'' is the first commercially successful arcade video game.
Games of skill were popular
amusement-park midway attractions from the 19th century on. With the introduction of electricity and coin-operated machines, they facilitated a viable
business. When
pinball machines with electric lights and displays were introduced in 1933 (but without the user-controller
flippers which would not be invented until 1947) these machines were seen as
games of luck. Numerous states and cities treated them as amoral playthings for rebellious young people, and banned them into the 1960s and 1970s.
Electro-mechanical games (EM games) appeared in
arcades in the mid-20th century. Following
Sega's EM game
Periscope (1966), the arcade industry experienced a "technological renaissance" driven by "audio-visual" EM novelty games, establishing the arcades as a suitable environment for the introduction of commercial video games in the early 1970s. In the late 1960s, college student
Nolan Bushnell had a part-time job at an arcade where he became familiar with EM games watching customers play and helping to maintain the machinery, while learning the game business. The
early mainframe game Spacewar! (1962) inspired the first commercial arcade video game,
Computer Space (1971), created by Nolan Bushnell and
Ted Dabney and released by
Nutting Associates. It was demonstrated at the Amusement & Music Operators Association (AMOA) show in October 1971. Another
Spacewar-inspired coin-operated video game,
Galaxy Game, was demonstrated at
Stanford University in November 1971. Bushnell and Dabney followed their
Computer Space success to create - with the help of
Allan Alcorn - a table-tennis game,
Pong, released in 1972.
Pong became a commercial success, leading numerous other coin-op manufacturers to enter the market. The novelty of arcade games waned sharply after 1982 due to several factors, including
market saturation of arcades and arcade games and a
moral panic over video games (similar to fears raised over pinball machines in the decades prior). 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 (1984) and
Renegade (1986–1987)), and advanced
motion simulator games (such as Sega's "taikan" games including
Hang-On (1985),
Space Harrier (1985), and
Out Run (1986)). 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. Arcade games continued to improve with the development of technology and of gameplay. In the early 1990s, the release of
Capcom's
Street Fighter II established the modern style of
fighting games and led to a number of similar games such as
Mortal Kombat,
Fatal Fury,
Killer Instinct,
Virtua Fighter, and
Tekken, creating a new renaissance in the arcades. Another factor was realism, including the "3D Revolution" from
2D and
pseudo-3D graphics to "true"
real-time 3D polygon graphics. This was largely driven by a technological
arms-race between
Sega and
Namco. During the early 1990s games such as Sega's
Virtua Racing and
Virtua Fighter popularized 3D-polygon technology in arcades. 3D graphics later became popular in console and computer games by the mid-1990s, though arcade systems such as the
Sega Model 3 remained considerably more advanced than home systems in the late 1990s. Until about 1996, arcade video-games had remained the largest segment of the global
video-game industry. Arcades declined in the late 1990s, surpassed by the console market for the first time around 1997–1998. 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 have adapted other business models, such as providing other entertainment options or adding prize redemptions. In Japan, where arcades continue to flourish, games like
Dance Dance Revolution and
The House of the Dead aim to deliver tailored experiences that players cannot easily have at home. ==Technology==