Electro-mechanical games (EM games) are types ofarcade games that operate on a combination of someelectronic circuitry andmechanical actions from the player to move items contained within the game's cabinet. Some of these were earlylight gun games using light-sensitivesensors on targets to register hits, while others weresimulation games such asdriving games,combat flight simulators andsports games. EM games were popular inamusement arcades from the late 1940s up until the 1970s, serving as alternatives topinball machines, which had been stigmatized asgames of chance during that period. EM games lost popularity in the 1970s, asarcade video games had emerged to replace them in addition to newer pinball machines designed asgames of skill.
EM games typically combined mechanical engineering technology with variouselectrical components, such asmotors,switches,resistors,solenoids,relays, bells,buzzers andelectric lights.[1] EM games lie somewhere in the middle between fullyelectronic games and mechanical games.
EM games have a number of different genres/categories. "Novelty" or "land-sea-air" games refer tosimulation games that simulate aspects of various vehicles, such ascars (similar toracing video games),submarines (similar tovehicular combat video games), or aircraft (similar tocombat flight simulator video games).Gun games refer to games that involve shooting with a gun-like peripheral (such as alight gun or similar device), similar tolight gun shooter video games. "General" arcade games refer to all other types of EM arcade games, including various different types of sports games.[2] "Audio-visual" or "realistic" games referred to novelty games that used advanced special effects to provide a simulation experience.[3]
Coin-operated arcade amusements based ongames of skill emerged around the turn of the 20th century, such asfortune telling,strength tester machines andmutoscopes. Normally installed at carnivals and fairs, entrepreneurs created standalone arcades to house these machines[4][5] More interactive mechanical games emerged around the 1930s, such asskee-ball,[4] as well as the first simplepinball games. However, when pinball was first introduced, it lacked features such as user-controlled flippers, and were considered to begames of chance. This led to several jurisdictions to ban pinball machines fearing their influence on youth.[6]
Alternatives to pinball were electro-mechanical games (EM games) that clearly demonstrated themselves as games of skill to avoid the stigma of pinball. The transition from mechanical arcade games to electro-mechanical games dates back to around the time ofWorld War II, with different types of arcade games gradually making the transition during thepost-war period between the 1940s and 1960s.[7]
At the1939–1940 New York World's Fair, in April 1940,Edward Condon of theWestinghouse Electric Company displayed theNimatron, a non-programmable electro-mechanical computer that played games ofNim, using electro-mechanical relays, buttons, and lightbulbs. The device, intended solely for entertainment, saw nearly 100,000 games during the fair, and may have inspired theNimrod, a full digital computer programmed to play Nim at the 1951Festival of Britain, considered as one of the precursors of the video game.[8][9][10]
In 1941,International Mutoscope Reel Company released the electro-mechanical driving gameDrive Mobile, which had an uprightarcade cabinet similar to what arcade video games would later use.[1] It was derived from older British driving games from the 1930s. InDrive Mobile, asteering wheel was used to control amodel car over a road painted on a metaldrum, with the goal being to keep the car centered as the road shifts left and right. Kasco (short for Kansai Seisakusho Co.) introduced this type of electro-mechanical driving game to Japan in 1958 withMini Drive, which followed a similar format but had a longer cabinet allowing a longer road.[3] Capitol Projector's 1954 machineAuto Test was adriving test simulation that usedfilm reel to project pre-recorded driving video footage, awarding the player points for making correct decisions as the footage is played. These early driving games consisted of only the player vehicle on the road, with no rival cars to race against.[7]
By the 1950s, EM games were using atimer to create a sense of urgency in the gameplay. An example of this is theboxing gameK.O. Champ (1955) by International Mutoscope Reel Company.[7] By 1961, however, the US arcade industry had been stagnating. This in turn had a negative effect on Japanese arcade distributors such asSega that had been depending on US imports up until then. Sega co-founderDavid Rosen responded to market conditions by having Sega develop original arcade games in Japan.[11]
From the late 1960s, EM games incorporated more elaborate electronics and mechanical action to create a simulated environment for the player.[3] These games overlapped with the introduction of arcade video games, and in some cases, were prototypical of the experiences that arcade video games offered. The late 1960s to early 1970s were considered the "electro-mechanical golden age" in Japan,[12] and the "novelty renaissance" or "technological renaissance" in North America.[13][3] A new category of "audio-visual" novelty games emerged during this era, mainly established by several Japanese arcade manufacturers.[3] Arcades had previously been dominated byjukeboxes, before a new wave of EM arcade games emerged that were able to generate significant earnings for arcade operators.[14]
