Mobile Wins Arcade

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

In the early 1980s, the world added a hobby; playing Arcade Games. What started in arcades soon conquered living rooms. The development of Arcade Games is so rapid that even now we look back nostalgically on the games of the past. Pac Man, Tetris, Street Fighter, Donkey Kong, Pong, Asteroids, Space Invaders and Mortal Kombat – just to name a few.

Sure, you can get an arcade cabinet for a lot of money, but there is a more accessible way to relive those good times. Namely, with Arcade Slots. After all, casino game developers are from the same generation as us and can’t resist giving all of the above titles a nice new slot machine look.

As children of the 80s, we would like to share our love for both arcade games and slots. Which games give you that arcade feeling and, with a little luck, make you a nice penny?

Arcade History

The development of the slot machine and arcade games are quite parallel. It’s not for nothing that the translation of arcade is “gaming machine”. You could argue that slot machines are a form of gaming machines.

Same as jukeboxes, they are all cabinets that you have to toss a coin into. Before the first arcade cabinets, shooting galleries and ball throwing games were the ‘small’ entertainment of choice.

Like pinball machines and jukeboxes, for example, slot machines were developed in the early twentieth century and transitioned to digital around the 1960s and 1970s. This digitization created the first arcade cabinets as we know them today and is also when the word “arcade” came into vogue.

In the 1980s, arcade cabinets popped up everywhere in arcades, restaurants, cafes and cafeterias. Many other, older forms of gaming machines, such as the pinball machine, fell out of favor. The slot machine did survive, but in the café often alongside the arcade cabinet.

With the advent of the Commodore 64, Nintentdo and SEGA, arcade cabinets became obsolete overnight. The glory days of arcades lasted less than fifteen years. Now they are kept in people’s homes as decorative pieces.

The physical slot machine is also a relic of the past. The advent of the Internet meant for the physical slot machine what the console meant for the arcade cabinet. A tragic story, but fortunately there is a sequel. The best of both worlds come together in the top arcade slot machines described below!

Top Arcade Games

• Pac Man: Purists will say that Pac Man was not the first, but Pac Man is the most iconic arcade game for us. The premise of this game is so simple and good that it never needed a series of sequels to perfect it (though they did come). Namco’s 1980 game was an instant hit, selling hundreds of thousands of gaming machines within a year. Even though Pac Man is the star of the show, the ghosts Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde also have a special place in our hearts.
• Space Invaders: Pac Man knocked 1980 Space Invaders off the throne as the most popular arcade game. This 1978 game went a lot further than Pong in terms of gameplay, but also dovetailed well with the Star Wars craze in terms of theme. Until 2012, a new version of this game was released almost every year (on different platforms), which shows how successful this game is despite its simple design.
• Street Fighter: It may be said at this point that all of these games are of Japanese origin. The same goes for Street Fighter. This revolutionary game took advantage of the new graphic capabilities of the late 1980s and marks the pinnacle of arcade hall culture. The game, featuring martial artists from around the world, got a pretty bad movie starring Jean Claude van Damme and Kylie Minogue. However, Bison was wonderfully portrayed and makes it so everyone must see the movie at least once.
• Mortal Kombat: The rivalry between Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat is one that has ignited within many an adolescent friend group. Mortal Kombat supposedly “ripped off” Street Fighter, but with digitized characters, bloody scenes and brutal fatalities, had it perhaps surpassed the stylistic Street Fighter? Perhaps, but the gameplay was a bit wooden compared to Street Fighter. The last word has not been said on this. In any case, Sub Zero and Scorpion are the most bad ass characters in video games ever. Get over here!
• Donkey Kong: before Nintendo took over the world with Mario, Mario, a.k.a. Jumpman, first had to take on a monkey and his barrels to save Pauline. Yes, you read correctly, Jumpman and Pauline. Strange that those characters eventually managed to conquer the world as Mario and Peach. With Donkey Kong, the “high score” has been elevated to mythical status. Just Youtube Donkey Kong and you will enter a trapdoor of documentaries, claims and conspiracy theories.

Top 5 Arcade Trivia

• The first pixelated blood to appear on a screen came from Mortal Kombat in 1992. This was the arcade cabinet version, though. Castle Wolfenstein 3D holds the honor of the first blood splatter on our computer screens at home.
• If Lara Croft were a real person, she would be 54 years old now. Her date of birth is Feb 14th, 1968.
• The ghosts in Pac Man have their own personalities. Blinky constantly chases Pac-Man, Pinky tries to ambush him, Inky is randomly distributed depending on Pac-Man’s position and Clyde will get close to the player and then try to flee to the bottom left corner, possibly cutting off escape routes.
• Shortly after the arcade game came out, a 12-year-old boy in Japan, armed with a shotgun, tried to rob a bank of its coins so he could spend them on Space Invaders. The myth that games are bad for young people was thus born.
• The Arcade Games industry got a revival on the cell phone when the touch screen was introduced. Think of games like Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja and Flappy Bird.