What is the Golden Age of Arcade Gaming? Silver Age?

Cafe Society
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Inspired by this thread and post, here is where we debate what is the Golden Age and Silver Age of Arcade gaming, including but not limited to pinball machines and video games.

I submit that the Golden Age lasted from Asteroids/Space Invaders until Gauntlet. Those first two really hit off the Video Game craze. For me, some of the lustre and innocence started to fade when Pac-Man came on the scene in a couple years, taken over by a more society-widespread and commercialization, but I can’t deny that for the rest of society everything still seemed fresh and new until Gauntlet really kicked off the whole pump-quarters-to-continue wave of video games.

Meanwhile at the same time you still had a lot of innovation in pinball machines: the only drawback was that IMO the artwork wasn’t quite as good and the playing field a little too cluttered for my tastes vis a vis 70s machines. But multilevelled gaming such as Black Hole and Split Second make up for that.

But the Silver Age I am not sure about, mainly due to a personal reaction. Video games totally changed for me when Street Fighter came out, and the rampant commercialism of the late 80s quarter guzzlers seemed quaint in comparison. Perhaps, setting personal preferences aside, the Silver Age lasted from Gauntlet until computers and home consoles finally nearly equalled the arcade experience in the late 90s.

Some have opined that the Silver Age was in the 70s, and you may state your case here. However, since I wasn’t really aware of gaming halls until around 1979 I might not be able to empathize :slight_smile:

ETA: yes I have seen the Wiki entries, but do not necessarily agree with them.

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The Golden Age of Arcade Gaming lasted from the release ofthe first commercially successful videogame, Pong in 1972 until the video game crash of 1983

If there is a Silver Age, it would be hard to say. Consoles have made arcades more or less disappear. There are, however, some large scale entertainment complexes like Dave & Busters or Gillians that do very well.

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Walter Day, chief scorekeepr of the now-defunct Twin Galaxies arcade in Ottumna, Iowa (you might have seen him in The King of Kong), claims the “Golden Age of Video Game Arcades” started on January 18, 1982- when Time did a cover story on arcades, games, and gamers- and ended on January 5, 1986, the day of the last Twin Galaxies tournament. In my opinion, 1982 is too far to start. John Sellers’s Arcade Fever places the dates at 1971-1985, blaming the advent of the NES for the death of the arcade game. Van Burnham’s Supercade covers the “videogame age” of 1971-1984. Steven L. Kent’s The First Quarter (later republished as The Ultimate History of Video Games dates the Golden Age as 1979-1983. J.C. Herz’s Joystick Nation places the history of video games into eras: 1972-1976 is “The Pong Era,” 1977-1985 is “The Atari Era,” and 1986-1988 is “The 8-Bit Era.” The Wikipedia article you mention points out that some people place the ending point at the early 1990s, which in my opinion is too far. Most timelines seem to agree with what I would believe the Golden Age to be: 1978 (advent of Space Invaders) to 1985 (advent of NES). The Silver Age would probably be 1986-1995: Many well-known arcade games still managed to be made in this era, with fighting games (Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter II) and NBA Jam heading the pack. 1995 is the cut-off date since that is when the PlayStation was introduced: by this point, home video games would overtake the arcade games, although arcades are still out there- though not as strong. (To use comic-book era names, 1972-1977 would be the “Platinum Age:” other than Pong, there wasn’t really much innovation.)

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I’m unsure if you can divide arcade games into “Golden,” “Silver,” or whatever ages. Part of the problem, it seems to me, lies in the demographic shift in the players, that occurred when video games started being popular.

Arcades with coin-operated games existed long before video games. They contained pinballs naturally, but also a host of other coin games: rifle shoots, bowling games, baseball games, car race games, and so on. These were usually pretty basic mechanical games with some electronics (coils, relays, and similar). You would also find coin games in various other places: neighbourhood stores, bus stations, train stations, bowling alleys and pool halls, and the like.

But the players of these games tended to be the sort of people that your mother warned you about. Coin games, whether in an arcade or a drugstore, did not attract gainfully-employed and/or professional people, nor the brainy kids at school. They did attract the hoods, the juvenile delinquents, the kids who skipped school. I’m speaking from experience here–I was one of the latter.

