Limitations of the Arcade Machine

 

Gaming began in the early 70's with the Arcade machine, this was a television screen inside a cabinet that you activated with the insertion of money, after a certain amount of time or lives, the game would end and so you would have to put more money in the machine to play it.

The Arcade Machine first appeared in 1971, when students at Stanford University set up the Galaxy Game, a coin-operated version of the Spacewar video game. The students that programmed the game were Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck. This is the earliest known instance of a coin-operated video game. Later in the same year, Nolan Bushnell created the first mass-manufactured such game,Computer Space, for Nutting Associates.

After this large companies realised that there is a lot of money to be made in Arcade Machines, and so, they began to manufacture their own games



Computer Space Arcade System

 In 1972, Atari was formed by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, originally an engineering firm called Syzygy Engineering in 1971 where they made a revolutionary arcade game, Computer Space. Atari essentially created the coin-operated video game industry with the game Pong, the first successful electronic ping pong video game. Pong proved to be popular, but imitators helped keep Atari from dominating the fledgling coin-operated video game market.
Atari is responsible for a lot of the progress games have made today, a lot of the games they released inspired the chain of events that took place to take gaming to where it is today. Games such as Pong, Space Invaders and Centipede

Following this chain-reaction the popularity of Arcade Machines sky rocketed, they were seen in most pubs, bars and even restaurants!
Although the Arcade Machine was popular, it had many limitations and flaws that some people may have not cared about back then. For example the main limitation being the most obvious thing about it, you had to go to it and spend money every time you wanted to play it. People back then wouldn't have cared because they didn't have Home Consoles, but this is one of the main reasons why people went on to invent Home Consoles in the first place.
In the 1990's there was a noticeable decline in the amount of arcade machines, this was because they simply began dying out as they became less popular due to the production of home consoles.
In the late 80's and early 90's a lot of consoles were made rendering arcade machines useless as a person could buy a game once and play it as many times as they wanted. There was even the production of one of the first hand held consoles, the Nintendo Game Boy in 1989.
Nintendo and Sega

Donkey Kong Arcade Game play

Nintendo and Sega today are two of the most successful game companies in the world, and are largely responsible for the way we see games today, starting with very influential and successful games that they released as arcade machines.
Nintendo even revolutionised the way we play game with their arcade game Wild Gunman released in 1874 and was a Light Gun Shooter game, so the player was given a gun shaped controller so they could aim at the screen and fire, this drove the player to eel like an even bigger part of the game.
Other influential arcade games they made were:
Space Firebird, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., Mario Punch-out

A lot of these game were created by one of Nintendo's Leading game designers, Shigeru Miyamoto, he is responsible for all of the signature Nintendo Series, such as Mario, Zelda, Pikmin etc.

Sega also influenced the game world with arcade games such as Duck Hunt, which was also a Light Gun Shooter Game that involved shooting ducks. As with Nintendo's Gunman, this game sucked the player deeper into the game and made them feel like more of a part of it.
The most popular Sega Character would have to be Sonic The Hedgehog, siimply because players enjoyed running to the right of the screen at high speeds.