Arcade Games

Arcade games often have very short levels, simple, easy to grasp controllers, iconic characters, and rapidly increasing difficulty. They are designed as quick bursts of adrenaline-fueled thrills, as opposed to most console games, which feature more in-depth gameplay, and stronger storylines. This is due to being coin-operated, where the player is essentially renting the game for as long as their game avatar can stay alive (or until they run out of tokens). Games on consoles or PCs can be referred to as an "arcade game" if it shares these qualities, or if it's a direct port of an arcade title.

Arcade racing games are those which have a simplified physics engine and do not require much learning time, in opposition to racing simulators. Cars can turn sharply without losing speed or overdrifting, and the AI rivals are sometimes programmed so they are always near the player (rubberband effect).

The first popular "arcade games" were early amusement park midway games such as shooting galleries, ball toss games, and the earliest coin-operated machines, such as those which claim to tell a person their fortune or played mechanical music. Although none of these were coin-operated games themselves, the old midways of 1920s-era amusement parks (such as Coney Island in New York) provided the inspiration and atmosphere of later arcade games.

In the 1930s, the earliest coin-operated pinball machines were made. These early amusement devices were distinct from their later electronic cousins in that they were made of wood, did not have plungers or lit-up bonus surfaces on the playing field, and used mechanical instead of electronic scoring readouts. By around 1977, most pinball machines in production switched to using solid state electronics for both operation and scoring.

In 1972, Atari was formed by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. Atari essentially created the coin-operated video game industry with the game PONG, the smash hit electronic ping pong video game. PONG proved to be popular, but imitators helped keep Atari from dominating the fledging coin-operated videogame market. Nonetheless, video game arcades sprang up in shopping malls and small, "corner arcades" appeared in restaurants, grocery stores, bars and movie theaters all over the United States and other countries during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Games such as Space Invaders (1978), Galaxian (1979), Pac-Man (1980), Battlezone (1980), and Donkey Kong (1981) were especially popular.