Good Clean Fun: The Origins of the Video Arcade

In addition to the arcades, in the 1970s and 1980s, video games alone or in small clusters were installed in supermarkets and 7 Elevens, coin laundries, movie theater lobbies, college student unions, and taverns. Anywhere people might have a bit of extra time and spare change in their pockets was a good location for a video upright, which sometimes took a spot once occupied by a pinball machine. Within a few years, this new kind of technologically advanced play was introduced into a wide variety of public places. A generation born in the 1960s and ’70s took to these games as something of an obsession, just as earlier generations had grown up going to the pictures or listening to rock and roll. Coin-operated video game cabinets were essential to the leisure of teenagers, and particularly teenage boys, coming of age in the last years of the Cold War.²

Beginning with Computer Space in 1971, and Pong and the Odyssey, both in 1972, electronic TV games were available for home and arcade play. Some games were also played in workplaces or universities on mainframes and minicomputers. The space of the video arcade did not define the emerging medium all by itself. But the arcade was in some ways more important than home, work, or school: it led the way in establishing popular games like Space Invaders and Pac-Man. It also set in place associations between video games and a history of public amusements, making the home game into a version of something else, an adaptation of arcade play for domestic space. Home video game consoles were marketed as a way of recreating the arcade experience, but with the perceived threats of the game rooms removed by a shift from public to private.

These threats were well publicized.³ News reports addressed fears of children’s lunch money being squandered on coin-operated amusement, of schoolwork abandoned for play, of addiction comparable to getting hooked on hard drugs, of minds ruined by overabsorption in electronic microworlds.⁴ The United States Surgeon General spoke publicly saying video games could be harmful to children and cause them to be violent, and although he quickly clarified that his assertions were based on no scientific evidence, the news of his concern spread widely.⁵ Arcades were feared as dens of crime and depravity, and many municipalities tried to regulate them out of existence. But the idea that coin-operated amusements were a threatening form of popular culture was not first expressed in the 1980s. Such fear was the product of many decades of concern about public amusements. It was expressed by early twentieth-century progressives, moralizing crusaders against vice, and grandstanding public servants. Coin-operated amusements were represented in popular media from the 1930s to the 1970s as a diversion for lowlifes and a trade under the control of criminals with crooked politicians in their pockets. The video arcade—and the meanings associated with it arising around spaces of electronic pleasure—emerged as a product of both established and shifting values and associations with a history stretching back to the nineteenth-century American city.

These meanings stitch together a number of forms of pleasure-seeking that span better than a century of public life. The video arcade of the 1980s inherits a tradition of arcades (or playlands, sportlands, and whatever else amusement rooms have been called) and of the machines found in them. The emergence of video games was not just the birth of a new kind of object and a new culture of play. It was also the continuation of established practices and ideas about spaces of amusement, and the renewal of coin-operated leisure with new technologies and fresh modes of experience. This history encompasses a number of diverse and overlapping forms of media, games, and consumer culture, including motion pictures, musical recordings, sports, carnival attractions, gambling, and games of chance and skill. It has at different places and times been seen as urban and suburban, seedy and classy, more and less culturally legitimate. But the history of public coin-operated amusements is largely one of wanting legitimacy and struggling for respectability. The success of the video arcade is, in part, the winning of this legitimacy and respectability. At the same time, though, video games carried on old connotations of disrepute, and occasioned a new moral panic around young people and media. The arcade of the 1970s and ’80s was seen in multiple, contradictory ways.

And the improved reputation of amusement centers was hardly caused by video games alone. Video games were able to occupy a central place in popular culture so quickly in part by emerging into a public space that existed already. Amusement arcades began as penny arcades in the 1890s, and passed through a number of iterations over the decades, as different kinds of amusement went in and out of fashion. In the 1970s their image was transformed by suburbanization, new business practices, and the rehabilitation of pinball as “good clean fun.” The newly respectable arcades of the 1970s were not dominated by video games, which were present as a minority among a variety of types of game but played second fiddle to pinball. Pinball was a great force for the transformation of public coin-operated amusements in the early years of video games, and video games rode pinball’s coattails until the very end of the decade, when one video game changed the trajectory of public amusement sharply. Before the fantastic success of Space Invaders at the end of the decade, pinball was king. Video games did not cause arcades to change their reputation and place in popular imagination very radically at all, but rather nudged them farther along a path they were already traveling. Video games picked up the meanings of these newly respectable spaces, while they also renewed the threat historically occasioned by youth cultures centered around public amusements.

This perceived danger was a product of widely shared associations between spaces and identities. Public coin-operated amusements were never consecrated as high culture, with its associations of an affluent, adult, contemplative experience. They were rather lively and boisterous, cheap and common, accessible to practically any member of society. Young people, working class and mostly male, were their best patrons over many years (except in drinking establishments, where children were excluded). The video arcade became a more middle-class version of this kind of space, but even so it retained a strong residual character of earlier sites of play, a sense of the tough masculine culture of which polite society disapproves. The emergence of video games as a medium was a product of these associations between public play spaces and a culture of boys and young men engaged in competitive action.

Coin-Ops before Pong

Coin-in-the-slot machines, while not an invention of the nineteenth century, became quite common in its later years with the spread of urban consumer culture, vending such inexpensive items as cigars and razor blades. Often called slot machines or simply slots, the machines would replace human labor in many fields as symbols of the advancing machine age. One such slot machine supplanted the “try-your-weight apparatus” previously staffed by boy attendants.⁶ Similar coin-in-the-slot testing and guessing games filled amusement parks in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries alongside fortune-tellers and merry-go-rounds.⁷ The many dime museums in American cities of the nineteenth century contained penny arcades with displays of curios and freaks and stages for dramatic performances. The coin-in-the-slot amusements in a dime museum in the 1880s or ’90s would have included various trial-test machines and “Cosmic and Dioramic views,” or peepshows. A dime museum was a place of affordable amusement (ten cents to enter, when a vaudeville show might cost a quarter) combining lectures or theatrical performance with other attractions, and having a more proletarian character than the legitimate stage, World’s Fair exposition, or fine arts museum with which it coexisted. Along New York’s Bowery, dime museums operated in shops on streets where one would also find cheap melodrama theaters and penny arcades.⁸

