Continuing the discussion from The Pitfalls of AI:
Wait wait wait, when did arcades first start showing up??? My timeline is wayyyyyy off. I thought those were like a mid-80s thing.
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Nope. There was an arcade (Aladdin’s Castle) at Southridge Mall in Milwaukee (actually Greenfield, but close enough) and that was there in 1979. They grew like wildfire after that and there were street level arcades everywhere.
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Arcades were around before video games! They were filled with pinball machines, electromechanical games, and other things besides that going back over a century. Throughout the 70s the video games slowly started moving in and the pinball machines moved out. Space Invaders in 1978 kicked that transition into high gear. By the 80’s it was typical to see dozens of video games and a handful of pinball machines in an arcade. But even before they filled arcades it wasn’t uncommon to find a video game or two sitting in weird places: laundromats, the entrance to a Kmart, etc.
Check that out and also the 1960’s for some interesting and unique electromechanical games.
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I think arcade machines reached their pinnacle of relevance when it doubled as a place to put down your beer.
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I remember the pizza place in my town had a few arcade machines around 1979. Famously, my Mom played Pac Man there when it arrived and predicted that this game would never catch on.
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I’m not certain which video game was the first I played, but there’s a good chance it was either Pong or Night Driver - Videogame by Atari | Museum of the Game
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Almost no one thought it would work. Every game to that point had some kind of shooting capability. Just moving around a maze was very weird. No one knew what to do with it and in my arcade it sat unplayed for a long time. Then a guy came in and played it backwards (blind).
I doubt anyone remembers, but Pac-Man was deterministic. If you followed certain paths, you always won.
One of the “innovations” that came with Ms. Pac-Man was randomization, faster ghosts when you didn’t get all flashing bonus pills, and the maze had rounded ends that Ms Pac-Man could use to gain distance. There were still basic patterns to start every screen, but eventually you had to break off and be methodical.
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My first time at the arcade was in 1976, on my birthday trip to Disney World. They had Pong, Tank, a bunch of electromechanical games (there was a fighter combat one that I liked), and pinball.
ETA: Holy crap, I’ve been playing video games for half a century now. Wow.
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In the late 90’s, I bought Tutankham for $400 from a local arcade game reseller. I had never been able to get past the third screen. I turned on infinite lives and finally got to the fourth screen….
… which was just the first screen with more baddies.
I was SOOO disappointed.
Then a few years later a guy from Iowa drove out from my usenet listing and bought it for $400.
I just looked and it’s worth ~$1,000 now.
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That deaf, dumb, and blind kid… sure plays a mean pinball! 
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The first time I played an arcade game was at a bowling alley in Albuerquerque. It was probably 1979. My father held me up so that I could push the buttons.
I’m pretty sure it was Space Invaders.
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Yep! There’s some (badly-coded) RNG when the ghosts are frightened (that is, when you eat a power pellet), but outside that, it’s all deterministic. I love this channel’s visualizations of what’s going on.
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I had a Defender Stargate machine back in the late '80s and early '90s, which got left behind in a move. I wish I still had it, but my Legends Ultimate (with OneSauce and CoinOps X) is much more practical.
Also, for a bit of trivia (my specialty!): Pac-Man’s name in Japanese is “Puck-Man” (Pakku-Man), because he’s shaped like a hockey puck and it sounds like a Japanese onomatopoeia for scarfing down food. That was supposed to be his name in English as well, until the localizers talked to arcade owners, and realized what would happen as soon as kids with permanent markers got to the machines…
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I was born in 86 and grew up in a small town that had little going for it even in the 90s, So I kind of missed out on the golden age of Arcades and am more familiar with the electro mechanical, token and ticket carnival game style arcades like Chuck E Cheese’s or Adventure Landing circa the late 90s/Early 00s than the ones where Arcades were the place for video games… Do remember seeing a Mario Pinball Machine and a Sonic the Fighters Cabinet at a skating rink around that time as well…
My experiences with arcade classics have mostly been in home ports, such as owning the GameBoy version of Pac-Man at one point and playing either the Genesis or SNES version of Ms. Pac-Man on a dorm or reccenter console at the school for the blind I attended for most of my K-12 education or playing the NES version of Donkey Kong in Animal Crossing for Gamecube… Do remember playing some version of Tetris on an arcade cabinet once, though no clue which version though the graphics looked 16-bit and it would have been late 90s or early 00s most likely… Of course, tetris is a game that’s great on just about anything(I had a game pro 600 or something simmilar, one of those cheap handhelds with a hardware sprite type LCD display, d-pad, and a single action button that went for like 20 bucks and boasted hundreds of games back around the turn of the century where all the games are just variations of a handful of mostly Tiger LCD game caliber stuff, but Tetris was one of the base games and worth the price of admission on its own… though I remember one Tetris variation there I’ve never seen elsewhere where, instead of rotating the Tetrominoes, the action button would cycle through all the shapes… a younger me would try to turn every Tetromino into an O/square tetromino and go for lots of doubles… Not sure why I didn’t try for all Is/sticks and all tetrises though… Every piece started in a random shape and orientation, so it was a bit harder than it might first sound(if you were unlucky, you wouldn’t have time to turn the block into the one you wanted before it hit bottom)…
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That’s the story, but I’ve always wondered if vandalism was really the main issue. I mean, just look at the logo! I don’t think most people immediately see it as a P.
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps4/333419-arcade-archives-pac-man/boxes/1921
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