Periscope, asubmarine simulator andlight gun shooter,[15] was released byNakamura Manufacturing Company (later called Namco) in 1965[16] and then by Sega in 1966.[17] It used lights and plastic waves to simulate sinking ships from a submarine,[18] and had players look through aperiscope to direct and fire torpedoes,[11] which were represented by colored lights and electronic sound effects.[19][20] Sega's version became an instant success in Japan, Europe, and North America,[21] where it was the first arcade game to cost aquarter per play,[17] which would remain the standard price for arcade games for many years to come.[21] The success ofPeriscope was a turning point for the arcade industry.[11]
Periscope revived the novelty game business, and established a "realistic" or "audio-visual" category of games, using advanced special effects to provide a simulation experience.[3] It was the catalyst for the "novelty renaissance" where a wide variety of novelty/specialty games (also called "land-sea-air" games) were released during the late 1960s to early 1970s, from quiz games and racing games to hockey and football games, many adopting the quarter-play price point.[13][2]
As Japan's arcade industry grew rapidly, a new category of "audio-visual" novelty games began being manufactured in the late 1960s from Japanese arcade manufacturers, with the four largest being Sega,Taito, Nakamura Manufacturing, and Kasco.[a] Their "audio-visual" games were exported internationally to North America and Europe, selling in large quantities that had not been approached by most arcade machines in years.[3] This led to a "technological renaissance" in the late 1960s, which would later be critical in establishing a healthy arcade environment for video games to flourish in the 1970s.[3]
The success ofPeriscope led to American distributors turning to Japan for new arcade games in the late 1960s, which in turn encouraged competition from traditional Chicago arcade manufacturers.[11] American arcade firms such asMidway Manufacturing,Chicago Coin andAllied Leisure responded by cloning the latest novelty games from Japan, establishing a clone market in North America. Japanese manufacturers responded by releasing new game concepts every few months to stay ahead of the clone competition, but the American clones gradually succeeded in driving Japanese firms out of the North American market in the early 1970s. Despite this, Japan continued to have a thriving local market with more than 500,000–700,000 arcade machines by 1973, mostly consisting of EM shooting and driving games from Japanese manufacturers alongside pinball machines imported from the United States.[3]
Atari founderNolan Bushnell, when he was a college student, worked at an arcade where he became familiar with EM games such as Chicago Coin'sSpeedway (1969), watching customers play and helping to maintain the machinery, while learning how it worked and developing his understanding of how the game business operates.[22]
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Periscope established a trend of missile-launching gameplay during the late 1960s to 1970s,[7] with the game's periscope viewer cabinet design later adopted by arcade video games such as Midway'sSea Wolf (1976) andAtari'sBattlezone (1980).[23] In the late 1960s, Sega began producinggun games which somewhat resemblefirst-person shooter video games, but which were in fact electro-mechanical games that usedrearimage projection in a manner similar to azoetrope to produce moving animations on ascreen.[24] They often had vertical playfields that used mirrors to create an artificial sense of depth.[7] It was a fresh approach to gun games that Sega introduced withDuck Hunt, which began location testing in 1968 and released in January 1969. It had animated moving targets which disappear from the screen when shot,solid-state electronic sound effects, and awarded a higherscore forhead shots.[25][26][27]
Missile, ashooter andvehicular combat game released by Sega in 1969, had electronic sound and a moving film strip to represent the targets on a projection screen. A two-wayjoystick with a firebutton was used to shoot and steer the missile onto oncoming planes displayed on a screen, while twodirectional buttons were used to move the player's tank; when a plane is hit, an animated explosion appears on screen, accompanied by the sound of an explosion.[28] According to Ken Horowitz, it may have been the first arcade game to use a joystick with a fire button.[14]Missile became a major arcade hit for Sega in the United States, inspiring a number of manufacturers to produce similar games.[3] Midway later released a version calledS.A.M.I. (1970)[14] and adapted it into the arcade video gameGuided Missile (1977).[7] Midway also released the submarine-themed missile-launching gamesSea Raider (1969) andSea Devil (1970).[7] Joysticks subsequently became the standard control scheme for arcade games.[14]