Enter video games in the 1970s. Suddenly, the brainy kids took an interest. Here was some technology that they found interesting (more fun than building Heathkit radios, for example). What made it work? But also, there were the game themes–kids who enjoyed Star Trek, Star Wars, and science fiction could now pilot their own space ships, shoot phaser beams, and save the galaxy from destruction. All that was missing was getting the girl. Video games and arcades became acceptable to these kids, and eventally, to their parents and friends as well. Arcades and game manufacturers took notice, and video games eventually began squeezing pinballs, shooting games, etc. out of the arcades, replacing the less-than-desirable demographic with nicer kids who had money.

So we had a demographic shift to accompany the game shift, and I think we’re seeing the results in this and the other thread. Those who remember the old arcades full of pinballs see those days as a “Golden Age,” when pinball ruled, and the person who could consistently get free games at least had the respect of his peers–he (rarely she) never got respect anywhere else. But if you had never been in one of those arcades, never played pinball, and never rubbed shoulders with the folks you’d been warned to stay away from, you might well see the opening up of arcades caused by video games as the start of a “Golden Age.”

Me, I still maintain that my days of skipping school to play pinball in seedy downtown arcades, and to try to get to the point where free games were easy to achieve, are a Golden Age. But that’s just me. Certainly, those who came later and encountered video games in nice, safe, clean arcades in the sububan malls might feel differently. As I may have inferred in the other thread, I don’t know if such a debate could be done, at least sensibly. As I hope I’ve demonstrated, your opinion can indeed vary, depending on your age and experiences.

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I would say Dragon’s lair is a major watershed point as well.
I still remember looking at it the first time and thinking, “Holy crap these games can look that good?”
We all knew that Asteroids graphics were really boring and simple, and that later games were slowly getting better. But it really wasn’t that important except in the fact that better graphics made playing easier as things were easier and quicker to identify.
But after Dragon’s lair, it really became a major point of gamning. How good the graphics were, often more than the gameplay itself, determined the success of the game. I would call that the end of the golden age, start of the silver.

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I’m putting the Golden age from somewhere around 1980 to whenever the SNES came out.
There were many games during that period that were really creative. Like Crazy Climber or Paperboy. “Hey, let’s make a game about being a paper boy!” Doesn’t that sound a little nuts? Or Q-Bert, with that little hammer at the bottom of the unit for when you fell off the ‘3-D’ image. How does Q-Bert even relate in any way to the real world? Sure Joust sounds like a copy of the real world until you consider that instead of horses, your knight rides on an Ostridge and that it can fly!

At some point, arcade games seemed to be taken over by fighting games and the creativity behind the concept of what a game is, what it could be, seemed to be lost, or at least moved to home systems. To me, the brillance behind Gauntlet is that it is a cooperative game. You have no choice but to work with your other players. It wasn’t the first co-op game but I think it’s success owes greatly to that fact.

Silver age ends about 1960 and probably started about 100 years befor that when they were Penny Arcades.

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I think (IMHO) that the “Golden Age” truly ended when Nintendo was putting NES’s in those “Playchoice” arcade cabinets and charging $.25 for 3 minutes. :rolleyes:

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Regarding what Spoons pointed out, I guess we could segregate these arcade “golden ages” into a Golden Age for Video Coin-Ops as well as a Golden Age for Pinballs. I’m not as big as a pinball buff as I am a video game buff, but I don’t know where the ages would start and end for pinball. The first pinball game with the traditonal two-flipper control was Humpty Dumpty in 1947. I’m not sure when pinball really became popular, but the Bally/Midway games of the late '80s-early '90s once dot-matrix displays came into being were known by a lot of people: Pinbot, Addams Family, Black Knight, Twilight Zone, Funhouse, etc. If this isn’t the Golden Age, it’s at least the Silver. Eventually, Bally/Midway closed up shop when it came to pinball, and there’s only one company, Stern, making machines today.

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The “Crash of 1983” was more about the home video game market than the arcade game market.
I’d say the golden age of arcade games came about when the original Showbiz Pizza and Chuck E. Cheeses hit their peaks before they became playgrounds for tikes.