ABSTRACT
The early 1980s were the golden age of the arcades, when playing the latest games meant jamming your way into a boisterous neon arena where throngs of fickle teenagers, quarters in hand, queued up for 30 s of twitch. The stakes were high for the owners of these pop-fueled establishments, the arcade operators, who had to predict which machines would collect more quarters than dust. The International Arcade Museum website lists 244 machines manufactured in 1981 alone, and for each Frogger, Galaga, or Defender, there are dozens of obscure titles like Sun Electronics’ Funky Fish and Universal’s Cosmic Avenger (see Figure 9.1). Shigeru Miyamoto at GDC 2007. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-u.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780429280542/68a2eefb-655d-4369-8304-d131db7e921a/content/fig9_1.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> (Photo courtesy of Vincent Diamante.)