Sega'sGun Fight (1969) had two players controlcowboy figurines on opposing sides of a playfield full of obstacles, with each player attempting to shoot the opponent's cowboy.[3][29] It had aWestern theme and was one of the first games to feature competitive head-to-head shooting between two players, inspiring several early Western-themedshooter video games.[30] Notably, the game's concept was adapted byTomohiro Nishikado intoTaito's shooter video gameWestern Gun (1975), which Midway released asGun Fight in North America.[3] Sega'sJet Rocket, developed in 1969,[11] was acombat flight simulator featuringcockpit controls that could move the player aircraft around a landscape displayed on a screen and shoot missiles onto targets that explode when hit.[31] The game displayed three-dimensional terrain with buildings, produced using a new type of special belt technology along with fluorescent paint to simulate a night view.[32] At Japan's 1970 Coin Machine Show,Jet Rocket was considered the best game at the show.[33] Upon its debut, the game was cloned by three Chicago manufacturers, which led to the game under-performing in North America and Sega leaving the North American arcade market for years.[11] Sega released several other similar EM flight combat games, includingDive Bomber (1971) andAir Attack (1972).[34]
Tomohiro Nishikado developed the target shooting EM gameSky Fighter, released by Taito in 1971. The game used mirrors to project images of model planes in front of a moving sky-blue background from a film canister on a rotating drum. The game was a hit, but too large for most locations, so it was followed by a scaled-down version,Sky Fighter II, which sold 3,000 arcade cabinets.[3] In 1972, Sega released an electro-mechanical game calledKiller Shark, a first-person light-gun shooter that used similar projection technology to Sega's earlier shooting games, and made an appearance in the hitSteven Spielberg filmJaws (1975).[24] In 1974,Nintendo releasedWild Gunman, a light-gun shooter based on theLaser Clay Shooting System that usedfull-motionvideo-projection from16 mm film to display live-actioncowboy opponents on the screen.[35]
Several EM arcade games gave the illusion ofholography in the 1970s. The San Francisco based Multiplex Company used its "rotating cylindrical hologram" technology to provide animation for several shooting games from Kasco and Midway. Kasco used it inGun Smoke (1975),Samurai andBank Robbers (1977), while Midway used it inTop Gun (1976). These games predated Sega's later arcade video gameTime Traveler (1991) in their use of holographic-like technology.[36] Kasco'sBank Robbers[b] was a commercial success, becoming the eighth highest-grossing EMarcade game of 1978 in Japan.[37] Taito also announced a holographic-like arcade gun game at the AMOA show in October 1975.[38] In 1977, Kasco released a shooting EMninja game calledNinja Gun,[12] which helped introduce a number of American children toninjas in popular culture by the early 1980s.[39]
One of the last EM games from Sega wasHeli-Shooter (1977), acombat flight simulator that combines the use of aCPU processor with electro-mechanical components, screen projection and audio tape deck. The gameplay involves the player piloting ahelicopter using a throttle joystick (to accelerate and decelerate) and pedals (to maneuver left and right) across a realistic three-dimensional landscape and shooting at military targets across the landscape.[40][41] In Japan, it was one of the top ten highest-grossing EM arcade games of 1977,[42] and it released in North America the same year.[41] One of the last successful EM shooting games was Namco's light gun gameShoot Away (1977), which was Japan's third highest-grossing EM arcade game of 1977[42] and highest-grossing EMarcade game of 1980,[43] while maintaining a presence in Western arcades into the 1980s.[44]
A new type ofdriving game was introduced in Japan, with Kasco's 1968 racing gameIndy 500,[3][12] which was licensed byChicago Coin for release in North America asSpeedway in 1969.[45] It had a circular racetrack with rival cars painted on individual rotating discs illuminated by a lamp,[3] which produced colorful graphics[3] projected using mirrors to give apseudo-3Dfirst-person perspective on a screen,[7][46][47] resembling a windscreen view.[48] It had collision detection, with players having to dodge cars to avoid crashing, as well as electronic sound for the car engines and collisions.[7] This gave it greater realism than earlier driving games,[3] and it resembled a prototypical arcaderacing video game, with an upright cabinet, yellow marquee, three-digit scoring, coin box, steering wheel and accelerator pedal.[1]Indy 500 sold over 2,000 arcade cabinets in Japan,[3] whileSpeedway sold over 10,000 cabinets in North America,[12] becoming the biggest arcade hit in years.[3] LikePeriscope,Speedway also charged a quarter per play, further cementing quarter-play as the US arcade standard for over two decades.[3]
Other EMracing games derived fromIndy 500 included Namco'sRacer and Sega'sGrand Prix,[12] the latter a 1969 release that similarly had afirst-person view, electronic sound, a dashboard with aracing wheel and accelerator,[49] and aforward-scrolling road projected on a screen.[50] Taito's similar 1970 rear-projection driving gameSuper Road 7 involved driving a car down an endlessly scrolling road while having to dodge cars, which inspiredTomohiro Nishikado to develop the Taito racing video gameSpeed Race (1974).[51] Chicago Coin adaptedSpeedway into amotorbike racing game,Motorcycle, in 1970.[7]
