A Historical Look At Video Games
Originally from Game Informer magazine 1993 -reprinted with permission.
The Ancestry of the Arcade
The Birth of the Video Game
On the Go and in the Home
Early Arcade Classics
Competition on the Home Front
Video Games: A Cultural Movement
The Downward Spiral
Home entertainment video game systems were created to bring the arcade experience into the consumer's home. Coin-operated, stand-up video games are an offshoot of the long popular arcade pinball flipper games. Where did the pinball arcade come from? The first documented reference to its forerunners can be traced to Charles Dickens literary classic, Pickwick Papers, dating back to 1836. When describing the interior of the Peacock Tavern, Dickens mentions the presence of a bagetelle board, which is regarded as the ancestor of pinball. The object of the game was to shoot a ball with a cue at a set of scoring holes at the other end of the table. In 1929, John Sloan, an advertising salesman for Billboard Magazine (then a carnival and slot-machine publication) discovered an adaptation of the bagetelle board built by the janitor of his apartment building. The board was now slightly slanted forward, with a spring-loaded plunger and holes edged with tiny brass pins to increase the challenge. Sloan described this new discovery to several of his customers, which spurred the development of several coin-operated versions. Unfortunately, these machines were too large and expensive to gain widespread popularity. It took the Depression of 1931 and a young businessman named Raymond Moloney to bring the pinball game to the forefront.
Moloney and his partners introduced a brightly painted game called Ballyhoo, and by 1932 it had become a national sensation. More than 50,000 games sold in seven months, causing Moloney and his partners to form Bally Manufacturing Company, predecessor of the arcade manufacturer. Ballyhoo's success is attributed to several things, including its size that allowed it to rest on counter and table tops in establishments such as barber shops, drug stores, train depots, gas stations, and other public gathering spots. The machines were also inexpensive, sixteen US dollars, so many unemployed workers purchased these machines as a source of income.
Over the years, pinball progressed in the areas of technological advances and the principles of play. Pinball machines became free-standing and developed a series of bumpers, plungers and switches to enhance game play. Electricity was incorporated into the game in 1933, in the form of a dry cell battery and, by 1935 they connected to electrical outlets. Perhaps the most notable progression was the first flipper game, Sunny, introduced by Williams Manufacturing Company in 1949. This improvement changed pinball from a game of gravity and chance to a game that incorporated a player's skill. The door was opening to a whole new world.