By comparison to the dime museum, the arcade was free to enter and even cheaper in reputation. It was noted for being “the cheapest kind of amusement ever concocted for the delectation of an audience of countrymen and boys bound on seeing the sights of the city and seeing them cheap. In the penny arcade the low water mark of cheapness has been reached. Nothing could be cheaper.”⁹ In contrast to rivals for young people’s spare change in the early twentieth century, such as candy shops and ice cream parlors, a moral question surrounded the content of the amusement in the penny arcade.¹⁰ Around the turn of the century, the penny arcade in an American city would have contained a variety of attractions including punching bags, automatic scales, shooting rifles, fortune tellers, and phonograph players. The most popular coin-op amusement of the 1890s and 1900s, however, lined up in long rows, was the moving picture peepshow machine such as a mutoscope. It contained a succession of images printed on cards, which would become animated when made to flip before the viewer’s eye by hand-cranking the device. Progressives disparaged the views for sale through these coin-op movie machines as “stupid” even if “tame,” though they were also known to contain such so-called vulgar imagery as women in states of undress.¹¹ Some of the titles of peepshow pictures popular in the 1890s indicate these subjects: Parisienne Girls, Dressing Room Scene, Getting Ready for the Bath, and Little Egypt, the last being a famous hootchie-cootchie dancer. The hand-crank gave the user control over the speed of the picture, perhaps allowing the viewer to slow down at a moment of voyeuristic pleasure.¹² The sexual content of the mutoscope was not only found in the picture cards. The highly suggestive posters advertising the mutoscopes were often more cause for protest than the motion-picture images. One critic called these posted advertisements “the most undesirable features of an arcade.”¹³ The pictures themselves were also condemned by polite observers as vile and scandalous, filling young boys’ minds with “evil and debasing thoughts.”¹⁴ They were “the lowest and meanest trick yet devised for snatching away the pennies and the morals of the people.”¹⁵

Coin-slot recordings of music had been popular beginning around 1890 in midways, resort areas, and railroad stations, but also in urban parlors dedicated to them, which also contained vending machines.¹⁶ But the penny arcade enjoyed its brief heyday beginning when photographic moving pictures emerged later in the decade (the mutoscope’s debut was in 1897) and ending once theaters dedicated to projecting them on a screen became the standard way of experiencing cinema, in the later 1900s.¹⁷ Once a program of films lasting thirty or more minutes could be seen for five or ten cents in a Nickelodeon theater, there was little demand for peepshows charging one cent for forty to sixty seconds.¹⁸ Coin-operated moving picture peepshows were a popular diversion in many kinds of places, including theater lobbies, which continued to house coin-op machines when the featured attraction was a projected film. Amusement rooms were located on busy streets in entertainment districts like New York City’s 14th Street, which housed the Automatic One-Cent Vaudeville of Adolph Zukor, who would proceed from there eventually to become a Hollywood mogul. Many of these rooms were in resort areas, like New York’s Coney Island and countless other resorts within an easy mass transit ride from an American city. The establishment of the penny arcade as an amusement center free to enter containing coin-operated entertainment of brief duration would be maintained through several generations of public play and leisure even as the fortunes of penny arcades rose and fell. But once motion pictures attained the status of a maturing industry with well-established institutions of production, distribution, and exhibition, the mutoscopes were relegated to nostalgic novelty, and the penny arcade sought other attractions. Zukor and his ilk dropped the coin business when cinema became more theater and less carnival. Penny arcades endured in part as a token of the simpler, happier times of years past, as in the penny arcade of Disneyland’s small-town simulation, Main Street USA. By the 1960s the coin-operated machines of the first arcade boom were presented as museum pieces.¹⁹

While Nickelodeon theaters were often held to be dangerous for young and female patrons unchaperoned in their dark, stranger-filled auditoriums, they might also have been regarded as improving on penny arcades, which were not only peepshow parlors to satisfy men’s baser desires, but also places for tough street children to hang around without even spending one penny.²⁰ Their cheapness and questionable clientele gave coin-operated amusements a low reputation that would endure long after motion pictures had ceased to be their main attraction. This was only exacerbated when both the arcade and the coin-operated amusement device enjoyed a resurgence in the 1920s and ’30s. The disrepute of the space and experience of coin-in-the-slot machines was reinforced in this period as new associations emerged with gambling and crime. In a way this was a product of arcades substituting one kind of amusement for another, with recordings of music and dramatic acts phonographically and cinematically being succeeded by a variety of games. Along with the shift from watching or listening to playing, the emporium’s name sometimes changed. What had been an arcade or an automatic vaudeville was now sometimes a playland or sportland, though still retaining the same old characteristics of being a space for coin-op play open to pedestrian traffic and free to enter.²¹ (The name “arcade” also persisted, of course.) Coin machines continued to be installed in numerous public places, as they had been for decades, including cigar and candy stores, railway stations and bus depots, hotel lobbies, gas stations, barber shops, and lunch rooms.

The new game emporiums contained many attractions, from diggers and cranes to love testers and mindreaders.²² Many coin-op games of the time were versions of popular sports such as horse racing and baseball, and shooting games were an attraction whose appeal spanned virtually the whole century, as electro-mechanical rifle shooters eventually gave way to Space Invaders, Asteroids, and Defender. But the most popular type of coin-op game of the Depression years and decades to follow was the pin game, and until video games surged in popularity at the end of the 1970s it was the pin game that epitomized the trade in coin-operated play.

The rise of pinball during the 1930s has often been associated with the hardships of the Depression. Down-on-their-luck players found solace and amusement in their few moments of diversion, and the very low cost made it affordable even to those unable to enjoy any other commercial leisure. “It only took a few pennies in a Baffle Ball or Ballyhoo machine to wipe away the gloom of unemployment,” according to one popular history.²³ The pin game was also seen as a boon to proprietors of candy and drug stores, who kept countertop games by the register, hoping that customers would drop some of their change in the slot. This vision of the pin game as a solace in hard times was counterbalanced by more fearful and puritanical rhetoric of social reformers, which in some ways was rehearsed again in the 1980s when pinball gave way to video games as the public amusements most fancied by young people. There is one big difference, however, between antipin and antivideo crusades: pinball was more often and more strongly identified with gambling and crime, and its bad reputation was a product not only of cheapness but also of vice. The low reputation of public amusements suffered from this identification for most of the twentieth century.

