A Short History of the Arcade, in Fourteen Games You Can Play Here
Every arcade game was built around one constraint that no game today has to respect: the machine had to take your money, and then it had to stop. A cabinet that let you play forever earned nothing. That single commercial fact shaped almost everything we now think of as game design, and you can watch it happening across about a decade.
We have rebuilt fourteen of these ideas to play in a browser. What follows is where they came from, and what each one actually invented.
1976: Breakout, and the game with no enemy
Atari had already sold Pong. The follow-up question was what a single player does when there is nobody on the other side of the table, and the answer was to turn the opponent into a wall. Breakout gave you a paddle, a ball and a stack of bricks, and it worked because the wall you are destroying is also the thing making the game harder: clear the low rows and the ball starts coming back at angles you cannot reach in time.
Its production story is the famous part. Nolan Bushnell wanted the prototype built with as few chips as possible and offered a bonus for every one saved. Steve Jobs took the job and brought in Steve Wozniak, who built a working version in a few days with a chip count so low that Atari's engineers reportedly could not manufacture it and rebuilt the design anyway. It is a good story about constraint, which is the theme of this whole era.
1978: Space Invaders, and difficulty by accident
Tomohiro Nishikado's aliens speed up as you destroy them, and almost every player reads that as menace: the swarm getting frantic as it closes in. It was not designed. The hardware could only draw so much, and with fewer invaders left on screen there was less to draw, so the remaining ones moved faster. Nishikado noticed, decided it was better than what he had planned, and kept it.
The most famous difficulty curve in games is a rendering limitation that somebody was smart enough not to fix.
Space Invaders also gave us the high score. Before it, you played and the number went away. After it, the machine remembered, and the arcade became somewhere you went to take something back off a stranger.
1979: Asteroids, and momentum
Asteroids is drawn with a vector monitor, which traces lines directly rather than filling a grid of pixels, and that is why its ship still looks sharp in a way its contemporaries do not. The design contribution is subtler: your ship has inertia. Thrust and you keep going. Almost nothing before it asked you to plan a stop.
It is also the first game on this list that is genuinely hard to quit, because the screen wraps and there is no safe corner to hide in.
1980: Missile Command, and a game you cannot win
Dave Theurer's game gives you six cities and asks you to defend them from warheads falling out of the sky. There is no victory condition. The waves keep coming, faster, and eventually the last city goes. The only question is how long you last and what it costs.
Mechanically its idea is that you never shoot at anything. You choose a point in the sky and a blast opens there, and anything caught in it detonates too, so the skill is in prediction and in catching several at once rather than in aim. Theurer has said the game gave him nightmares, which in 1980 was not a surprising thing for a game about incoming missiles to do.
1980: Pac-Man, and enemies with opinions
Toru Iwatani set out to make something that was not about shooting, and ended up making the most influential enemy design in games. The four ghosts look identical in behaviour for about thirty seconds, and then you notice they are not: each one is chasing a different tile.
One goes straight for you. One aims at the space four tiles ahead of where you are facing, so running in a straight line is how you run into her. One takes its bearing from the first ghost's position, which makes it harmless when that ghost is far away and vicious when it is close. One chases while it is distant and bolts for its corner as soon as you get near, which is why a ghost always seems to lose its nerve.
There is no pathfinding in any of it. Each ghost looks at the turns available, throws out the way it came, and takes whichever remaining one is closest in a straight line to its own target. Four rules, one tie-break, and the whole thing reads as personality.
1981: Donkey Kong, and the jump
Shigeru Miyamoto's game is usually credited with making jumping a verb. Before it, characters moved; after it, they had a relationship with the floor. That sounds small and it is not: gravity turns a maze into a place, gives a designer a way to make a gap meaningful, and creates the entire platform genre that followed.
It also has a story, which almost nothing else in the arcade did. You are climbing toward something. That is a different feeling from surviving waves, and it is the reason players remember the ending.
1984: Tetris, and the game that never ends
Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris at the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and it is the cleanest idea in this piece: seven shapes, one rule, no theme, no enemy and no finish. It is also the point at which the arcade's economics stop being the design constraint. Tetris does not need to take your quarter. It just needs to be slightly faster than you.
What they all have in common
Every game here fits on one screen, teaches itself in about ten seconds, and gets harder until you lose. None of them has a tutorial, a cutscene or a save file. That was not restraint, it was a cabinet in a bowling alley that had to explain itself to a stranger holding a coin, and then had to end.
What has changed is where you play. These games were designed for a stand-up cabinet and most people now meet them on a phone, which is why the versions here are built to be played with a thumb. A few of them ended up better for it. A missile defence game where you touch the sky to place a blast turns out to want a touchscreen more than it ever wanted a trackball.
A note on what these are
None of the games on this site are the originals, and none of them are trying to pass as them. Game mechanics cannot be owned, and rebuilding a mechanic is how the medium has always moved: every maze chase after 1980 is standing on Iwatani's ghosts. Names, characters and artwork are a different matter and belong to the people who made them, so ours are our own.
There are fourteen games in total, including several that are not descended from anything in particular. Browse all of them, or take whatever is on the homepage and see how far you get.