Stand-up (coin operated) video arcade games looked, played and sounded great since the early 80s. At-home games couldn’t achieve that quality for a good 20 years. Why was the quality of coin-operated games so difficult to replicate on other platforms for so long?
Memory. Robotron: 2084 had 64k of processing power, the Atari 2600 had 4k. Took a while for the consoles to catch up, but the arcade games were evolving as well.
There’s no mystery here. Even “back in the day” a coin op cabinet would be incorporating hardware that was orders of magnitude more expensive than anything a manufacturer could HOPE to sell to the home market. People balked at paying $600 for a Playstation 3 in 2006. The idea of someone in 1982 spending $1000 for an arcade cabinet that would probably only play one game was completely out of the question. But it was entirely reasonable that an arcade doing decent business could get well more than the 4000 plays at 25 cents each that it would take to start turning a profit on that cabinet.
Eventually though, the forward march of technology meant that the difference between what you could build into an arcade cabinet for $2500 (or even more) was no longer appreciably more impressive to the average gamer than what you could get from a home console that cost $250. And of course there are other issues with arcades in the US as well (Though they continue to do okay in Japan for the moment.)
So it’s not really a question of “at home games couldn’t achieve that quality” so much as “at home games couldn’t achieve that quality at a price point people were willing to pay.” After all. You could have arcade perfect Neo Geo games for the low low price of $650 for the console and $300 per game in 1990. And you saw how well that went for them.
One of the benefits of the crash in the mid-80s is that a lot of cabinets came up for sale, cheap. For $250 I bought an Asteroids, Gravitar, and Battlezone and had them delivered to my house.
But you’ll note that “for cheap” is still 2.5 times the cost of an NES system during the same era.
It was all about price points.
That was for all three games. Therefore, each game cost ~$85.00
Oh, okay; Still, price competitive only in the short term, not available in stores, sold secondhand at a loss, takes up a lot of space, etc.
Simply put, it wasn’t feaseable/cost effective to create a consumer product with ‘arcade level’ graphics until… eh, roughly the PS2/Dreamcast era.
Thanks for the explanation. It seems rather odd that in 1983, arcade games could be so far ahead of technology used within government, businesses, universities, etc., and still look great today, but I guess that’s showbiz…
Games are still like that, in a way. While obviously at the top tier of nuclear simulation, energy grid optimization, physics calculations etc beat games in terms of needed performance concerns, but a huge amount of the optimizations and innovations in various computing fields come out of gaming. Games often lag “behind” in programming language adoption due to performance concerns. Back when everyone was using C, game companies were sticking with assembly. When everyone(*) moved to managed languages, games are still using C and C++ codebases. It’s really just now that you’re starting to see a switch to things like C# in games – and even then it’s a very tentative, limited switch and the majority of the codebase is still in lower level languages.
The nature of games is that you need to do a lot of calculations on a relatively short schedule (to make it so that input and on-screen feedback is responsive). This necessarily causes games to be the things that require powerhouse computers and crazy optimizations to squeeze the most out of hardware if you want to stay ahead of the arms race.
- “Everyone” used rather loosely. I realize that a lot of places still use C and C++ to some degree.
I could argue the “still look great today” point - you might want to go back and look at a few classic arcade titles, because a lot of them kinda look like crap nowadays, and of those that don’t most of them look good in either a “Retro” (i.e. ‘making allowances for age’) way, or in an extremely stylized way.
Also, it’s important to note that these cabinets absolutely were NOT “ahead of the technology used in government, businesses, universities, etc.” in anything other than “putting colorful pixels on a screen”. Many government organizations, businesses, universities, etc during this era were still using mainframes or minicomputers, which were both much more expensive than arcade cabinets and also much more powerful - but the focus wasn’t on shiny output displays. Even microcomputers -could- easily rival or exceed the processing power of an arcade cabinet, but the arcade cabinet had specialized hardware for shiny graphics and interesting sound effects that would not have been present in equivalent “academic” or “business” use devices.
While Jragon is correct from a software side, the only hardware innovations games have historically driven are graphics units and to a lesser degree, RAM increases in personal computers. (I guess you could make a case for CPUs as well, but I would argue that would have happened anyway.)
I don’t think it was until the NES era that the same actual units were used in both arcades and home machines. And, even then, those might have been legacy, as there was a lot of development in modifying the same system to run different games.
Is it also to do with the idea that game boards in arcade machines were created with the aim of playing only one game very well, ie. dedicated hardware?
I know stuff like the NeoGeo or Naomi can play multiple titles but that’s a relatively recent thing.
For example this site lists the relatively few games each board type could play.
I thought the thread would be about how much more creative the early 80’s games were. Shows what can happen when copycat and incremental game design principles aren’t holding full sway.
Because there was nothing to copy? As soon as there was anything established, clone games were popping up all over the place.
Also, BigT - the only time I am aware of that arcade parts and “home” console parts were ever the same was the Neo Geo, which was quite firmly the SNES Era.
Huh?
NES ports of Donkey Kong (1980/1983), Pac-Man (1980/1984), and others were only a few years behind the curve. Or look at the Street Fighter II/Mortal Kombat era fighters of the early 90s. The SNES ports were 90-95% of the way there and “arcade perfect” ports were both just a few years down the line.
Another factor was, the arcade games had to be that good, right off the bat. They were competing with a well-established technology (pinball), and if the games weren’t at least as entertaining at the same price point, people would continue to play the pinball machines instead.
Home electronic games, by comparison, were competing with board games and card games. Hell, single-player electronic games, which was most of the market, were competing with books and solitaire.
This is a bit confusing as really old boards listed there have multiple titles to their name, so I’m not sure why you are saying this is a recent thing. But the dedicated hardware thing seems plausible, even in the case of multiple titles.
Ports seem to have their own problems, just in virtue of being ports.
Right. But it didn’t take 20 years to match the awesome graphical prowess of Pac-Man on a home console (remember when we called them home consoles?). It took less than five years to get a “close enough” version.
My point was intended to support your point. If we take the SF2 case, we have the first port within 2 years, well within the lifespan of the arcade machine being popular, and being done so with the disadvantages you get from being a port. The 20 year claim is just bizarre in any case.
Ah, my mistake.