Pin games have a long history, and in different moments they have been games of skill and chance, games paying out rewards in cash or other prizes and games “for amusement only.” Like many forms of play, a pin game is something gamblers can bet on, and a great many surely did bet on the outcome of a game of pinball. The history of pinball is also one of technological innovation and adaptation to new environments of regulation and cultural acceptability. The electronic game with a steel ball, a plunger, a playfield and backglass, bumper-thumpers, electrical noises, and two flippers was actually relatively late in pinball’s history to emerge. What was called pinball in the days of the Depression was a rather different object.

A pin game was any game on which one or often more balls or marbles rolled along a board pocked with holes or studded with pins for the ball to strike, altering its course. One key game of the 1930s, Little Whirl Wind, was upright like pachinko, and a penny dropped in its slot bought the player five balls to be moved through a spiral maze and down to holes below. Scoring would depend on which holes the ball fell into. Hitting or shaking the machine helped the player. Some pin games were modeled on popular sports. Gottlieb’s Baffle Ball, one of the hit amusements of the 1930s, was a countertop version of baseball with pins surrounding holes marking four bases in a diamond. Some games, like Bally’s Rocket, paid out cash like a slot machine to winners who achieved a high score or struck a target. Payout games were particularly popular in the later 1930s.²⁴ The decades to follow saw tension within the coin-op business between payout pinball and games for amusement only. Bally, a company named for its hit Ballyhoo pin game of 1931, was mainly a payout game manufacturer. It introduced its lucrative Bingo pin game in 1951. The Bingo player tried to line up numbers in the backglass by making balls fall into numbered holes in the playfield, and Bally proceeded to make bingo games of various themes and versions. Scoring in a bingo made money for the player but also courted trouble with the law. A federal court in 1956 distinguished between games of chance, like bingo, and flipper games, which were not regulated as gambling machines.²⁵ Dodging trouble, the coin-op industry preferred flipper games in the wake of this decision and often substituted the name flipper for pinball, to avoid any lingering negative connotations.

Long before this setback for the amusement industry, pin games had courted serious trouble. However factual or imagined, an association between pin games and crime rackets developed during the 1930s and endured into the video age. Public opinion of pinball was typically that of “an evil that threatened the morals of the nation.”²⁶ Along with disapproval of gambling, this prompted municipalities to ban pin games as they did in New York, Chicago, and many other cities, just like one-armed bandit slot machines. A famous image of New York City’s Mayor LaGuardia destroying coin-slot machines in 1934 crystallized the prohibitionist fervor of the age. It was also familiar from popular media, such as the Warner Bros. picture Bullets or Ballots (1936), in which gangsters force a merchant to place nickel pinball machines in his store across from a primary school, profiting from the pupils’ misspent lunch money. As Better Homes and Gardens put it in 1957, pinball machines “can wreck the civic enterprise and economic well-being of any village, town, or city.”²⁷

At the time of pinball’s greatest popularity and profitability in the 1970s, expectations of its potential harm to children persisted even if the threats had shifted with the times from gambling to sex and drugs. Popular press articles on public amusements would reference the questionable reputation of arcades, where children might be “easy victims for sex criminals, narcotics peddlers, and others.” Any indication of rising fortunes for the coin amusement trade or the newfound respectability of pinball would also reference its past in seedy dives and its underworld connections as “a slot machine in disguise.”²⁸ Residual mafia associations persisted as well, as reflected in a 1977 episode of the CBS television series All in the Family.²⁹ When Archie Bunker buys Kelsey’s tavern and goes into business as a saloonkeeper, his wife Edith attempts to make over the establishment with a feminine touch of taste and class. She wants to bring in new tablecloths and replace photos of prizefighters behind the bar with portraits of George and Martha Washington. “We’ll get rid of the pinball machine,” she says, “’cause that’s gambling.” Archie, exasperated, answers: “You get rid of the pinball machine and a guy who smells like garlic will come around, kiss me on both cheeks, and put a hole in my head!”

The surge in pinball’s popularity in the 1970s provides a context for this moment of All in the Family, when pinball was very familiar and yet still sometimes felt to be a problem. Its popularity was caused by a cluster of factors, including the introduction of solid-state electronic pinball machines and the repeal of pinball bans in cities such as New York and Chicago. But not least of these factors was the centrality of pinball to the narrative and imagery of the Who’s rock opera, Tommy. Tommy was released as a double-LP album in 1969, and adapted into a feature film released in 1975. The track “Pinball Wizard” climbed the pop charts twice, first for the Who in 1969, and then for Elton John, who plays the Wizard in the movie, in 1976. In the sequence in which he appears, John’s outlandish character competes against the eponymous hero in a televised pinball competition staged spectacularly as a musical number backed by the Who onstage in a theater filled with spectators, making hard rock music and pinball competition into companion popular diversions. Pinball had originally not been central to Pete Townsend’s conception of the story of the opera’s “deaf, dumb, and blind” character, but he apparently added the game as a rebellious kind of amusement to fit with the musical style of the work (and more generally, of the Who). The popularity of the music and movie promoted pinball among young music-loving amusement hall denizens, and Elton John appeared in advertising to promote Bally’s tie-in pinball machine, Capt. Fantastic, which played on his characterization of the Pinball Wizard in the movie. Another spin-off from the movie, a pinball machine called Wizard, was also popular in the later 1970s. One coin-op industry observer commented that his trade “can thank the rock and rollers for lending an aura of hip legitimacy to flipping the silver ball.”³⁰ The Tommy-themed pinball machines were part of a wider development of cross-promoting entertainment media with coin-op amusements, in particular to appeal to young, white, male players. Other examples of these 1970s tie-ins were pinball machines with pop culture or sports themes such as Superman, Close Encounters, Buck Rogers, Star Trek, Dolly (Parton), KISS, Evel Knievel, Charlie’s Angels, Bobby Orr, and Playboy.

