Jamie Lendino - Attract Mode: The Rise and Fall of Coin-Op Arcade Games

In the Golden Age of arcades, video games were more than pop culturethey were portals to the future. Shooting galleries and claw machines seemed archaic next to the video arcades sizzling colors and animated attract mode screens. Subdued room ambience accentuated bright, backlit marquees, displays, and coin boxes. Buttons with flashing red LEDs looked like rocket ship controls. The sharp, neon lines of vector graphics drafted a perfect, minimalist design language.

More distinct than the visuals were the sounds. Video game coin-ops together formed this dissonant mashup of explosions, laser blasts, computer music, and synthesized speech. The ominous, walking bass lines of Asteroids and Space Invaders stood out the most. You could feel the pulsing in your gut as you scanned the floor to see which games were in the room, and which of those were unoccupied, waiting for the next quarter. Play a game and the feel of the vibrating cabinets and custom controlsdifferent from game to gamemade for a new kind of amusement park ride.

Even finding just a couple of new arcade games was terrific. I grew up in Brooklyn, and for a time it seemed as if cabinets were everywhere: crammed into the local pizza place or bodega, tucked inside a bowling alley, adjacent to a miniature golf course, or underneath an elevated subway station, one of many street spots. Sometimes one or two new coin-ops would surprise you in a store you hadnt been to recently.

The rest of the country saw a wider variety of locales, including college campuses, airports, and bus depots. Hotels kept them in recreation rooms off the lobby, sometimes with a pool table or next to the gym. Indoor malls included larger, independent arcades along with chain locations such as Time-Out . The biggest were housed in their own buildings, destinations all their own.

Real arcades were the most fun because they had dozens of machines. They were always crowded, usually with a lopsided mix of teens and adults. Often one person played a game as a few others watched, sometimes to crib strategies, sometimes with a quarter on the lower-left corner of the screen to show they had the next game.