Golden age of arcade video games

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

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. 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. 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.

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. The 1982 film Tron was closely tied to an arcade game of the same name
.

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. 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 arcade game sector revitalized later during the early 1990s particularly with the mainstream success of fighting games.

Time period

Although the exact years differ, most sources agree the period lasted from about the late 1970s to early 1980s.

Technology journalist Jason Whittaker, in The Cyberspace Handbook, places the beginning of the

vector display technology, first seen in arcades in 1977's Space Wars, rose to prominence via Atari's Asteroids. Kent says the period ended in 1983, which saw "a fairly steady decline" in the coin-operated video game business and arcades.[3][4]

microcomputer revolution
.

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.[7] 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".[8]

Business

The golden age was a time of great technical and design creativity in arcade games. The era saw the rapid spread of

Robby Roto failed because they were too complex to learn quickly. Qix was briefly very popular but, Taito's Keith Egging later said, "too mystifying for gamers...impossible to master and when the novelty wore off, the game faded".[15] Around this time, the home video game industry (second-generation video game consoles and early home computer games) emerged as "an outgrowth of the widespread success of video arcades".[16]

In 1980, the U.S. arcade video game industry's revenue generated from quarters tripled to $2.8 billion.[17] By 1981, the arcade video game industry in the United States was generating more than $5 billion a year[1][18] with some estimates as high as $10.5 billion for all video games (arcade and home) in the U.S. that year, which was three times the amount spent on movie tickets in 1981.[19] The total revenue for the U.S. arcade video game industry in 1981 was estimated at more than $7 billion[20] though some analysts estimated the real amount may have been much higher.[20] By 1982, video games accounted for 87% of the $8.9 billion in commercial games sales in the United States.[21] In 1982, the arcade video game industry's revenue in quarters was estimated at $8 billion[22] surpassing the annual gross revenue of both pop music ($4 billion) and Hollywood films ($3 billion) combined that year.[22][23] It also exceeded the revenues of all major sports combined at the time,[23] earning three times the combined ticket and television revenues of Major League Baseball, basketball, and American football, as well as earning twice as much as all the casinos in Nevada combined.[24] This was also more than twice as much revenue as the $3.8 billion generated by the home video game industry (during the second generation of consoles) that same year;[22] both the arcade and home markets combined added up to a total revenue between $11.8 billion and $12.8 billion for the U.S. video game industry in 1982. In comparison, the U.S. video game industry in 2011 generated total revenues between $16.3 billion and $16.6 billion.[25]

Prior to the golden age,

Donkey Kong Junior with 35,000,[34] Mr. Do! with 30,000,[37] and Tempest with 29,000 units.[38] A number of arcade games also generated revenues (from quarters) in the hundreds of millions, including Defender with more than $100 million[18] in addition to many more with revenues in the tens of millions, including Dragon's Lair with $48 million and Space Ace with $13 million.[39]

The most successful arcade game companies of this era included

SNK
also gained popularity around this era.

During this period,

Japanese video game manufacturers became increasingly influential in North America. By 1980, they had become very influential through licensing their games to American manufacturers.[40] Japanese companies eventually moved beyond licensing their games to American companies such as Midway, and by 1981 instead began directly importing machines to the North American market as well as building manufacturing facilities in the United States.[41] By 1982–1983, Japanese manufacturers had more directly captured a large share of the North American arcade market, which Gene Lipkin of Data East USA partly attributed to Japanese companies having more finances to invest in new ideas.[42]

Technology

Arcades catering to video games began to gain momentum in the late 1970s, with

interactive entertainment and for driving down hardware prices to the extent of allowing the personal computer (PC) to become a technological and economic reality.[43]

While color monitors had been used by several

RGB color graphics became widespread, following the release of Galaxian in 1979.[46] Galaxian introduced a tile-based video game graphics system, which reduced processing and memory requirements by up to 64 times compared to the previous framebuffer system used by Space Invaders.[47] This allowed Galaxian to render multi-color sprites,[48] which were animated atop a scrolling starfield backdrop, providing the basis for the hardware developed by Nintendo for arcade games such as Radar Scope (1980) and Donkey Kong followed by the Nintendo Entertainment System console.[49]

The golden age also saw developers experimenting with

Tempest and 1983's Star Wars from Atari. However, vector technology fell out of favor with arcade game companies due to the high cost of repairing vector displays.[citation needed
]