Some of these machines such as the Playboy model were also new in a different way: they were marketed to consumers as objects to purchase for the home. Coin-op games had been made for use in public until this time, and the public amusements trade was surprised by the interest in pinball ownership by individuals. This might have been partly a response to pinball bans: if they were unavailable to play in public, one option for fans of the game was to acquire them for play in private.³¹ It was also partly a product of pinball’s rising legitimacy and its growing popularity. Pinball was in a moment of rescue from the bad reputation of the past, partly out of the same Eisenhower-era nostalgia that produced Happy Days and Grease, but also as a product of a new context, years removed from the association of public amusement with gambling and criminal gangs. Pinball enjoyed the respect of intellectuals, and a number of popular illustrated histories were published in these years reclaiming pinball as an object of appreciation alongside the cinema and other popular arts.³² The home market was perceived to be an untapped growth area, and the acquisition in 1976 of one of the major pinball manufacturers, Gottlieb, by a Hollywood studio, Columbia Pictures, was a response to this opportunity for expanding the home market.³³ The acquisition of Atari by Warner Communication, Inc. (WCI), in the same year was similarly an opportunity to capitalize on play in the home as well as in public places (Atari made both pinball and video games for the coin-op trade) and a sign of the rising legitimacy and profitability of public amusement. It also marked games’ emergence into the realm of media where they might be a catalyst for the synergistic marketing of cross-promoted franchises such as Superman, which was a comic book, paperback book, movie, and video game all under the WCI umbrella.³⁴ The presence of video games in both arcade and domestic space suggested a similar potential for pinball to expand into a consumer market in places where the game might earlier have been shunned for its underworld stigma.

Still, these developments drew on the rebellious nature of the pinball player, the romantic outlaw character in the style of James Dean.³⁵ Pinball, like rock and roll, connoted a vaguely threatening low culture likely to arouse the disapproval of one’s parents and other guardians of civilization. It was a fixture of tough places like saloons and urban arcades supposedly filled with lowlifes. But it was also a rather harmless game, a source of simple pleasures. These youth culture connotations, and a lingering association with gangs and hoodlums—with tough guys in leather jackets, cigarettes dangling from their lips—made pinball seem sexy. So did the racy backglass art showing off the curvaceous female form on many machines of the 1970s alongside motorcycles, spaceships, and other boy-fantasy scenery. The tough, competitive culture of pinball and the sexualized backglass art alike were aspects of the masculine character of 1970s arcade amusement. And the rising reputation of this culture was a function not only of shedding past negative associations, but also reproducing them as a kind of safe danger, a contained risk. The tough, working-class, youthful masculinity conveyed by the image of the pinball player in popular imagination was part of the romantic appeal of the game.

The Game Room in the Age of Pinball

Bruce Springsteen’s “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),” released in 1973 on side one of The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, romanticizes a beachside resort in New Jersey: a boardwalk and pier out over the Atlantic Ocean, midway rides like a Tilt-a-Whirl, a fortune teller, young people out late, holiday fireworks. Local “wizards” play in a “dusty arcade” filled with “pleasure machines.” The people and places, as in so many of Springsteen’s lyrics, are from the lower end of the class hierarchy: factory workers and waitresses, pale-skinned greasers in high-heeled shoes with shirts open, “cheap little seaside bars,” cops making a bust. The pinball room is for youthful carnival diversion. Young men like the first-person voice of the lyric amuse themselves on the cheap and compete with one another before moving on to drinking and sex. The pleasure machines in the dusty arcade are places for working-class, maybe “ethnic” white youth, teenagers, or men in their twenties out for a good time in a town whose economy is driven by commercial leisure.

There may have been electronic pleasure machines like Pong in the dusty arcades of Asbury Park by 1973, but Springsteen is pointing to an earlier period in electro-mechanical coin-op play. Amusement park game rooms of the 1960s and ’70s would have typically combined a number of different kinds of attractions: shooting, driving, and sports games; old-time novelties like strength and love testers; shuffle and bowling games; and more pinball than anything else. They might have also included a photo booth or some kiddie rides. Resort town arcades often would include redemption games that reward good play with tickets to be collected and exchanged for a prize. Skee ball had been popular for decades. In earlier days such machines could be operated with a penny, nickel, or dime, but by the 1970s the coin was a quarter, which would buy you five balls of play on a flipper. Perhaps because of their association with youth and with times marked off for leisure—evenings, weekends, and holidays—these pleasure machines have often been treated, as they are in “Sandy,” in nostalgic terms as tokens of moments past and experiences of innocence or the trials of coming of age.

Another popular culture representation from less than a decade later shows a rather difference space and a different image of leisure and play. In a scene early in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), the camera pans across a number of video-game screens and teenage boys playing the uprights. This is part of a longer sequence establishing the southern California shopping center as the central site of high school students’ socializing. The kids work at the mall and play at the mall. After establishing the arcade space, one character approaches another about buying rock concert tickets, and this commerce of questionable legality occurs against the backdrop of a Space Invaders and a Pac-Man. Nearby the arcade is a movie theater and a counter selling fast food, and just outside its entrance are apparel shops like the Gap. The scene ends as the ticket broker, Damone, puts an arm around his more innocent friend Brad and says, “Come on, let’s find you a girl.”

The suburban teenage life occurring here, by contrast to Springsteen’s lyric, is much more middle class. The mall is a clean, upscale destination for consumer culture and communal gathering. Although ticket scalping is a less legitimate part-time job than waiting tables, it is more respectable than pushing drugs or shaking down shopkeepers for protection money. The two spaces still share an association with young people’s romantic desires and conquests, but in other ways, distinctions separate them not just by type of amusement but also by the identities of their clientele.

The video arcade of the 1970s and ’80s is much more often associated with the type of representation in Fast Times than in “Sandy.” It may be tempting to read this difference as one between earlier and later coin-operated amusements. But the shift from working class to middle class, from dusty to sanitized, occurred before video games replaced pinball machines as the central appeal of these play rooms. This shift was the product of a suburbanization of leisure, and an acceptance of previously disreputable coin-operated amusements as a legitimate attraction within the regional shopping centers outside of city centers (as well as in other suburban and exurban locations). In the 1960s and ’70s, such places were becoming not only lively retail hubs for middle-class American consumer spending, but also significant social magnets representing a new version of culture and community. The spread of pleasure machines from urban and resort locations to suburban shopping malls came with a rearticulation of space, attaching new associations and meanings to the amusement room.

