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LadyMarrowind

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Hi, I'm doing a presentation about the Golden Age of Arcade Machines for my senior final project in high school. I have all of the vital information written down for the period of time but I was hoping that any of you could give me ideas or tips on what I should make sure that is included.
Is there any highly important games that I should be sure to show my class in a slide show? Certain small videos? Fun facts?
I could really use some advice, and with your help I know I can create something spectacular:)
 
Here is a good article about how arcades began and got popular.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/143179/the_history_of_arcade_games.html?cat=19

There are other things like this if you search for arcade history on the web. Just watch out for those that talk about "video games" as they usually talk about home console stuff.

You may also want to research the "death of the golden age of the arcade", and see if you can come to your own conclusion as to whether it was caused by the proliferation of home consoles (like the new Nintendo Entertainment System - or NES), or something else entirely...
 
I'm not sure of the actual focus of your report. Not sure if you are focusing on the industry or the specifics of the game play and evolution of games themselves. Or for that matter if you are going for all of it.

You might mention the progression from black and white games to vector to color raster games. I would of course mention computer space as it's generally considered the first notable arcade game. Pong because of it's popularity. Nolan Bushnell and the start of Atari and for that matter his role in Chuck E cheese. Asteroids probably deserves a mention. Pretty sure it was Atari's biggest selling title ever IIRC. The Japanese of course need to be mentioned as they were a huge part of classic gaming. Taito created many great titles. Space invaders must be mentioned as it was hugely popular. I believe it actually caused a coin shortage in Japan due to it's popularity. Nintendo of course is hugely important too. interesting company being that they started out as a playing card company and ended up in the arcade/video game market. The story of radar scope and it's failing sales and how that lead to the creation of donkey kong and jump man who was eventually reintroduced as mario is certainly worth mentioning. Of course Namco should be mentioned for creating pac man. The story of ms pac is also an interesting one in itself. I always find the fact that ms pac was hugely popular but never released in arcade form in Japan to be an interesting tidbit. Tron might be worth a mention as it's timely with the release of the new movie and kind of interesting that the game was more popular than the movie. Not sure but it may have also been the first video game that was tied to a movie. I would probably point out that these games were probably the first computers that people from the era were introduced to. They only had a single function and nobody really thought of them as computers but they of course have mother boards and processors and although not keyboards they still had controls that interface to allow input commands for functions and of course a screen to view the data/game.
 
Awesome video! I didnt know about the coin shortage. Makes me wish I was old enough to enjoy the arcades back then
 
be sure to stress the FACT that they were not places for nerds to hang out...
 
Fun facts?
I could really use some advice, and with your help I know I can create something spectacular:)

There's tons of fun facts about arcade machines, such as:

An Electrohome G07 monitor has a cap screened wrong on the board: C302.
Some versions were shipped with incorrect resistors in the negative sync... oh, wait, these probably aren't the fun facts you're interested in.

Ahem.

How about this? Mario's first appearance was in Donkey Kong, and his name was Jumpman. Mario was the villan in Donkey Kong Jr.
Or how Donkey Kong was originally conceived as a conversion for existing (poor selling) Radar Scope games - early Donkey Kong cabinets were red, since they were Radar Scopes with new artwork and ROMs.

If you go to www.klov.com, and look up the articles on various games, then you'll get all kinds of interesting stuff about the most popular ones.

Don't forget to mention how many more games there were outside of what we now know as "the classics". Lots of manufacturers had their try at games, and a lot of them get forgotten. There were lots of games that were not "hits". Sure, everybody knows about Tempest, Asteroids, Pac-Man, Galaga, etc - but how many people remember Domino Man, Zoo Keeper or Crazy Climber? All great games that most people seem to have forgotten about.

-Ian
 
Thank you so much! This was all very helpful. I'm sure my classmates will be facinated with it all, its kinda hard not to be.
Everyone loves videogames, at least high schoolers do.
I will stress that not just nerds were at arcades- cool people too. ;)
 
Thats a really weird article... but interesting. I wouldn't want to show the myth to my classmates in fear of bismirching the presentation as a whole.
The game reminds me of the Pokemon "Lavender Town Syndrome".
 
I always liked this little fun fact... Galaxian was the first arcade game to have color graphics. Other games before Galaxian achieved color using tinted monitor overlays. Always also liked how Space Invaders was so popular in Japan it caused a Yen shortage.

I try to put a little history in some of my game stories on my site and sometimesd in my videos as well. Not sure if any of it would help you but your wlecome to it.
 
What about BattleZone becoming the Bradley Fighter for the military or that poor kid that died playing Frenzy (or was it Berzerk)?

Scott C.
 
I did not know that Galaxian was the first color monitor, that was interesting.
I also didn't know about the Bradley Fighter thing... thanks :)
This is so much very helpful.
 
I did not know that Galaxian was the first color monitor, that was interesting.

I don't think it was actually the first game with a color monitor. It was the first game with all the graphics in full RGB color. I believe that there were some other games, using color monitors, but with simple solid color graphics.

Another useless bit of trivia, the first game to use a ROM chip for graphic data was Atari's Tank. Previous games used diodes, since the graphics were such simple shapes. Many early black and white games don't even have processors - they're implemented solely with discrete TTL logic. Pong and Breakout are made like this... and this is also why they're not in MAME. MAME can only emulate microprocessor games, but Pong and Breakout have no ROMs, no program code, and no CPU.

-Ian
 
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