Several developers at the time were also experimenting with

isometric graphics and shadows;[54] and SubRoc-3D, which introduced the use of stereoscopic 3D through a special eyepiece.[55]

This period also saw significant advances in digital audio technology. Space Invaders in 1978 was the first game to use a continuous background soundtrack, with four simple chromatic descending bass notes repeating in a loop, though it was dynamic and changed tempo during stages.[56] Rally-X in 1980 was the first game to feature continuous background music,[57] which was generated using a dedicated sound chip, a Namco 3-channel PSG.[58] That same year saw the introduction of speech synthesis, which was first used in Stratovox, released by Sun Electronics in 1980,[57] followed soon after by Namco's King & Balloon.

Developers also experimented with

Bega's Battle introduced a new form of video game storytelling: using brief full-motion video cutscenes to develop a story between the game's shooting stages, which years later became the standard approach to video game storytelling. By the mid-1980s, the genre dwindled in popularity, as laserdiscs were losing out to the VHS format and the laserdisc games themselves were losing their novelty.[61]

16-bit processors began appearing in several arcade games during this era. Universal's Get A Way (1978) was a sit-down racing game that used a 16-bit CPU,[62] for which it was advertised as the first game to use a 16-bit microcomputer.[63] Another racing game, Namco's Pole Position (1982), used the 16-bit Zilog Z8000 processor.[64] Atari's Food Fight (1983) was one of the earliest games to use the Motorola 68000 processor.[65]

Williams Electronics at the Amusement & Music Operators Association (AMOA) in October 1983,[70] also demonstrated pre-rendered 3D graphics.[71] Atari's I, Robot, developed and released in 1984,[72][73] was the first arcade game to be rendered entirely with real-time 3D computer graphics.[74]

Gameplay

high score.[79] It also had a basic story with animated characters along with a "crescendo of action and climax" which laid the groundwork for later video games, according to Eugene Jarvis.[80]

With the enormous success of Space Invaders, dozens of

cross-hairs on the screen.[85]

Others tried new concepts and defined new genres. Rapidly evolving hardware allowed new kinds of games which allowed for different styles of gameplay. The term "

The two most popular genres during the golden age were space shooters and character action games.

Defender (1981)[86] and Robotron: 2084 (1982)[90] as well as Atari's Asteroids (1979).[91]

Namco's

Venture is dungeon exploration and treasure-gathering. Q*bert plays upon the user's sense of depth perception
to deliver a novel experience.

Popular culture

Donkey Kong

Some games of this era were so widely played that they entered

video game competition and attracted more than 10,000 participants, establishing video gaming as a mainstream hobby.[97] By 1980, 86% of the 13–20 year old population in the United States had played arcade video games,[98] and by 1981, there were more than 35 million gamers visiting video game arcades in the United States.[99]

The game that most affected popular culture in North America was Pac-Man. Its release in 1980 caused such a sensation that it initiated what is now referred to as "Pac-Mania" (which later became the title of the last coin-operated game in the series, released in 1987). Released by Namco, the game featured a yellow, circle-shaped creature trying to eat dots through a maze while avoiding pursuing enemies. Though no one could agree what the "hero" or enemies represented (they were variously referred to as ghosts, goblins or monsters), the game was extremely popular. The game spawned an animated television series, numerous clones, Pac-Man-branded foods, toys, and a hit pop song, "Pac-Man Fever". The game's popularity was such that President Ronald Reagan congratulated a player for setting a record score in Pac-Man.[100] Pac-Man was also responsible for expanding the arcade game market to involve large numbers of female audiences across all age groups.[101] Though many popular games quickly entered the lexicon of popular culture, most have since left, and Pac-Man is unusual in remaining a recognized term in popular culture, along with Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, Mario and Q*bert.

Seen as an additional source of revenue, arcade games began popping up outside of dedicated arcades, including bars, restaurants, movie theaters, bowling alleys, convenience stores, laundromats, gas stations, supermarkets, airports, even dentist and doctor offices.

Showbiz Pizza and Chuck E. Cheese
were founded specifically as restaurants focused on featuring the latest arcade titles.

In 1982, the game show Starcade premiered. The program focused on players competing to achieve high scores on the latest arcade titles, with the chance to win the grand prize of their own arcade machine if they could hit a target score within a specific time frame. The show ran until 1984 on TBS and syndication.

