Electro-mechanical game
[5] Coin-operated arcade amusements based on games of skill emerged around the turn of the 20th century, such as fortune telling, strength tester machines and mutoscopes.
[13] From the late 1960s, EM games incorporated more elaborate electronics and mechanical action to create a simulated environment for the player.
[15][5] A new category of "audio-visual" novelty games emerged during this era, mainly established by several Japanese arcade manufacturers.
[16] Periscope, a submarine simulator and light gun shooter,[17] was released by Nakamura Manufacturing Company (later called Namco) in 1965[18] and then by Sega in 1966.
[a] Their "audio-visual" games were exported internationally to North America and Europe, selling in large quantities that had not been approached by most arcade machines in years.
[5] This led to a "technological renaissance" in the late 1960s, which would later be critical in establishing a healthy arcade environment for video games to flourish in the 1970s.
[5] Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, when he was a college student, worked at an arcade where he became familiar with EM games such as Chicago Coin's Speedway (1969), watching customers play and helping to maintain the machinery, while learning how it worked and developing his understanding of how the game business operates.
[9] It was a fresh approach to gun games that Sega introduced with Duck Hunt, which began location testing in 1968 and released in January 1969.
[27][28][29] Missile, a shooter and vehicular combat game released by Sega in 1969, had electronic sound and a moving film strip to represent the targets on a projection screen.
A two-way joystick with a fire button was used to shoot and steer the missile onto oncoming planes displayed on a screen, while two directional buttons were used to move the player's tank; when a plane is hit, an animated explosion appears on screen, accompanied by the sound of an explosion.
[16] Missile became a major arcade hit for Sega in the United States, inspiring a number of manufacturers to produce similar games.
[5] Sega's Jet Rocket, developed in 1969,[13] was a combat flight simulator featuring cockpit controls that could move the player aircraft around a landscape displayed on a screen and shoot missiles onto targets that explode when hit.
[33] The game displayed three-dimensional terrain with buildings, produced using a new type of special belt technology along with fluorescent paint to simulate a night view.
[13] Sega released several other similar EM flight combat games, including Dive Bomber (1971) and Air Attack (1972).
[36] Tomohiro Nishikado developed the target shooting EM game Sky Fighter, released by Taito in 1971.
The game used mirrors to project images of model planes in front of a moving sky-blue background from a film canister on a rotating drum.
The game was a hit, but too large for most locations, so it was followed by a scaled-down version, Sky Fighter II, which sold 3,000 arcade cabinets.
[26] In 1974, Nintendo released Wild Gunman, a light-gun shooter based on the Laser Clay Shooting System that used full-motion video-projection from 16 mm film to display live-action cowboy opponents on the screen.
The San Francisco based Multiplex Company used its "rotating cylindrical hologram" technology to provide animation for several shooting games from Kasco and Midway.
[38] Kasco's Bank Robbers[b] was a commercial success, becoming the eighth highest-grossing EM arcade game of 1978 in Japan.
[41] One of the last EM games from Sega was Heli-Shooter (1977), a combat flight simulator that combines the use of a CPU processor with electro-mechanical components, screen projection and audio tape deck.
[42][43] In Japan, it was one of the top ten highest-grossing EM arcade games of 1977,[44] and it released in North America the same year.
[47] It had a circular racetrack with rival cars painted on individual rotating discs illuminated by a lamp,[5] which produced colorful graphics[5] projected using mirrors to give a pseudo-3D first-person perspective on a screen,[9][48][49] resembling a windscreen view.
[5] Other EM racing games derived from Indy 500 included Namco's Racer and Sega's Grand Prix,[14] the latter a 1969 release that similarly had a first-person view, electronic sound, a dashboard with a racing wheel and accelerator,[51] and a forward-scrolling road projected on a screen.
[52] Taito's similar 1970 rear-projection driving game Super Road 7 involved driving a car down an endlessly scrolling road while having to dodge cars, which inspired Tomohiro Nishikado to develop the Taito racing video game Speed Race (1974).
[14] There were also two EM racing games from 1971 that gave the illusion of three-dimensional holography, Bally's Road Runner and Sega's Monte Carlo.
