Video arcade

1970s and 1980s

The golden age of arcade video games in the 1980s became a peak era of video arcade game popularity, innovation, and earnings. Color arcade games became more prevalent and video arcades themselves started appearing outside their traditional bowling-alley and bar locales. Designers experimented with a wide variety of game genres, while developers still had to work within strict limits of available processor-power and memory. The era saw the rapid spread of video arcades across North America, Western Europe and Japan. The number of video-game arcades in North America, for example, more than doubled between 1980 and 1982, reaching a peak of 13,000 video game arcades across the region (compared to 4,000 in 1998). Beginning with Space Invaders, video arcade games also started to appear in supermarkets, restaurants, liquor stores, filling stations and many other retail establishments looking for extra income. This boom came to an end in the mid-1980s, in what has been referred to as "the great coin-op video crash of 1983".