In renewing and reviving the amusement center in the era of suburbanization, retailers and operators sought to cleanse coin-operated games of their lingering disrepute. The seedy image of the urban or seaside game room was an impediment to the arcade’s acceptance by shopping center landlords, and the coin-operated trade made efforts to shed this image. The old idea of a game room was a dilapidated downtown or oceanfront penny arcade home to a cast of shady characters: sailors, hobos, undesirables. The new idea was to make the amusement arcade “first class” and to ensure “wholesome fun.” Rather than urban arcades or sportlands, catering in particular to young men, the shopping center amusement rooms might have more family appeal. They could be to the 1970s and ’80s what the corner drugstore, with its soda fountain counter, was to the 1940s and ’50s.³⁶

While many of the suburban arcades were in free-standing locations or amusement centers including other diversions like miniature golf, go-karts, or batting cages, the shopping mall arcade was particularly commonplace and reliably profitable. Some chains, including Aladdin’s Castle, ran arcades in both kinds of locations. The game room attracted teens to the mall as a meeting place and hangout, but also gave youngsters a way to pass the time while their mothers shopped.³⁷ Teenage mall visitors in the 1980s might have gone there for the video games, but boys also went to pick up girls and vice versa.³⁸ Male players far outnumbered female ones, often by a ratio of four or more to one. Many of the social pleasures of the arcade were similar to those of earlier generations of gendered amusement, and more likely homosocial than romantic: competition, challenge, proving oneself to peers.³⁹

The mall was not the site of the majority of video arcades in the 1970s. In 1976, shopping centers accounted for only about one-third of amusement rooms.⁴⁰ The remainder were in street spots, resorts, or amusement or theme parks like Golf N Stuff (GNS). But the mall was a fast-growing location for coin-op play, and the mall arcade concept led the way in reconceiving the game room as a safe and respectable space for teenagers to congregate, putting to rest the old stigma of pinball and other penny arcade fixtures. Old arcades such as those in New York City’s seedier districts like Times Square might have “gone to the dogs,” but new, suburban spaces were considered surprisingly nice by old standards.⁴¹ Some chains of amusement parks including GNS and Aladdin’s Castle also ran shopping center locations, and by the end of the decade the independent retailer hoping to open a mall arcade would have found a market effectively closed to new competition and dominated by chains.⁴² The prejudices of mall landlords had been overcome by this new concept of the game room, along with the evidence of profits to be shared by the retailer.⁴³

The new arcade followed in many ways from the configuration of suburban shopping center space, from its meanings and functions. Shopping center arcades developed an identity from their surroundings, and could only be acceptable to landlords and other tenants, and presumably to many shoppers, by fitting in and conforming to the sensibility and purpose of the location. The shopping mall was developed not only to be a regional commercial venture to exploit the consumption desires of suburban residents, but also to function as a nexus for community life in the newly populous regions on the outskirts of cities. The architect Victor Gruen, often credited as one of the pioneers of the mall, argued that it would not be sufficient merely to sell consumer goods to suburbanite shoppers. The success of the shopping center would be realized by meeting further, deeper needs: making “opportunities for social life and recreation in a protected pedestrian environment.” In this way, malls would be a place for “modern community life that the ancient Greek Agora, the Medieval Market Place and our own Town Squares provided in the past.” The shopping center was to marry many functions in one spot. Its role in sustaining “civic, cultural, and social community” life would be met not only through retail shopping but also by a diverse array of other offerings to the suburban public.⁴⁴ These included artistic and cultural displays and performances, educational and recreational programming, and spaces conducive to meetings and gatherings. Malls in the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s contained eye-catching fountains and sculptures in central courts or atria. They staged fashion shows, art exhibitions, concerts, and dances. Many offered rides and ice-skating rinks for amusement and recreation. Play areas for young children were also common, with slides and climbers, and perhaps rides. The design of a galleria, with two or more levels overlooking a central concourse—or perhaps a clock tower, fountain, skating rink, or fifteen-foot-square chessboard—made for social gathering places and communal spectacles of public life. A mall, one architect wrote, should “relax and refresh the families who use it, and promote friendly contact among the people of the community.”⁴⁵

In contrast to the city streets and urban shopping districts, the suburban shopping center had the distinction of being predictable and comfortable.⁴⁶ It was a new kind of public area cleansed of the less desirable elements of city life, such as poverty and filth, sheltering its visitors from becoming troubled by unpleasant things. One strong appeal of the mall was its enclosure, its protective function to control the environment and keep out undesirable imperfections of social reality.⁴⁷ The very qualities of public amusement spaces that had led to their disrepute—their associations with marginal persons, with crime and dereliction, with seedy or dusty or shady environments—were absent by design from suburban shopping malls. Also often absent were racial and ethnic minorities, some of whom brought legal actions claiming discrimination in leasing or hiring, or being harassed by security personnel.⁴⁸ The shopping center’s enclosure and protection were to facilitate a particular ideal of community in the suburbs that would reinvent the bonds of small town life, the village green or main street where neighbors and citizens would meet. But this was a class and race fantasy of protection from the other, insulation from the trouble of a racially and economically segregated and stratified society.⁴⁹ Commentators on shopping malls have often compared them to Disneyland, which speaks to their function of giving visitors pleasure in a nice public environment, but also to their ersatz nature as a place that merely seems like an authentic town center, encouraging a longing for simpler, happier times. Like a theme park and an upscale mall, an amusement arcade depended for its legitimacy and respectability on associations between leisure-time pursuits and social identities. The safety of a white middle-class or affluent clientele helped the arcades of the 1970s dodge the stigma of public amusements and renew the image of pinball and other coin-op games in popular imagination. Now they were not merely game rooms; they were “family fun centers.”⁵⁰

Proprietors of these centers adopted a number of strategies to secure this revision in their trade’s reputation, but the most central, most frequently mentioned in discussions of coin-op games and respectability was cleanliness.⁵¹ A nice arcade, no matter the location, one that would avoid trouble and keep quarters dropping into the cash box, would be first of all a clean arcade. A clean arcade, with well-functioning machines, supervision, and rules prohibiting unwanted behavior, would be unlikely to cause problems for the mall and its patrons. It would be deemed worthwhile by the suburban communities whose civic life was now to be found in a shopping center, which was itself a pleasant model of cleanliness. It would be considered safe for the children of the suburban bourgeoisie.

Cleanliness in these discussions was both a literal and figurative term. It meant sweeping, dusting, and picking up trash, but it also meant casting off the connotations of the “dusty arcade” of Bruce Springsteen’s memories. A clean arcade would be safe from lowlifes and beggars, small-time criminals and hustlers, adults who think they’re still teenagers, tough guys sneering at genteel sensibilities.⁵² It would fit into suburbia and its American middle-class culture in an era of “white flight” from the city. It would put distance between the new arcade and its other, the old amusement center frequented by the wrong kind of crowd. Clean also meant legal, free of corruption and vice, a legitimate business. Clean even suggested virtue. “Good clean fun” isn’t a reference to an absence of dirt; it affirms a moral judgment, a sense of wholesomeness and propriety.

