Arcade video game
An arcade video game is a video game designed to be played in an arcade. They were popular in the 1980s and 1990s.
As a video game, it's usually digital, often using a joystick and some buttons to control a simplified character representing the player on a CRT TV screen.
As an arcade game, its controls and rules are simple enough for a teenager to quickly pick up, while its difficulty ratchets up until they inevitably lose, making way for the next paying customer.
This makes for a very specific type of game design, encouraging an experience that's quick and casual. Classic examples include Space Invaders, Asteroids, Pac-Man, Centipede, and Joust.
8-bit arcade games were first. They tend to have about sixteen colours, a plain black background, maybe a handful of screen-wide levels that simply get more difficult each time without much variation, and basic sound effects. They usually require the player to start from scratch with each new payment, ensuring each high score is the result of skill. They tend not to have an ending, with the game eventually getting too frantic for anyone to keep up with. The graphics tend to be simple, symbolic, and iconic out of necessity, such as Pac-Man being little more than a mouth, to suggest his goal is eating.
Next was 16-bit arcade games. They tend to have thousands of colours, several layers of parallax, scrolling levels that each have their own distinct theme, and an FM soundtrack. They usually let the player pay to continue from where they left off, encouraging designers to make later levels impossibly hard in order to extract more coins from people, should anyone wish to make it through to the game's ending.
Then came a brief period of 3D polygon-based arcade games, such as Virtua Racing and Tekken, before home consoles replaced arcade games completely. They're now more of a genre than something you'd find in an actual arcade, which have sadly moved on from providing entertainment to enabling gambling.
Compare with other arcade games, such as pinball machines. Contrast with home computer games and video games, which can allow slow exploration, and saving where you're up to so you can carry on another day.
Arcade video games: Joust