In 1983, an animated television series produced for Saturday mornings called Saturday Supercade featured video game characters from the era, such as Frogger, Donkey Kong, Q*bert, Donkey Kong Jr., Kangaroo, Space Ace, and Pitfall Harry.

Arcade games at the time affected the

electro music genres during the early 1980s.[118] The booming success of video games at the time led to music magazine Billboard listing the 15 top-selling video games alongside their record charts by 1982.[16] More than a decade later, the first electroclash record, I-F's "Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass" (1997), has been described as "burbling electro in a vocodered homage to Atari-era hi-jinks",[119] particularly Space Invaders which it was named after.[120]

Arcade games also influenced the

.

In more recent years, there have been critically acclaimed documentaries based on the golden age of arcade games, such as

Ready Player One (2018) which is based upon the novel by Ernest Cline and directed by Steven Spielberg. Television shows have exhibited arcade games including The Goldbergs and Stranger Things (both of which feature Dragon's Lair
among other games).

Strategy guides

The period saw the emergence of a gaming media, publications dedicated to video games, in the form of video game journalism and strategy guides.[23] The enormous popularity of video arcade games led to the very first video game strategy guides;[126] these guides (rare to find today) discussed in detail the patterns and strategies of each game, including variations, to a degree that few guides seen since can match. "Turning the machine over" - making the score counter overflow and reset to zero - was often the final challenge of a game for those who mastered it, and the last obstacle to getting the highest score.

Some of these strategy guides sold hundreds of thousands of copies at prices ranging from $1.95 to $3.95 in 1982[126] (equivalent to between $6.00 and $12.00 in 2024).[127] That year, Ken Uston's Mastering Pac-Man sold 750,000 copies, reaching No. 5 on B. Dalton's mass-market bestseller list, while Bantam's How to Master the Video Games sold 600,000 copies, appearing on The New York Times mass-market paperback list.[126] By 1983, 1.7 million copies of Mastering Pac-Man had been printed.[128]

List of popular arcade games

The games below are some of the most popular and/or influential games of the era.[129]