In the coin-operated amusements trade, which included not only pinball and video game machines but also other arcade amusements, pool tables, and jukeboxes, the push for respectability through cleanliness and orderliness was pervasive during the 1970s and ’80s. This was good business logic, assuring the trade of sustained and increasing revenue through not only the acceptance of pinball and video games by polite society, but also increasing freedom from onerous regulation. If coin-op arcades were good clean fun, there would be no cause to ban them or the machines within their walls.

Cleanliness was not a new ambition in the 1970s, having been urged on arcade owners as early as a 1906 item advocating for “cleanliness and light” in penny vaudeville parlors.⁵³ A 1933 Billboard story about the rise of pin games encouraged keeping arcades well lighted and clean as signs of refinement, the better to overcome “the feminine prejudice.”⁵⁴ In the 1970s, though, cleanliness was linked not so much with light and refinement and gentility as with orderliness and respect for authority and property. It was often mentioned in the same breath as maintenance. If machines were kept running in good working order and the floors were kept free of dust and trash, the arcade would appear respectable.⁵⁵

Enforcing a high standard of cleanliness went hand-in-hand with forbidding behaviors such as smoking, eating, and drinking. Signage declaring these prohibitions would function not only as ways to prevent trash and ash from collecting on the floor or dirtying the machines, but to maintain a sense of respect and discipline among the patrons of the arcade through their obedience to posted rules.⁵⁶ In upscale arcades such as the Time Zone chain, which opened in 1974 and expanded in southern California during these years, a “code of conduct consistent with intelligent maturity” was enforced as a way toward achieving “profits, prestige, and permanence in the leisure industry.”⁵⁷ Trade wisdom was that rules must be enforced by arcade managers, and troublemakers kicked out. “Dirt and garbage lead to more dirt and garbage, but clean tends to stay that way,” according to one trade journal editorial. It urged a high standard of policing the arcade against these perceived threats, measures undertaken though the discipline of authority and a respect for orderly conduct. “There are many people in this country,” it warned, “who honestly believe that arcades are settings for everything from drug peddling to prostitution. The arcades will stand guilty until proven clean.”⁵⁸

To be proven clean, arcades posted their codes of conduct on the wall for all to see. The terms might vary from place to place, but certain themes were consistent. In addition to forbidding food and drink as a way of keeping the space free of litter and mess, banning drinking also regulated consumption of alcohol. Likewise, no smoking meant that cannabis products would be proscribed along with tobacco (many arcades still had cigarette machines, though). Posted policies regulated the age of patrons, making the arcade a safe space for children. Kids were unwelcome during school hours and at night they might need an adult chaperone. The number one rule, according to a survey of operators of coin-op machines in 1978, was “no horseplay.”⁵⁹ This ensured that the environment of the arcade would be peaceful and respectful, like the mall beyond its doors. Young people spending their money in an arcade would follow the same expectations of polite and respectful conduct as in school or church—or so the coin-operated amusements trade hoped.

Arcades in many locations other than malls, from bowling alleys to college unions, often had their own site-specific expectations. Some of the new arcade chains, such as Time Zone, Aladdin’s, and GNS, were regarded as “plush” family fun centers, a reference not only to their carpeting but also their luxe appeals to an affluent family trade.⁶⁰ A coin-op trade paper celebration of “Arcades Today” depicted them as transformative for the business. “The metamorphosis of arcades from the center city sleaze or earlier times to the plush carpet centers of today has been heartwarming.”⁶¹ Plush carpeting would have been hard to find in dusty arcades and sportlands of urban and resort areas. So would these new arcades’ elaborate, Disneyesque décor featuring themes such as medieval castle or western ranch. The clientele in such locations were “All-American folks from central casting,” which meant they would cause no trouble and enhance the emporium’s classy image. These plush amusement centers located in miniature golf courses and shopping malls emerged first in southern California, appearing to be “not unlike something you’d see concocted in the special effects departments of their own Hollywood studios.”⁶² The businesses invested unusual sums in advertising and promotion, were kept scrupulously clean, and featured an unusually high percentage of TV games, which carried less residual shame than pinball.

During these years, Ramada opened arcade rooms in its chain of inns to capitalize on the popularity of coin-operated amusements. Like a suburban mall, a nice hotel would want to ensure that pinball and video game machines would be integrated into its space without bringing along undesirable associations. Ramada managed this by stressing the cleanliness of its game rooms, eliminating any hint of a “carnival look” or any suggestion of a “garish, bus station appearance.” So that dust or trash would have no place to gather, Ramada had the legs removed from pinball tables and mounted them instead on carpeted benches. Rather than placing the machines within earshot of a lobby area, the arcade was located behind Plexiglas to eliminate the noises of electronic machines. The mall arcades catered to young people in particular, but both pinball and video games were popular with players of many ages. As a place of lodging for business travelers, Ramada appealed to adults as well as children with its game rooms. Almost two-thirds of the quarters spent in its arcades came from the pockets of businessmen. Like the rules posted in mall arcades, the efforts to remove any hint of stain or stigma from amusement machines in hotels upgraded the class status of coin-slot play and made it newly respectable.⁶³

This respectability arose from a number of sources, and the inclusion of video uprights within the game room was one of them. But at the beginning of 1979, when the story of Ramada’s game rooms was reported, pinball was still the most popular and profitable coin-op machine in the arcade. The shifting status of public amusements happened during pinball’s reign, and video games surpassed pinball only once change was well underway. The emergence of clean, plush, family fun centers occurred along with the emergence of video games, but at first these new arcades had a much more varied array of offerings than they would by the early 1980s, when the new electronic games now reigned over all others.

