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1975 had new titles such as Western Gun , Dungeon and dnd . The year's best-selling arcade game was Taito's Speed Race , released as Wheels and Wheels II in North America.
The "paddle game" trend came to an end in arcades around 1975, with the arcade video game industry entering a period of stagnation in the "post paddle game era" over the next several years up until 1977. [1]
The following titles were the best-selling arcade video games of 1975 in the United States, according to annual arcade cabinet sales figures provided by Ralph H. Baer. [2]
Rank | Title | Arcade cabinet sales | Developer | Manufacturer | Genre |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Wheels / Wheels II (Speed Race) | 10,000 | Taito | Midway Manufacturing | Racing |
2 | Tank / Tank II | 6,000 | Kee Games | Kee Games | Maze |
3 | Flim-Flam | 4,000 | Meadows Games | Meadows Games | Pong |
Gran Trak 20 | 4,000 | Atari, Inc. | Atari, Inc. | Racing | |
5 | PT-109 | 1,500 | Mirco Games | Mirco Games | Shooter |
6 | Avenger | 1,000 | Electra Games | Electra Games | |
7 | Crash 'N Score | 500 | Atari, Inc. | Atari, Inc. | Driving |
Gun Fight (Western Gun) | 500 | Taito | Midway Manufacturing | Shooter | |
Jet Fighter | 500 | Atari, Inc. | Atari, Inc. | ||
Shark Jaws | 500 | Atari, Inc. | Atari, Inc. | Action | |
Steeplechase | 500 | Atari, Inc. | Atari, Inc. | Racing |
In the United States, RePlay magazine published the first annual chart of top-grossing arcade games in March 1976, listing both video games and electro-mechanical games (EM games) on the same chart for the previous year. The following were the highest-grossing arcade games of the previous year, in terms of coin drop earnings. [3]
Rank | Arcade video games | Arcade electro-mechanical games (EM games) | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Title | Overall rank | Genre | Title | Overall rank | Genre | |
1 | Tank / Tank II | 1 | Maze | Super Shifter | 4 | Racing |
2 | Wheels / Wheels II (Speed Race) | 2 | Racing | Air Hockey | 6 | Air hockey |
3 | Gun Fight (Western Gun) | 3 | Shooter | Wizard | 7 | Pinball |
4 | Indy 800 | 5 | Racing | Skee Ball | 9 | Skee-Ball |
5 | Gran Trak 10 / Gran Trak 20 | 8 | Racing | F-114 | 10 | Shooter |
6 | Twin Racer | 11 | Racing | OXO | 15 | Pinball |
7 | BiPlane | 12 | Shooter | Rifle Range | 16 | Gun |
8 | Racer (Speed Race) | 13 | Racing | Crown Basketball | 18 | Sports |
9 | Demolition Derby | 14 | Racing | Amigo | 19 | Pinball |
10 | Street Burners | 17 | Racing | Grand Prix | 20 | Racing |
Pong is a table tennis–themed twitch arcade sports video game, featuring simple two-dimensional graphics, manufactured by Atari and originally released in 1972. It was one of the earliest arcade video games; it was created by Allan Alcorn as a training exercise assigned to him by Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, but Bushnell and Atari co-founder Ted Dabney were surprised by the quality of Alcorn's work and decided to manufacture the game. Bushnell based the game's concept on an electronic ping-pong game included in the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game console. In response, Magnavox later sued Atari for patent infringement.
Taito Corporation is a Japanese company that specializes in video games, toys, arcade cabinets, and game centers, based in Shinjuku, Tokyo. The company was founded by Michael Kogan in 1953 as the Taito Trading Company, importing vodka, vending machines, and jukeboxes into Japan. It began production of video games in 1973. In 2005, Taito was purchased by Square Enix, becoming a wholly owned subsidiary by 2006.
Space Invaders is a 1978 shoot 'em up arcade video game developed by Tomohiro Nishikado. It was manufactured and sold by Taito in Japan, and licensed to the Midway division of Bally for overseas distribution. Space Invaders was the first fixed shooter and set the template for the genre. The goal is to defeat wave after wave of descending aliens with a horizontally moving laser to earn as many points as possible.
The Magnavox Odyssey is the first commercial home video game console. The hardware was designed by a small team led by Ralph H. Baer at Sanders Associates, while Magnavox completed development and released it in the United States in September 1972 and overseas the following year. The Odyssey consists of a white, black, and brown box that connects to a television set, and two rectangular controllers attached by wires. It is capable of displaying three square dots and one line of varying height on the screen in monochrome black and white, with differing behavior for the dots depending on the game played. Players place plastic overlays on the screen to display additional visual elements for each game, and one or two players for each game control their dots with the knobs and buttons on the controller by the rules given for the game. The console cannot generate audio or track scores. The Odyssey console came packaged with dice, paper money, and other board game paraphernalia to accompany the games, while a peripheral controller—the first video game light gun—was sold separately.