Speedway also had an influence onAtari founderNolan Bushnell, who had originally planned to develop a driving video game, influenced bySpeedway which at the time was the biggest-selling game at his arcade, but he ended up developingPong (1972) instead. Atari eventually developed a driving video game later on,Gran Trak 10 (1974).[52]
Sega's EM driving gamesStunt Car (1970) andDodgem Crazy (1972) are seen as precursors to later driving video games that involve ramming cars, such asExidy'sDestruction Derby (1975) andDeath Race (1976) as well as Atari'sCrash 'N Score (1975), while lacking their dynamically changing open arenas enabled by video game technology.[7] Kasco used8 mm film for a 1970s driving game,The Driver, which projected live-action video footage filmed byToei Company.[12]
There were also two EM racing games from 1971 that gave the illusion of three-dimensional holography, Bally'sRoad Runner and Sega'sMonte Carlo. The player's car was animated with holographic-like technology, while the rival cars were standard model cars like other EM games. During a collision, an animation shows the player's car flipping into the air several times.[53]
One of the last successful electro-mechanical arcade racing games wasF-1, a racing game developed byNamco and distributed byAtari in 1976.[54] The gameplay is viewed from the perspective of the driver's viewpoint, which is displayed on the screen using a projector system.[55] It was the highest-grossingarcade game of 1976 and 1977 in Japan (ahead of every video game),[56] and the highest-grossing EM arcade game of 1977 in the United States.[57] Namco'sF-1 is believed to have been influenced by Kasco'sIndy 500,[58] and in turnF-1 provided the basis for Namco's hitracing video gamePole Position (1982), which was co-designed byF-1 designer Sho Osugi.[55]
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EMbowling games called "bowlers" includedBally Manufacturing'sBally Bowler and Chicago Coin'sCorvette in 1966. EMbaseball games included Midway'sLittle League (1966) and Chicago Coin'sAll Stars Baseball (1968).[2]
Taito entered the EM industry withsports games such asCrown Soccer Special (1967), a two-player game that simulated association football using electronic components such as pinball flippers,[59] andCrown Basketball, which debuted in the US as the highest-earning arcade game at the 1968 Tampa Fair and also had a quarter-play option.[60]
Sega released an EM game similar toair hockey in 1968,MotoPolo, where two players moved around motorbikes to knock balls into the opponent's goal; it also used an8-track player to play back the sounds of the motorbikes.[61] Air hockey itself was later created by a group ofBrunswick Billiards employees between 1969 and 1972.[62]
The arrival ofarcade video games eventually led to the decline of electro-mechanical games during the 1970s.[63] Following the arrival of arcade video games withPong (1972) and its clones, electro-mechanical games continued to have a strong presence in arcades for much of the 1970s.[12][3] In Japan, EM games remained more popular than video games up until the late 1970s.[12] Japanese arcade manufacturers initially lacked expertise with solid-state electronics and foundPong-style video games to be simplistic compared to more complex EM games, so it took longer for video games to penetrate Japan than it had in the United States. Meanwhile in the United States, after the market became flooded withPong clones, thePong market crashed around the mid-1970s, which led to traditional Chicago coin-op manufacturers mainly sticking to EM games up until the late 1970s.[3] EM games eventually declined following the arrival ofSpace Invaders (1978) and thegolden age of arcade video games in the late 1970s.[12][64]
Several electro-mechanical games that appeared in the 1970s have remained popular in arcades through to the present day, notablyair hockey,whac-a-mole andmedal games. Medal games started becoming popular with Sega'sHarness Racing (1974), Nintendo'sEVR Race (1975) andAruze'sThe Derby Vφ (1975). The first whac-a-mole game,Mogura Taiji ("Mole Buster"), was released byTOGO in 1975.[65]Mogura Taiji became the second highest-grossing EM game of 1976 in Japan, second only to Namco'sF-1 that year.[66] In the late 1970s, arcade centers in Japan began to be flooded with "mole buster" games.[67]Mogura Taiji was introduced to North America in 1976, which inspired Bob's Space Racers to produce their own version of the game called "Whac-A-Mole" in 1977,[68] while Namco released their own popular "mole buster" game calledSweet Licks (1981).[69]
Electro-mechanical games experienced a resurgence during the 1980s.[70][71] Air hockey, whac-a-mole and medal games have since remained popular arcade attractions.[65]Hoop Shot, aSuper Shot basketball skill-toss game manufactured by Doyle & Associates, was released in 1985 and became a hit, inspiring numerous imitators within a year, leading to super shot games becoming popular in the late 1980s.[72] In 1990,Capcom entered thebowling industry withBowlingo, a coin-operated, electro-mechanical, fully automated miniten-pin bowling installation; it was smaller than a standardbowling alley, designed to be smaller and cheaper for arcades.Bowlingo drew significant earnings in North America upon release in 1990.[73] In 1991, Bromley released an electro-mechanical rifle shooting game,Ghost Town, resembling classic EM shooting games.[74]