Electro-mechanical arcade games

Periscope, an example of an early Sega electro-mechanical arcade game.

Electro-mechanical arcade games (often abbreviated EM games) are what arcades used to have before the arrival of solid-state electronic video games (which use solid-state electronics like transistors, integrated circuits, printed circuit boards, and microcontrollers, along with a video display). An electro-mechanical game is any coin-operated game that has neither a microprocessor (nor an approximation of one with logic gates like SHARK Jaws, Computer Space and others used), or a proper monitor (though some used a projection display, like Duck Hunt, Jet Rocket and Killer Shark). An electro-mechanical game is run through switches, relays, motors, and lights. Any electronic circuitry in the machine are usually very simple.

The most common type of electro-mechanical games were pinball machines—all of them up to the late seventies were either mechanical or electromechanical (the industry switched to microprocessors around 1978 or so). Other electro-mechanicals include most early slot machines and Pachinko machines, although the earliest ones were completely mechanical.

Besides pinball, there were many other types of electro-mechanical games, ranging from sports games to light-gun shooting games. Usually, rather than displaying the objects on a screen, they were physical objects that were either static or moving, often inside a showcase. Eventually, from 1969, there were electro-mechanical games that used video projection displays, giving them the appearance of arcade video games.

These games had one big problem: they broke down all the time. This is why you never see any electro-mechanicals anymore (aside from a few really old Skee Ball machines). The mean time between failures on most of these machines could be measured in days. Some were more reliable than others, but in general the more complex ones were constantly failing. Any individual game may have hundreds of moving parts, which were often subject to abuse. This makes functioning electro-mechanicals very rare today.

These were popular during the electro-mechanical golden age of the 1960s and 1970s, but video games eventually overtook them in popularity during the golden age of arcade video games that began with Space Invaders in 1978.^[1]

Electro-mechanical golden age

The electro-mechanical golden age began with the 1959 arcade hit Mini Drive, a racing game where the player used a steering wheel to control a miniature car across a scrolling conveyor belt inside an arcade cabinet. It was manufactured by Kasco (Kansei Seiki Seisakusho) and became a hit in Japan.^[1]

Periscope, released by Namco in 1965,^[2][3] and then by Sega in 1966,^[4] was an early submarine simulator and light gun shooter,^[5] which used lights and plastic waves to simulate sinking ships from a submarine.^[6] It became an instant success in Japan, Europe, and North America^[7] where it was the first arcade game to cost a quarter per play,^[4] which would remain the standard price for arcade games for many years to come.^[7] Periscope revived the North American arcade industry in the late 1960s.^[8] The game was cloned by Midway as Sea Raider (1969) and Sea Devil (1970). Midway later adapted it into an arcade video game, Sea Wolf (1976).^[9]

In 1967, Taito's EM arcade game Crown Soccer Special was a two-player sports game that simulated association football, using various electronic components, including electronic versions of pinball flippers.^[10] Sega's 1970 multiplayer EM shooter game Gun Fight was a direct precedent to Taito's 1975 arcade video game Gun Fight, which in turn was influential on shooter video games.^[11]

Video projection games

Starting with Duck Hunt in January 1969, Sega introduced electro-mechanical arcade games that looked and played like later arcade video games, but relied on electro-mechanical components to produce sounds or images rather than a CRT display. They were electro-mechanical arcade games that used rear image projection (some in a manner similar to an ancient Chinese zoetrope to produce moving animations) on a display screen. Duck Hunt was the first arcade game with animated targets displayed on a screen, in contrast to earlier electro-mechanical arcade games that displayed actual physical static targets. This gave Duck Hunt the appearance of a video game, several years before the first true video games arrived in the arcades (Computer Space and Pong). Duck Hunt thus anticipated the kind of light-gun shooter video games that would later appear in the 1970s, and was the first electronic arcade game to display a first-person perspective on a screen.

After Duck Hunt, Sega produced several more electro-mechanical arcade games based on the same technology, using rear image projection in a manner similar to the ancient Chinese zoetrope to produce moving animations on a screen. In 1969, Sega released the electro-mechanical games Grand Prix, a first-person driving/racing game projecting a forward-scrolling road on a screen, and Missile, a first-person vehicle combat simulation that had a moving film strip project targets on screen and a dual-control scheme where two directional buttons move the player tank and a two-way joystick with a fire button shoots and steers missiles onto oncoming planes, which explode when hit. In 1970, the game was released in North America as S.A.M.I. That same year, Sega released Jet Rocket, a first-person combat flight sim with cockpit controls that could move the player aircraft around a landscape displayed on screen and shoot missiles onto targets that explode when hit. In 1972, Sega released Killer Shark, a first-person light gun game known for appearing in the 1975 film Jaws.

These eventually influenced Nintendo to produce similar light-gun shooting electro-mechanical arcade games. In 1974, Nintendo's arcade light gun shooter Wild Gunman used similar technology, but improved it even further by using full-motion video projection to display live-action cowboy opponents on screen.

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