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Arcade & Classic Games · 91

Cabinet artwork mattered before the first second of play. Side panels, marquees and control layouts had to sell an experience from across a noisy arcade. Another angle makes it more interesting: Bonus fruit, ships, bells and other strange objects became score bait because a rare target gives players a reason to break their safe routine. A continue screen is thirty seconds of negotiation between pride, curiosity and another coin.

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Arcade

PAGE 91 / 97

Wait, really?

Defender hit arcades in 1981 with horizontal scrolling, a radar display and a famously busy control panel. It demanded enough buttons that simply knowing what everything did was part of becoming good at the game. The rabbit hole keeps going: Street Fighter II reached arcades in 1991 and helped make head-to-head fighting cabinets social magnets. A single machine could produce a queue of challengers and a local pecking order without any online matchmaking at all.