Arcade gaming is one of those things from the past that people look back on with nostalgia. Some of us remember the fun from our younger days, and others take their knowledge from 80s movies and shows like Stranger Things. 

Either way, like many other retro trends, those simple games keep coming back from time to time. And we couldn’t be happier about it. 

The Golden Era

A typical game we used to see at the arcade was installed in the coin-operated entertainment machines. For a fixed price, you had a certain amount of credits to use on a game of your choice. The origins of such entertainment go back to the 1930s when the first coin-operated pinball machines gained recognition, or even before that. Real breakthroughs of arcade gaming development were made possible by the introduction of electro-mechanical games, such as Sega’s Periscope, as well as video games. 

The sudden growth in the quality and complexity of the latter contributed largely to the appearance of what we could call the golden era of arcade gaming. The exact dates when arcades were in their heyday are hard to pinpoint, but mostly, it was the 80s.

The increased popularity of arcades had a lot to do with increased power in computing technology with a simultaneous drop in the costs. This made it possible for developers to make more complicated quality games available to everyone. One of the milestones that put a distinctive mark on the timeline surely has to be the release of Space Invaders in 1978 – a first blockbuster arcade video game, but other interesting titles were coming out as well. 

Something To Stretch The Brain

Shooting and breaking things might very well be the foundation that the phenomenon of arcade gaming was built upon, but there is undoubtedly more to it than that. An exciting type of arcade games from the logic or casino games genre is video poker. It has been around since the 1980s and became significantly popular in the casinos, where people felt less intimidated to try and play on their own than attending tables and dealing with a human factor. 

With numerous valuable poker websites available these days, video poker does not seem like much, but it is quite entertaining and comes in plenty of variants. People still seem to be enjoying it, and several machines for video poker are an essential element of any respectable casino’s interior.

The Best Of The Best Arcades Of All Time

A variety of stimulating and entertaining arcade games have been made throughout the years. Some of the classics such as air-hockey, billiards, boxing games, electronic dartboards, or even photo booths – are known and appreciated today. They made it to modern-day arcades, fairs, and festivals, or workplaces. Perhaps, however, the video games are the ones that made the biggest impression on our collective minds. 

Apart from the abovementioned hit from the shoot’em up genre, more interesting propositions became popular with the players and made their creators a lot of money. Among them, we can distinguish titles like Street Fighter II, Asteroids, Mortal Kombat, and Mortal Kombat II, Donkey Kong, and NBA Jam. But the famous Pac-Man has to be declared the most prominent of them all. This sensation from 1980 had an estimated 30 million active players across the United States by the year of 1982.