Arcade Games Then And Now

Back in the twenties people used to throw stones at empty bottles, or they would try to shoot the hat off of some dummy. These were arcade games for the people during the presidency of Calvin Cooledge.

The twenties have been come to be known as the roaring twenties for all of the huge development that happened, which is directly related to president Cooledge's politics and reformations. Back then they were still setting up electricity and cars.

Funny to think, that your great grandfather was born in a time when electricity wasn't even a normal commodity. Yeah, the world has changed a lot, especially arcades.

Arcade games were generally held at carnivals and fairs. Up to this point there had already been theme parks, but they were lacking in creative content.

Basically these theme parks were made of a Ferris wheel and a mirror room. It wasn't until the roaring twenties they started making arcade games.

Then the depression came along and nobody wanted to play games, and during that same time everyone got doped into social security. Besides having a terribly communistic decade in our history we did ok.

Forty years later we started back up with the arcade games. But the year was nineteen seventy and electricity was "poppin".

This was a time when people were mesmerized by lava lamps and disco balls. The electric arcade game pong game along and blew people's minds.

This was the dawn of the new era, and over the next twenty years arcades started popping up on every street corner. Pong is a relatively simple game, so as games developed over the next little while people started to get more and more hooked.

Games like Mars Invader and Asteroids started to transcend arcade from a social experience to an independent indulgence. By the mid-eighties when Mrs. Pacman had made her appearance children had become desperately addicted.

These poor children would spend all their savings, quarter after quarter, on these terribly underdeveloped 16 bit games. Now we have places like Chucky Cheeses and Fiesta Fun who have a great mixture of different style arcade games.

We even have places like Dave and Busters for those people that are a little too old to still be in a Chucky Cheeses. Yes arcade has changed a drastic amount over the last century.

The biggest change is all sort of recreational games have turned into electronic games. People still play pool and foosball, but more than ever, with the rapid developing technology we have, people are investing in gaming consoles.

Luckily traditional arcade games are not forgotten altogether. We can still go to carnivals and fairs and theme parks, and some of these places have some of the original shoot the duck or throw the ring games.