Meaning

Video games were introduced in amusement arcades in the late 1970s and were most popular during the golden age of arcade video games, the early 1980s. Arcades became popular with children and particularly adolescents, which led parents to be concerned that video game playing might cause them to skip school.

Game-History

The first popular "arcade games" included early amusement-park midway games such as shooting galleries, ball-toss games, and the earliest coin-operated machines, such as those that claimed to tell a person's fortune or that played mechanical music.

The old Midways of 1920s-era amusement parks (such as Coney Island in New York) provided the inspiration and atmosphere for later arcade games.

In the 1930s the first coin-operated pinball machines emerged. These early amusement machines differed from their later electronic cousins in that they were made of wood. They lacked plungers or lit-up bonus surfaces on the playing field, and used mechanical instead of electronic scoring-readouts.

By around 1977 most pinball machines in production switched to using solid-state electronics both for operation and for scoring. Popularity of arcade machines came with contention through the mid 1970s and early 1980s. During the same period that video games proliferated and were celebrated as a sign of technological progress, numerous communities organized against arcades. Efforts to regulate coin op video gaming were geographically widespread, and they also drew on long standing suspicions of the coin-operated industry, which included organized crime and influence of violence. Existing regulation in several communities facilitated the ongoing regulation existed due to its associations to money laundering and organized criminal activity and its long standing cultural and historical ties with gambling.

Despite the negative connotations of the coin operated industry in the preceding decades of the 1960s and the 1950s, by the 1970s, those in the industry were working towards professionalization and acceptance as a legitimate business. Two major trade journals RePlay Magazine published in 1975 and Play Meter published in 1974 offered profiles on industry professional and updates on industry news that helped professionalize the industry.

Genres

Arcade games often have short levels, simple and intuitive control schemes, and rapidly increasing difficulty. This is due to the environment of the Arcade, where the player is essentially renting the game for as long as their in-game avatar can stay alive (or until they run out of tokens). Games on consoles or PCs can be referred to as "arcade games" if they share these qualities or are direct ports of arcade titles. Many independent developers are now producing games in the arcade genre that are designed specifically for use on the Internet.

These games are usually designed with Flash/Java/DHTML and run directly in web-browsers. Arcade racing games have a simplified physics engine and do not require much learning time when compared with racing simulators. Cars can turn sharply without braking or understeer, and the AI rivals are sometimes programmed so they are always near the player (rubberband effect).

Arcade flight games also use simplified physics and controls in comparison to flight simulators. These are meant to have an easy learning curve, in order to preserve their action component. Increasing numbers of console flight video games, from Crimson Skies to Ace Combat and Secret Weapons Over Normandy indicate the falling of manual-heavy flight sim popularity in favor of instant arcade flight action.Other types of arcade-style games include fighting games (often played with an arcade controller), beat 'em up games (including fast-paced hack and slash games), light gun rail shooters and "bullet hell" shooters (intuitive controls and rapidly increasing difficulty), music games (particularly rhythm games), and mobile/casual games (intuitive controls and often played in short sessions).

Arcade action games
The term "arcade game" is also used to refer to an action video game that was designed to play similarly to an arcade game with frantic, addictive gameplay. The focus of arcade action games is on the user's reflexes, and the games usually feature very little puzzle-solving, complex thinking, or strategy skills. Games with complex thinking are called strategy video games or puzzle video games.