When did the Arcade really become something? Was it before or after the Pinball machines became popular?
Arcades actually go back to the early 1900s in the US, wherethey were called Penny Arcades, and while they had slot machines and pinball,they also had things like love testers and Edison kinetiscopes where you couldwatch a woman take her clothes off.
People are often surprised to hear that the pinball machinedidnât have flippers until 1947 and they werenât even at the bottom of theplayfield until the early 1960s. Pinball (at least in the form it currentlyexists) is a lot newer than you think and is barely a decade older than thearrival of video games. The original form of pinball was basically a game ofchance where a ball was dropped only to ding off metal pins at random and falldown holes with different payouts, very much like the modern game of pachinko.
Because Pinball was for gambling, there was a huge moralcrusade against them in the early part of this century. On a personal note, mygrandma used to tell me to stay away from âhooch, wild women, and pinballâ(sorry Nani, I failed you on all three).
New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia declared war on pinball,and vowed to smash every single pinball machine that existed. Technically,pinball has only been legal in New York City since 1976.
What the Penny Arcades of the turn of the century actually hadto offer wasnât quite as important as who visited them, who the audiencewas for them: they were designed as cheap entertainment for the huge wave ofAmerican immigrants in big cities who had a little bit of money to spend. Amajor part of the reason movies were always a universal art form accessible toeveryone (as opposed to something like ballet or theater) is that they hadtheir origins with kinetiscope amusements consumed by immigrants in pennyarcades, along with the nickelodeons that showed things like sports reels forboxing matches aimed at working class sports fans.
If I could be allowed a little digression, this is alwayswhy something like âupscaleâ movie theater chains like the AlamoDrafthouse make my skin crawl. Movies should be for the poor and for everyone,not for people who can shell out $14 for a bad order of hot wings, or amilkshake with wine in it. Itâs a sinister sign of how wealth is massivelyconcentrated in our new gilded age that these upscale theater chains target ashrinking percentage of the population with disposable income instead of theimpoverished masses. The selling point of upscale movie theaters is that theyautomatically kick out anyone making noise, too, to create a âgenteelâ movieexperience free of riff-raff, which I think is the kind of snotty crap a badguy in a Rodney Dangerfield comedy would do. Recently, Alamo made waves forhaving all female showings of Wonder Woman. I have nothing againstthis idea (why would anyone be offended by this when you can see the movie in a thousand places?), but it comes off as phony grandstanding when done by a chain whoâssole reason for existing is delivering an experience forrich people. The living version of this image below:Â
Returning to the original point, the key thing to rememberabout video games is this: in the beginning, they didnât start off in thearcades, but were marketed toward bars and bowling alleys. This is why themarketing for these games in the early days was extremely adult. It kind ofreminds me of how, come 2007 or so, the discussion around the Nintendo Wii wasthat it was a toy that could get you laid. Little by little, video gamesstarted to creep into the arcades.
The tipping point where the momentum shifted toward videogames over pinball in the arcade was definitely Space Invaders in â78, whichwas so wildly successful it showed that arcade video games were here to stay,and that they were a bigger moneymaker than the pinball machines were. Thereâsa story that Japan had a shortage of the „100 coin because of Space Invaders, which unfortunately is justtoo cool to be true, but it does go to show how it was a new cultural force that came in.Â
