An OK article but there wasn't much new in there and there were a number of inaccuracies
"…It is also undeniable, however, that the video game arcade would not have happened without him"
I suppose this one is a matter of opinion but I don't think it's at all "undeniable" that the video game arcade wouldn't have happened without Bushnell. My feeling is that if he and Dabney didn't create the arcade video game, someone else would have..
"By definition, an "amusement arcade" is a place that houses coin-operated machines, and for the first half of the 20th century, that meant pinball"
Not exactly. I don't think pinball really came to the fore until the depression, and that was over half way through "the first half of the 20th century"
Before that I think gun games, fortune tellers, jukeboxes/coin-op phonographs, Mutoscope/kinetoscope/peep shows, strength testers etc. predominated. If you'd gone into a penny arcade in the first two decades of the century, I think you'd have been hard pressed to find a lot of pinball/bagatelle machines.
"The first successful coin-operated game was called Baffle Ball"
Again, not exactly. It may not have even been the first popular pinball machine. I think Whiffle came out a bit before Baffle Ball. And there were a number of other successful coin-op games before Baffle Ball (such as ABT's pistol games) going back to the 1880s.
Of course, "successful" is a pretty ambiguous term.
"Bally and others originally made much of their money manufactuing slot machines"
Arguably, depending on what you mean by "originally". Bally actually started out making pinball games (not counting their years as Lion Manufacturing) and didn't enter the slot field until 1936, about five years after Ballyhoo (the first game under the Bally banner).
"The coin-operated amusements industry had…its roots in gambling"
Again, it depends on what you mean by "roots". While slots began appearing in the 1890s, coin-op amusements in the US appeared at least a decade before and during the first decade "athletic testers" and other machines predominated. Gambling games did appear early on, however.
"Computer Space was the first commercial arcade game released by Palo Alto-based Nutting Associates in 1971"
Computer Space was not Nutting's first arcade game. They were also located in Mountain View, not Palo Alto at the time.
"The release of Taito's 1975 Gun Fight in Japan became significant when its licensed American version Western Gun…"
Western Gun was the Taito version. Gun Fight was the American version.
"The success of Pong signaled the decline of pinball as companies rushed to produce video games. Arcade operators and games distributors quickly realized that video games had…"
Not exactly wrong, since video games arguably "signaled" the EVENTUAL decline of pinball but the article (and others) give the impression that Pong led to the immediate decline of pinball.
In fact, in terms of machine earnings, pinball was slightly ahead of video games in the late 1970s, especially after solid state pins began to appear. It wasn't until Space Invaders that video games clearly pulled ahead.
[Death Race] "…was widely banned."
A lot of sources have repeated this claim but the never seem to provide examples of locations that banned Death Race in particular (rather than all video games) or that banned video games specifically because of Death Race. I've found plenty of stories from 1976-77 talking about the controversy the game engendered (though I don't think there ever would have been a controversy had it not been for one Seattle reporter) but none that report that the game was "widely" banned.
Some stories even reported that entire countries banned the game but I've found no incidence of this happening and Exidy's marketing director at the time said he'd never heard of a country banning the game.
On another note, both the game's designer and Exidy's founder told me that the game was not based on Deathrace 2000 (I suppose this could have been to avoid legal ramifications - even though I talked to them 25 years after the game came out)
"By 1985, Steve Epstein's Times Square institution, the Broadway Arcade…was forced to close"
The Broadway Arcade didn't close until 1997. It was forced to move in 1985 but it moved to a location next door to the old one and the old location closed when the Novotel hotel opened on top of it.
"Millions of E.T. cartridges were produced, sold, and then returned, ultimately ending up in a landfill in New Mexico."
Not really but I'll let you read Atari Inc, Business if Fun if you want the straight skinny.
Keith Smith
http://allincolorfor...r.blogspot.com/