Legend
Vector display
Raster display
Name Year Manufacturer Legacy Notes
Space Invaders 1978 Taito (Japan) / Midway (U.S.) Considered the game that revolutionized the video game industry.[130] The first blockbuster video game,[131] it established the shoot 'em up genre,[132] and has influenced most shooter games since.[133]
Galaxian 1979 Namco (Japan) / Midway (U.S.) Created to compete with Space Invaders. The first game to use multi-colored, animated sprites.[134][135] Aliens move in a swooping formation and attack by dive bombing the player's ship.
Lunar Lander
1979 Atari Arcade version of an earlier minicomputer game concept. First Atari coin-op to use vector graphics.
Asteroids 1979 Atari Atari's most successful coin-operated game. It is one of the first to allow players to enter their initials for a high score.
Battlezone 1980 Atari Custom cabinet with novel 2-way dual-joystick controls incorporating top-fire button, and periscope-like viewer.[136] Early use of first-person pseudo 3-D vector graphics. It is widely considered the first virtual reality arcade game.[137] Also used as the basis for a military simulator.[138]
Berzerk
1980 Stern Electronics Early use of speech synthesis was also translated into other languages in Europe. Indestructible adversary appears in order to eliminate lingering players. This became an oft-employed device (e.g. Hallmonsters in Venture) to increase challenge and limit play duration of arcade games.
Missile Command 1980 Atari Theme of the game was influenced by the Cold War era.
Pac-Man 1980 Namco (Japan) / Midway (U.S.) One of the most popular and influential games, it had the first gaming
maze chase genre, opened gaming to female audiences,[139] and introduced power-ups[140] and cutscenes.[141]
Phoenix
1980 Amstar Electronics / Centuri (U.S.) / Taito (Japan) One of the first games with a
boss battle
.
Rally-X 1980 Namco Driving game with overhead, scrolling maze. First game with a
radar.[58]
When released, was predicted to outsell two other new releases: Pac-Man and Defender.
Star Castle 1980 Cinematronics The colors of the rings and screen are provided by a transparent plastic screen overlay.
Wizard of Wor 1980 Midway Allowed two-player competitive or cooperative fighting of monsters in maze-like dungeons.
Centipede 1981 Atari Co-created by programmer Dona Bailey.
Defender
1981
Williams Electronics
Horizontal scrolling space shooting game that was praised for its audio-visuals and gameplay. Was predicted to be outsold by Rally-X, but Defender trounced it, going on to sell 60,000 units.
Tempest
1981 Atari One of the first games to use a color vector display.
Donkey Kong
1981 Nintendo Laid foundations for
platform game genre as well as visual storytelling in video games,[89] and introduced a carpenter protagonist named Jumpman, a character who evolved into Nintendo's mascot, Mario
, in subsequent games.
Frogger 1981 Konami (Japan) / Sega-Gremlin (North America) Novel gameplay notable for being free of fighting and shooting.
Scramble 1981 Konami (Japan) / Stern (North America) First
scrolling shooter
game, featuring forced horizontal scrolling motion.
Galaga 1981 Namco (Japan) / Midway (North America) Space shooting game that leapfrogged its predecessor, Galaxian, in popularity.
Gorf 1981 Midway Multiple-mission fixed shooter game. Some of the levels were clones of other popular games. Notable for featuring robotic synthesized speech.
Qix 1981 Taito The objective is to fence off a supermajority of the play area. Unique gameplay that didn't have shooting, racing, or mazes.
Vanguard 1981 SNK (Japan) / Centuri (US) Early scrolling shooter that scrolls in multiple directions, and allows shooting in four directions,[143][144] using four direction buttons, similar to dual-stick controls.[145] Along with Fantasy, Super Cobra and Bosconian, is significant as being among the first video games with a continue screen.[146]
BurgerTime 1982
Bally Midway
(US)
Platform game where the protagonist builds hamburgers while being pursued by food. Original title changed from Hamburger when brought to the U.S. from Japan.
Dig Dug 1982 Namco (Japan) / Atari (North America) Novel gameplay where underground adversaries were defeated by inflating them or dropping rocks on them. Rated the sixth most popular coin-operated video game of all time.[147]
Donkey Kong Jr. 1982 Nintendo Jumpman was renamed Mario in this sequel. This was the only time Nintendo's mascot was featured as an antagonist in any of their games.
Front Line 1982 Taito One of the first of many 1980s games with commando-style infantry ground combat (guns, grenades and tanks) as the theme.
Joust
1982
Williams Electronics
Allowed two-player cooperative or competitive play.
Jungle King 1982 Taito An early side-scrolling (and diagonal-scrolling) platformer with vine-swinging mechanics, run & jump sequences, climbing hills, and swimming. Almost immediately re-released as Jungle Hunt due to a lawsuit from the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate claiming character copyright infringement on the character of Tarzan. This version changed the Tarzan character to a pith helmet-wearing white explorer.[148]
Kangaroo 1982 Sunsoft (Japan) / Atari (US) Unusual for a platform game, there is no jump button. Instead, the player pushes up—or up and diagonally—to jump.