A sports video game is a video game that simulates the practice of sports. Most sports have been recreated with a video games, including team sports, track and field, extreme sports, and combat sports. Some games emphasize actually playing the sport, whilst others emphasize strategy and sport management. Some, such as Need for Speed, Arch Rivals and Punch-Out!!, satirize the sport for comic effect. This genre has been popular throughout the history of video games and is competitive, just like real-world sports. A number of game series feature the names and characteristics of real teams and players, and are updated annually to reflect real-world changes. The sports genre is one of the oldest genres in gaming history.
1972 saw the release of the first commercially successful video arcade game, Pong, and the first video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey.
Tomohiro Nishikado is a Japanese video game developer and engineer. He is the creator of the arcade shoot 'em up game Space Invaders, released to the public in 1978 by the Taito of Japan, often credited as the first shoot 'em up and for beginning the golden age of arcade video games. Prior to Space Invaders, he also designed other earlier Taito arcade games, including the shooting electro-mechanical games Sky Fighter (1971) and Sky Fighter II, the sports video game TV Basketball in 1974, the vertical scrolling racing video game Speed Race in 1974, the multi-directional shooter Western Gun in 1975, and the first-person combat flight simulator Interceptor (1975).
Gun Fight, known as Western Gun in Japan and Europe, is a 1975 multidirectional shooter arcade game designed by Tomohiro Nishikado, and released by Taito in Japan and Europe and by Midway in North America. Based around two Old West cowboys armed with revolvers and squaring off in a duel, it was the first video game to depict human-to-human combat. The Midway version was also the first video game to use a microprocessor instead of TTL. The game's concept was adapted from Sega's 1969 arcade electro-mechanical game Gun Fight.
1976 had new titles such as Road Race, Night Driver, Heavyweight Champ, Sea Wolf and Breakout. The year's highest-grossing arcade games were Namco's F-1 in Japan and Midway's Sea Wolf in the United States.
1974 had new titles such as Speed Race, Dungeon, Gran Trak 10, Tank and TV Basketball. The year's best-selling arcade game was Tank by Kee Games.
A dedicated console is a video game console that is limited to one or more built-in video game or games, and is not equipped for additional games that are distributed via ROM cartridges, discs, downloads or other digital media. Dedicated consoles were very popular in the first generation of video game consoles until they were gradually replaced by second-generation video game consoles that use ROM cartridges.
In the history of video games, the first generation era refers to the video games, video game consoles, and handheld video game consoles available from 1972 to 1983. Notable consoles of the first generation include the Odyssey series, the Atari Home Pong, the Coleco Telstar series and the Color TV-Game series. The generation ended with the Computer TV-Game in 1980, but many manufacturers had left the market prior due to the market decline in the year of 1977 and the start of the second generation of video game consoles.
Magnavox Odyssey is the general brand name of Magnavox's complete line of home video game consoles released from 1972 through 1978. The line includes the original Magnavox Odyssey console, the Magnavox Odyssey series of dedicated home video game consoles, and the Magnavox Odyssey 2 ROM cartridge-based video game console released in 1978. Philips Odyssey is the brand name that includes the Philips Odyssey series of dedicated home video game consoles.
Electro-mechanical games are types of arcade games that operate on a combination of some electronic circuitry and mechanical actions from the player to move items contained within the game's cabinet. Some of these were early light gun games using light-sensitive sensors on targets to register hits, while others were simulation games such as driving games, combat flight simulators and sports games. EM games were popular in amusement arcades from the late 1940s up until the 1970s, serving as alternatives to pinball machines, which had been stigmatized as games of chance during that period. EM games lost popularity in the 1970s, as arcade video games had emerged to replace them in addition to newer pinball machines designed as games of skill.
A vertically scrolling video game or vertical scroller is a video game in which the player views the field of play principally from a top-down perspective, while the background scrolls from the top of the screen to the bottom to create the illusion that the player character is moving in the game world.
The 1970s was the first decade in the history of the video game industry. The 1970s saw the development of some of the earliest video games, chiefly in the arcade game industry, but also several for the earliest video game consoles and personal computers.
The Ping-O-Tronic is a dedicated first-generation home video game console produced by Zanussi, an Italian home appliance company, and released under their Sèleco brand in late-1974 only in Italy. It was the first Italian video game console, excluding Magnavox Odyssey imports and clones.
An arcade video game is an arcade game where the player's inputs from the game's controllers are processed through electronic or computerized components and displayed to a video device, typically a monitor, all contained within an enclosed arcade cabinet. Arcade video games are often installed alongside other arcade games such as pinball and redemption games at amusement arcades. Up until the late 1990s, arcade video games were the largest and most technologically advanced sector of the video game industry.