology and gameplay design led to a golden age of arcade video games, the exact dates of which are debated but range from the late 1970s to the early 1980s.
The arcade industry had a resurgence from the early 1990s to mid-2000s, including Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat, and Dance Dance Revolution, but ultimately declined in the Western world as competing home video game consoles such as the Sony PlayStation and Microsoft Xbox increased in their graphics and gameplay capability and decreased in cost.
(1962) inspired the first commercial arcade video game, Computer Space (1971), created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney and released by Nutting Associates.
Bushnell and Dabney followed their Computer Space success to create - with the help of Allan Alcorn - a table-tennis game, Pong, released in 1972.
[8] The video game industry transitioned from discrete integrated circuitry to programmable microprocessors in the mid-1970s, starting with Gun Fight in 1975.
The arcade industry entered a "Golden Age" in 1978 with the release of Taito's Space Invaders, which introduced many novel gameplay features - including a scoreboard.
In the early 1990s, the release of Capcom's Street Fighter II established the modern style of fighting games and led to a number of similar games such as Mortal Kombat, Fatal Fury, Killer Instinct, Virtua Fighter, and Tekken, creating a new renaissance in the arcades.
Designing an arcade game was more about the combination of these TTL chips and other electronic components to achieve the desired effect on screen.
Internet services such as ALL.Net, NESiCAxLive, e-Amusement and NESYS, allow the cabinets to download updates or new games, do online multiplayer gameplay, save progress, unlock content, or earn credits.
Many arcade games have short levels, simple and intuitive control schemes, and rapidly increasing difficulty.
[25] This is due to the environment of the arcade, where the player is essentially renting the game for as long as their in-game avatar can stay alive or until they run out of tokens.
Cars can turn sharply without braking or understeer, and the AI rivals are sometimes programmed so they are always near the player with a rubberband effect.
[28] The focus of arcade action games is on the user's reflexes, and many feature very little puzzle-solving, complex thinking, or strategy skills.
Arcade flight games are meant to have an easy learning curve, in order to preserve their action component.
This subgenre of games was largely defined by Hideki Kamiya, creator of the Devil May Cry and Bayonetta franchises.
Coleco famously bested Atari to secure the rights to convert Nintendo's Donkey Kong, which it subsequently included as a pack-in game for the ColecoVision to challenge the VCS.
[36] Arcade conversions typically had to make concessions for the lower computational power and capabilities of the home console, such as limited graphics or alterations in gameplay.
[39] Exact copies of arcade video games can be run through emulators such as MAME on modern devices.
[citation needed] Arcade games are downloaded and emulated through the Nintendo Wii Virtual Console service starting in 2009.
[citation needed] Using emulation, companies like Arcade1Up have produced at-scale or reduced-scale recreations of arcade cabinets using modern technology, such as LCD monitors and lightweight construction.
This list only includes arcade games that either sold more than 10,000 hardware units or generated a revenue of more than $10 million.