Moon Patrol 1982
Williams Electronics
(U.S.)
Along with Jungle Hunt, one of the first arcade games with parallax scrolling.[149]
Ms. Pac-Man 1982 Midway (North America) / Namco One of the most popular of all time, this game was created from a
hack
of Pac-Man. It has four different mazes and moving bonus fruit.
Pengo 1982 Sega A maze game set in an environment full of ice blocks, which can be used by the player's penguin, who can slide them to attack enemies.[150]
Pole Position 1982 Namco (Japan) / Atari (U.S.) After Sega's Turbo revolutionized sprite scaling with their third-person cockpit racer, Namco brought 16-bit graphics to the arcade, dropped the player's perspective closer to being directly behind the car, and added dramatic curves to the track. The game also incorporated product placements for companies (including licensee Atari) on passing billboards.
Popeye 1982 Nintendo Nintendo used higher resolution foreground sprites displayed over lower resolution backgrounds,
Donkey Kong was originally intended to be made with Popeye characters, but at the time, Nintendo was unsuccessful at securing the licensing from King Features Syndicate.[153]
Q*bert 1982 Gottlieb Became one of the most merchandised arcade games behind
Donkey Kong.[154][155]
Robotron 2084
1982
Williams Electronics
Popularized the dual joystick control scheme.
Gravitar 1982 Atari Not popular in the arcades due to its difficulty, but the gameplay inspired many clones like Thrust and Oids.
Time Pilot 1982 Konami (Japan) / Centuri (U.S.) Time travel themed aerial combat game with free-roaming gameplay in open air space that scrolls indefinitely in all directions, with player's plane always remaining centered.[156][157][158]
Tron 1982
Bally Midway
Earned more than the film it was based on.[159] Gameplay consists of four subgames.
Xevious 1982 Namco (Japan) / Atari (U.S.) The first arcade video game to have a TV commercial.
scrolling shooters.[81]
Zaxxon 1982 Sega First game to employ
isometric axonometric projection
, which the game was named after.
Crystal Castles 1983 Atari Among the first arcade games which do not loop back to earlier stages as the player progresses, but instead offers a defined ending.[161]
Champion Baseball 1983 Sega A sports video game that became a major arcade success in Japan, with Sega comparing its success there to that of Space Invaders.[162] It was a departure from the "space games" and "cartoon games" that had previously dominated the arcades,[162] and went on to serve as the prototype for later baseball video games.[163][164]
Dragon's Lair 1983 Cinematronics (U.S.) / Atari (Europe) / Sidam (Italy) An early
laserdisc video game, which allowed film-quality animation. The first arcade video game in the United States to charge two quarters per play.[165] It was also the first video game to employ what became known as the quick time event
. This game is one of three arcade games that are part of the Smithsonian's permanent collection, along with Pac-Man and Pong.
Elevator Action 1983 Taito An action game that is a mix of platformer, puzzle and shooter genres.
Gyruss 1983 Konami (Japan) / Centuri (U.S.) Often remembered for its musical score that plays throughout the game, Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D minor".[166]
Mappy 1983
Bally Midway
(U.S.)
Side-scrolling platform game
Mario Bros. 1983 Nintendo A game featuring simultaneous play with Mario and his brother Luigi as Italian-American plumbers in pest-inhabited sewers. Introduced Luigi for the first time, while also establishing he and Mario as plumbers.
Sinistar 1983
Williams Electronics
First game to use stereo sound. It was also the first to use the 49-way, custom-designed optical joystick that Williams had produced specifically for this game. Notable for appearance of menacing villain.
Spy Hunter 1983
Bally Midway
Overhead view, vehicular combat game that is memorable for its music, "The Peter Gunn Theme", that plays throughout the game.
Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulator 1983 Sega
vector games released.[167]
Star Wars
1983 Atari Uses several digitized samples of actors' voices from the film.
Tapper
1983
Bally Midway
Originally aligned with American beer
Budweiser
, was revamped as Root Beer Tapper, so as not to be construed as attempting to peddle alcohol to minors.
Track & Field 1983 Konami (Japan) / Centuri (North America) The first arcade
Olympic sports video game. It helped popularize arcade sports games, which began being produced at levels not seen since the days of Pong and its clones a decade earlier.[168]
1942 1984 Capcom Capcom's first arcade hit. Features Pacific War air combat. Standardized the template for aerial shoot 'em ups featuring vertical scrolling.
Karate Champ 1984 Technōs Japan/ Data East (US) The first popular player vs. player fighting game for arcades.[169] Initially released as a dual joystick game with alternating play. The subsequent Player vs. Player version featured four 4-way joysticks.
Kung-Fu Master 1984 Irem (Japan) / Data East (US) The first side-scrolling beat-em-up arcade game.[170]
Punch-Out!! 1984 Nintendo A boxing fighting game featuring digitized voices, dual monitors, and a third-person perspective.
Paperboy 1985 Atari Novel controls and high resolution display.

