(Page 2 of 10)
Back in America, Adlum watched the videogame portion of the amusement business slide into a period of doldrums. "I covered videogames through
Pong and then through a rather lackluster period until 1978 when a Japanese invention called
Space Invaders began showing up."
In October of 1975, Adlum started his own magazine, RePlay. Well established by 1978, he was there to observe as the golden age of videogames redefined the world of arcades.
"Somewhere in the neighborhood of '78-'79, the videogame portion of our industry took off like gangbusters. It was a period that lasted only three or four years and it was followed by the videogame bust," says Adlum.
Putting things into perspective, there were no home games the year that Nutting Associates released
Computer Space. The following year saw both the release of
Pong, the first successful "television game" in arcades, and the short-lived Magnavox Odyssey, the television game system sold in stores.
The Atari 2600 epitomized the first wave of "programmable" game consoles. (Photo courtesy of Wikipedia)
In 1975, Atari began work on a home version of
Pong. By 1976,
Pong sales were huge and companies like the Connecticut Leather Company (a.k.a. Coleco) and RCA began releasing
Pong-like games of their own. While much was written about
Home Pong, however, it never warranted a magazine of its own.
With the release of
Space Invaders and the beginning of the golden age of arcade, things changed. According to an article published in Time Magazine, Americans spent 75,000 man-years playing videogames in arcades in 1980. Movie studios released films like "Tron" and "Joysticks" to try and cash in on the craze. The character Pac-Man appeared on the covers of Mad Magazine and Time, and the amusement industry saw the creation of the first dedicated videogame publications in the form of trade magazines published for arcade operators.
"There were quite a few magazines that came out to cover videogames," says Adlum. "I remember going to a convention in New Orleans during the boom where they had quite a few tables set up for the distribution of journals that were either dedicated to videogames or had a section within the magazine about videogames. I think we counted like 25 different periodicals during the heyday of the videogame business.
"We at RePlay, as well as the other mainstream magazines -- Play Meter and Vending Times -- took exhibit booths on the regular trade show floor. We were the establishment. Every one of those other magazines disappeared real quick."
When today's gamers use the word "arcade," they may mean it as a noun referring to a place with videogames, or they may use it as an adjective to describe a fast style of gameplay. In the world of coin-operated amusement, however, the word "arcade" has a very specific meaning.
"People outside the industry use the word 'arcade' as an adjective. People in the industry use the word as a noun referring to a place that is solely dedicated to amusement machines.
"Videogames originally went into street locations like bars, some restaurants and some game rooms. The point is that the original videogames were just one more kind of amusement device in an industry that had coin-operated pool tables, pinball machines, target rifles and a variety of other stuff that came and went, like helicopter machines and so on."