Social Trend - The Arcade Gamer

The Arcade Started in the early1970's with coin operated arcade machines.Sega, a Japanese gaming company, created one of the earliest arcade games was named Periscope. Periscope was a submarine simulator and light gun shooter, which used lights and plastic waves to simulate sinking ships from a submarine hit. This arcade game was the first ever to use a quarter coin to play and was a huge success in North-America, Europe and Japan. The quarter later became used as a standard cost to arcade machines. 

After a huge success another game called duck hunt was created. The thing that attracted the users the most about this game was the light gun attachment that you could use to simulate hunting ducks on a machine. The game was very straight forward, you had a number of ducks you had to hit in order to win the level, using a limited amount of shots. 

Seeing Sega's huge success, other companies tried to do allot of arcade machine games which included racing games, shooting game but mostly semi-realistic simulators. All these games that were coming out caused a shortage of quarters that later the supply of quarters had to be increased because they where all in these machines. In 1972 Pong was created and this caused a great increase in arcade machine popularity due to competitive edge that 2 players can have with each other. People would queue up in front of the machine and play for countless hours in order to filter out the best player among them all. Later in 1978 another game came out called Space Invaders. Space invaders had allot of game variations to offer and was very cost efficient and fun to play. Player would compete to see who could get the highest score.

This huge phenomenon of arcade gaming was eventually being replaced by home consoles. The thing was that having an arcade game at the comfort of your own home was much comfortable than having to go down the pizza parlor and spend countless hours standing on your feet playing or even waiting in line to play. The advantage that arcade machines had was that they only costed a quarter to play and people that could not afford home consoles could still enjoy some good gaming. The other part was that arcade gaming encouraged socializing with other people and so the trend although it was declining it held on through the year 2000 where it's profits went down from 1.2b to 800mill. 

Nowadays arcade gaming has lost allot of its flow mainly because high power consoles and pcs are easier accessible and you can play online with multiple friends sitting on your own sofa , plus the graphics are always getting more realistic, instead of that raster 16 bit color graphics on the arcade machine. So it very unlikely that this trend will re-emerge, but its nice to go to an arcade store and play an arcade game with your friends once in a while, just to feel a bit more haptic. Without arcade gaming, competitive play would be allot different because this was the foundation that gave players the feeling of winning over an opponent using skill, so it a very important part in the gaming history we know today.

Bibliography:
Wikipedia, (2015). Arcade game. [online] Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcade_game [Accessed 6 May 2015].

Machine, S. and Machine, S. (2015). Space Invaders Arcade Machine at Firebox.com. [online] Firebox. Available at: http://www.firebox.com/product/847/Space-Invaders-Arcade-Machine [Accessed 6 May 2015].

Wikipedia, (2015). Duck Hunt. [online] Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_Hunt [Accessed 6 May 2015].