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Arcade & Classic Games · 65

Arcade difficulty was shaped partly by economics: a machine had to be exciting enough to earn another coin without ending the player's turn so quickly that it felt unfair. Arcade sound effects had to cut through real room noise, which helps explain why classic machines are full of short, sharp tones that remain recognizable decades later. Arcade difficulty rises gently until the game remembers it was built to eat coins.

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A quick detour

Dragon's Lair arrived in 1983 using laserdisc video to display hand-drawn animation that looked far more like a cartoon than ordinary arcade graphics. The trade-off was that players had to react to tightly scripted moments rather than roam freely. And for something completely different: Missile Command arrived in 1980 during the Cold War and gives the player no final victory,only increasingly difficult waves until the cities are lost. That bleak structure is unusually honest for a game about stopping incoming missiles.