List of best-selling arcade games

For arcade games, success was usually judged by either the number of

arcade hardware units sold to operators, or the amount of revenue generated, from the number of coins (such as quarters or 100 yen coins) inserted into machines,[171]
and/or the hardware sales (with arcade hardware prices often ranging from $1000 to $4000). This list only includes arcade games that have sold more than 10,000 hardware units.

Decline and aftermath

The golden age cooled around the mid-1980s as copies of popular games began to saturate the arcades. Arcade video game revenues in the United States had declined from $8 billion in 1981 to $5 billion in 1983,[187] reaching a low of $4 billion in 1984.[188][189] The arcade market had recovered by 1986, with the help of software conversion kits, the arrival of popular beat 'em up games (such as Kung-Fu Master and Renegade), and advanced motion simulator games (such as Sega's "taikan" games including Hang-On, Space Harrier, Out Run and After Burner).[188]

Arcades remained commonplace through to the 1990s as there were still new genres being explored. In 1987, arcades experienced a short resurgence with

run and gun shooter genres.[189] However, the growth of home video game systems such as the Nintendo Entertainment System led to another brief arcade decline toward the end of the 1980s.[188][190][191] In the early 1990s, the Genesis (Mega Drive outside most of North America) and Super NES
(Super Famicom in Japan) greatly improved home play and some of their technology was even integrated into a few video arcade machines.

In the early 1990s, the release of

pseudo-3D graphics to true real-time 3D polygon graphics.[87][190] This was largely driven by a technological arms race between Sega and Namco.[195]

By the early 2000s, the sales of arcade machines in North America had declined, with 4,000 unit sales being considered a hit by the time.

personal computers
that sapped interest from arcades.

Since the 2000s, arcade games have taken different routes globally. In the United States, arcades have become niche markets as they compete with the home console market, and they adapted other business models, such as providing other entertainment options or adding prize redemptions.[197] In Japan, some arcades continue to survive in the early 21st century, with games like Dance Dance Revolution and The House of the Dead tailored to experiences that players cannot easily have at home.[198]

Legacy

The Golden Age of Video Arcade Games spawned numerous cultural icons and even gave some companies their identity. Elements from games such as

Donkey Kong, Frogger, and Centipede
are still recognized in today's popular culture, and new entries in the franchises for some golden age games continued to be released decades later.

Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. for their cultural impact in the United States. No other video game has been inducted since.[199]

emulators can now run copies of the original console ROMs without porting the code to the new systems.

See also

References

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  2. .
  3. .
  4. ^ .
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  13. , To cash in on the Pac-Man video mania, game developers also introduced Asteroids, Frogger, Donkey Kong, Tron, and hundreds more. By 1982, arcade games had become a multi-billion dollar industry. In that year alone, almost 500,000 machines were sold at prices ranging as high as $3000 each.
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  19. , In 1981, $10.5 billion was spent on all features of video games, 3 times the amount spent on movie tickets that year (Surrey, 1982, p. 74).
  20. ^ , retrieved February 25, 2012, The figure of more than $7 billion for last year's video arcade game revenues is a conservative one. Some industry analysts estimate that the real amount spent on video games was as much as five times higher.
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  22. ^ , Video game machines have an average weekly take of $109 per machine. The video arcade industry took in $8 billion in quarters in 1982, surpassing pop music (at $4 billion in sales per year) and Hollywood films ($3 billion). Those 32 billion arcade games played translate to 143 games for every man, woman, and child in America. A recent Atari survey showed that 86 percent of the US population from 13 to 20 has played some kind of video game and an estimated 8 million US homes have video games hooked up to the television set. Sales of home video games were $3.8 billion in 1982, approximately half that of video game arcades.
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  26. ^ Jiji Gaho Sha, inc. (2003), Asia Pacific perspectives, Japan, vol. 1, University of Virginia, p. 57, At that time, a game for use in entertainment arcades was considered a hit if it sold 1000 units; sales of Space Invaders topped 300,000 units in Japan and 60,000 units overseas.
  27. ^ . Retrieved February 12, 2012. Estimates counted 7 billion coins that by 1982 had been inserted into some 400,000 Pac Man machines worldwide, equal to one game of Pac Man for every person on earth. US domestic revenues from games and licensing of the Pac Man image for T-shirts, pop songs, to wastepaper baskets, etc. exceeded $1 billion.
  28. , The machines were well worth the investment; in total they raked in over a billion dollars worth of quarters in the first year alone.
  29. . It became arguably the most famous video game of all time, with the arcade game alone taking in more than a billion dollars, and one study estimated that it had been played more than 10 billion times during the twentieth century.
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  31. ^ a b "Space Invaders vs. Star Wars", Executive, vol. 24, Southam Business Publications, p. 9, 1982, They compare this to the box office movie top blockbuster Star Wars, which has taken in only $486 million, for a net of $175 million.
  32. , Rumors emerged that the unknown creator of Pac-Man had left the industry when he received only a $3500 bonus for creating the highest-grossing video game of all time.
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Further reading

  • The Official Price Guide to Classic Video Games by

External links