From Pin Games to TV Games

By the early 1970s, the coin-operated amusements business had for years been focused most of all on jukeboxes and the establishments in which they could be found: those, like All in the Family’s Kelsey’s, serving mainly alcoholic drinks. A jukebox would require regular servicing on the operator’s route at least to replace old records with new ones, keeping up with the record industry’s cycle of hits climbing the charts. Operators also handled amusement games, some of which, like Kelsey’s pinball machine—alongside pool, shuffle, and soccer (foosball) tables—were found in the same bars. In the language of operators, these were “street” locations as opposed to “arcades,” which were places defined by their amusement games (though they also often had coin-operated jukeboxes, photo booths, and vending machines). During the 1970s, a number of changes shook up the business of coin-op leisure. First video games were introduced, then pinball became newly popular and displaced jukeboxes as the trade’s biggest earner, and finally video games became the most popular and profitable fixture of locations in the arcade and on the street. These shifts caused the trade organization representing the coin-op business, the MOA (Music Operators Association), to change its name in 1976 to AMOA (Amusement & Music Operators Association).

Video games became such fixtures by riding pinball’s coattails, and by inheriting some of pinball’s cultural status even as they cultivated their own. Video games trailed pinball in earnings and interest for most of the decade, despite the attention they attracted for being new and high-tech. Like 45s in a jukebox, video uprights and pinball machines had to be changed from time to time to refresh the interest of regular patrons. Video games in particular had a strong initial novelty value, and after a period of weeks or months would have to be rotated to a new location where the players might be unfamiliar with them. Success in the coin-op business meant moving machines from place to place on the operator’s route to maximize the earnings in the cash box.

Before 1979, video games did not generally become hits. One exception in addition to Pong was the unusual Atari product Indy 800, a racecar driving game played by up to eight players standing at wheels around a common up-facing display of a racetrack. Each of the players controlled one car on the track, and it cost a quarter for each of the players to race. Indy 800 was a big and lasting earner for Atari and amusements operators, often occupying a spot in the center of the game room (it could not be placed against a wall like most pinball and video cabinets); but the typical TV game was less lucrative than the typical pinball machine. Pinball machines were also unlikely to become hits to the extent that one would be significantly more profitable than others, or that arcades would want to have more than one of a particular pinball machine.

In the second half of the 1970s, pinball became the most important type of coin-operated machine in arcades and street locations. In annual summaries in the coin-op trade press, pinball was named machine of the year, as in 1977 and 1978, both referenced as a “year of pinball.”⁶⁴ Advice to the operator and proprietor was to showcase the pinball machines: the “number one attraction in any game room should be a beautiful array of flipper games.”⁶⁵ When surveyed in 1977, operators said that if they could deal in only one kind of machine, they would choose pinball, followed by pool, jukeboxes, soccer tables, and only then video games.⁶⁶ The “fair-haired darling of the coin operator,” a pinball machine was a steady if not spectacular source of income.⁶⁷ Especially in street locations but also in arcades, customers spent more money playing pinball than they spent playing any other amusement machines including TV games.

The surge of pinball past jukeboxes was a product of some changes already described: the rock-and-roll aura lent to pinball by Tommy, the legalization of flippers in big cities such as New York (1976) and Chicago (1977), the legitimacy won by clean and plush suburban arcades, and the effort to market pinball to consumers. The solid-state electronic pinball machine was a technological innovation that renewed interest in the game. Pinball had undergone many technological innovations over the years, and many became standard features of the game, including flippers and bumper thumpers. Replacing electro-mechanical technology with solid-state electronics fit into the wider developments in high-tech in the 1970s, as electronics penetrated many areas of everyday life from supermarket checkout counters to wristwatches. The new solid-state pinball machines introduced beginning in 1976 had electronic digital scorekeeping and electronic sounds, and an increased complexity of play. The mechanisms controlling the game were no longer the old switches and relays but now integrated circuits. This made them more similar to video games, which of course were also a form of integrated circuit electronics. Some players might not have recognized the change from electro-mechanical to solid state, and some games were released in two versions. But to some aficionados the new games would have been noticeably technologically upgraded.

The difference between electro-mechanical and electronic technology also figured in, however, to the widespread disdain for TV games among AMOA members. In surveys of operators during pinball’s heyday of the later 1970s, many expressed frustration with video games and a preference for many other kinds of coin-op machines. “Make less TV games” was their refrain.⁶⁸ One issue with video games was their unreliability. Electro-mechanical pinball and other arcade amusements could be more easily fixed by handy proprietors or operators who knew their way around relays and switches. A totally electronic game could only be fixed by someone with a less common expertise in electronics. Since 79 percent of operators found video games to be unreliable, the preference for pinball above other amusement machines made good sense, especially considering that few video games had yet to become very popular and thus seriously profitable.⁶⁹ In 1978, RePlay asked operators where TV games fit on their route, prompting operators to lament that they needed to be moved and repaired frequently.⁷⁰ That the question even needed to be asked indicates video games’ questionable status in the era of pinball’s reign.

Video games, however, were also crucial to the rising respectability of arcades and coin-operated amusements including pinball even before they outperformed all other amusements. They brought respectability by being newer and more high-tech than flipper games, and they gave coin-op amusements an “entrée,” according to one member of the AMOA, into “thousands of locations where any kind of coin operated amusement game was taboo, unacceptable, and not permitted to operate in the past.”⁷¹ These places included cocktail lounges, hotels, airports, and malls. Video games had no old reputation as playthings of gamblers, criminals, and hoodlums. They were considered more “intellectual” amusements, which was an indication of their class status in relation to other games. They were, in the tradesperson’s terms, “sophisticated, adult, scientific marvels.”⁷² Video games were also in many middle-class homes already by the later 1970s, which helped public amusements—some of which were now hardly different from home versions made by the same companies—overcome their original sin of association with crime and gambling. The advertisements for video games aimed at consumers were an “image-producing boost” giving coin-operated leisure a “respectability shield.”⁷³

Another benefit of video games for the coin-op business was a generational development: kids who grew up with video games seemed to like them more than adults who had not, which would serve to renew and refresh interest in amusements. The “family trade” at the plush arcades and bowling alleys liked TV games more than the older crowds at taverns and pool halls. One of the keys to success of a family fun center arcade like Time Zone was “a high percentage of TV games” along with the rest of the trappings of upscale leisure.⁷⁴ The college crowd also preferred video games more than other groups. In an arcade that opened in 1977 in Westwood, California, near the UCLA campus, four out of five machines were video games at a time when most game rooms were dominated by pinball.⁷⁵

