The history of Arcade Machines

Computer gaming started in the 1958 when the game Tennis for Two was build using equipment remaining from the second world war . The game itself was very simple and featured a side view of a table tennis table with a ball and paddles. After that in 1962 to the second computer game was made Spacewars, this game featured to players flying around a small star attempting to shoot each other while being dragged towards the small star placed in the centre of the screen.

After the success of Tennis for Two and Spacewars other people began to try and build there own arcade machine in order to be part of this fast to craze. One of the main people that did this was Nolan Bushnell who later co-founded Atari. Nolan Bushnell was one of the first people to realise that you could make a large amount of money so he built a very simple game called Pong the game featured the overview of a table-tennis court with a ball and two paddles. The game was so successful that there were reports of machines breaking due to the large amounts of coins being inserted into the machines on a daily bases. This was the main reason that atari had such a large control over the market, there wasn't much of an advantage it was merely they were first to establish their name in the market. Along with pong being realised in 1972 the Magnavox Odyssey was realised as the first home game console it featured several simple games all featuring different versions of Pongs.
At this point arcade machines such as Pong are dominating the market because graphics, sound and designs of the games, while home game consoling was still lacking being unable to compete with the higher level of quality offered by Arcade machines.

After the success of Pong, many more companies during 1975 began to try and enter the arcade market one of which was a game called Gun Fight and it was the first arcade machine to use a micro-processor because it gave the game better graphics and a much smooth animation. The game featured human to human combat and had a simple scoring system.


The years between 1978 and 1986 are refereed to as the golden ages of arcade machines is because arcade machines still had better processing power than the home consoles of that era so they had a very market using these machines instead of buying the consoles at home.
The machine said to have started the golden age is Space Invaders, This game is famous around the world for a number of reasons one of which is that it was the first game to have an increasing difficultly. The increasing difficultly wasn't actually part of the program because at the time the process wasn't quite powerful to move all the enemies around the screen so as the player begins to destroy the targets, The process begins to be able to handle moving the remain enemies around the screen so they begin to increase speed.
During this period due to the mass of money being made the technology involved increased dramaticly with stronger microprocessors allowing them to increase the gap of quality between Arcade and Home Console.

Over the years of 1978 to 1986 the Arcade Industry increased dramaticly due to two of the three many companies in the race to control the market, Sega and Nintendo both of these companies trying to out do the other and get full control of the industry, This meant they both were trying to improve their the technology so things like micro-processors became a lot more powerful and new interesting graphics were made to try and control the market.


After 1986 arcade machines began to lose there grip over the market because home consoles were finally able to keep up with the level of quality provided. This also meant that people were able to see that it was able to buy a home console because you would only have to pay once rather than have to constantly put money in to play just a single game while with a home console you were able to play a large number of different games once you had the game console. While the Arcade machine market is a former shadow of what is was in the "golden age" there are still a new game machines being made every year but they no longer have the perks of better graphics and sound quality but instead had to cope with the fact that it was easier to buy a home console because u could have a large number of games and you wouldn't have to keep adding coins into the machines.