Late in the 1970s, then, video games were popular in particular with younger and more affluent players of public amusements, and their presence had been essential to the revitalization of public amusements as a legitimate leisure-time activity. But they were not yet impressively profitable for the coin-op trade by comparison to other types of machine. This changed beginning in 1979, when Space Invaders became the industry’s first enormous hit. By April of that year, Space Invaders was the “world’s hottest game,” creating a kind of demand never seen before.⁷⁶ Like many a surprisingly popular craze before it, Space Invaders inspired songs such as one released as a 45 RPM single (first in Japan, then imported to the USA) combining the bleepy alien invasion sounds of the game with a disco tune backed by an orchestra, and another with the lyric “He’s hooked, he’s hooked, his brain is cooked.” Space Invaders was so hot that a Space Invaders pinball machine was made to exploit its popularity. This demand hurt other games in the market when arcade patrons wanted to play only Space Invaders, but the surge in interest in video games lifted the entire industry. Arcades that before had never kept more than one of a video or pinball machine now needed multiple Space Invaders cabinets to keep up with the thirst to play it. It might not be unusual for one location to have four Space Invaders, and American operators learned of an arcade in London’s Piccadilly Circus where ten were arrayed side by side.⁷⁷ Operators now enjoying increased revenue from Space Invaders became frustrated that other games could not match its earnings, and companies tried to duplicate its success with spinoffs and copycats, some legitimate (Space Invaders Deluxe) and some knockoffs of the “space creature assault” concept. Video game manufacturers followed up on Space Invaders with many more space shooter games: Asteroids and Asteroids Deluxe, Missile Command, and Galaxian all collected a great many quarters in the cash box.

Adults as well as children took to Space Invaders. A tavern that had one video game and two pinball machines in the later 1970s might have one pinball and two video games after Space Invaders. For all players, the novelty status of video games had been shed, and machines rewarded much more devoted play. It became unnecessary to rotate games around the operator’s route when there was such sustained interest in individual machines.⁷⁸ It might be unfair to say electronic games simply got better, but they newly rewarded devoted, repeated play and attracted players to individual cabinets more strongly. The games had also become more reliable, and complaints about maintenance largely ceased. Even if these issues persisted, the operators were making too much money to disdain video games. By late 1980, a “year of video” in the amusement trade, the average TV game upright had doubled its earnings from a few years before.⁷⁹ Now when asked if they could offer only one kind of game, the operators said “video,” which was now regarded as the “Rolls Royce” of amusement machines.⁸⁰ By 1982, the top-earning video game was collecting an average of $255 a week (the top pinball earner took $157).⁸¹ This was several times the take of a few years before.

At first, a new video game would offer a shorter duration of play for one quarter than a pinball machine. Games were more challenging initially to the unfamiliar or unseasoned player. This brevity of play helped increase the profitability of video games, and is one reason why some pinball machines dropped their play from five to three balls for a quarter at the same time that video games got hot. But unlike pinball, video games like Space Invaders, Asteroids, Missile Command, and later Pac-Man and Donkey Kong and many less popular examples, encouraged players to invest considerable time, energy, and money in increasing their skill and mastering the game. Pinball seldom inspired such devotion. Video games, unlike pinball, would adapt to your skill, becoming harder as you got better. They also had less chance built into them than pinball. A proficient video game player could milk a single quarter for a long duration, spending hours with these “infectious inventions.”⁸²

Unlike pinball, video games also remembered the machine’s high scores, and some allowed players to enter initials next to theirs for bragging rights.⁸³ Twin Galaxies Arcade in Ottumwa, Iowa, maintained an international scoreboard of high scores on various arcade games.⁸⁴ One trade paper headline read, “They Play for Hours, and Hours, and Hours to Beat the High Score!” In the early 1980s, many news reports told of young video game players who set records not just of high scores but also of duration of play for various popular arcade games. They would master the game to the point that they could play them continuously until their bodies could endure no more pushing a joystick, pressing a button, and coordinating hand and eye. A fourteen-year-old in Maine played Asteroids for 29 hours 35 minutes, and the record for Missile Command was 28 hours by a player in Spokane. Atari claimed its record length of play for Asteroids was 50 hours.⁸⁵ These games were hardly interchangeable, though, and becoming proficient at one did not necessarily mean mastery of others. In contrast, pinball players transferred their skill more from game to game. A pinball machine’s identity might come as much from its theme represented in its name, and its backglass art and playfield design. Young video game players told RePlay in 1981 that by comparison to video games, pinball machines are “more similar to one another” and more dependent on luck.⁸⁶ Video games were regarded as more reliant on skill. This is partly why so many photos of video arcades from this period show observers looking on at someone else playing. They are there to watch and learn, to gain insight into successful play, to figure out the ways of the machine and the strategies of the best video kids. Many guidebooks were also published to instruct the would-be high-score achiever.

This was a competitive, youthful, masculine culture familiar from experiences of sports and other kinds of contests based on achievements of skill. In representations of arcades in popular culture and the popular press, the player engrossed in a video game, engaged in an effort to master it and achieve a high score, is most often young and male. In television commercials for home versions of arcade games, for example, the player is invariably a teenage or young adult male whose entire being is consumed in electronic play. The image on the cover of Time magazine from January 18, 1982, was of such a young man armed with a futuristic space pistol inside the screen of an arcade cabinet. This obsession with video games, which captured the energy of so many young people in these years, also produced a sense of crisis among adults beginning in 1981. Once video games had become so popular, antigame crusades kicked into gear. Many municipalities that had not reacted against the popularity of pinball in the 1970s sought to regulate or ban video games and video arcades when they became even more popular in the 1980s (a topic to be considered in more detail in chapter 5). The outcry over electronic play was a product of many fears and concerns, but central to its mission was a worry about the force computer games seemed to exert over their players—what Sherry Turkle in her 1984 book on computers (and her commentaries on television and in the press) called their “holding power.”⁸⁷ Although its effects were often feared, pinball was never regarded as exerting this kind of force over its players. Video games displaced pinball as the central attraction of the arcade in part by offering a stronger, more mesmerizing appeal. But the space of the arcade, and many of its key characteristics and connotations, already existed at the time of the debut of Space Invaders. The video arcade and the pinball arcade and the clean and plush family fun center were all part of the same emergent space of amusement for the American suburban bourgeoisie, and its sons in particular.

Figure 1.1 *Time* magazine’s January 18, 1982, cover pictures a young man fighting an alien invasion within the representation of an arcade game.

1 Good Clean Fun: The Origins of the Video Arcade

Coin-Ops before Pong

The Game Room in the Age of Pinball

From Pin Games to TV Games

Home and Away

Notes