Timeline of arcade game history
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
This article contains a timeline of notable events in the history of arcade gaming:
- 1971: Computer Space, the first ever coin-operated arcade video game, is released by Nutting Associates.
- 1975: Taito releases Gun Fight, the first arcade video game to use a microprocessor.
- 1976: Barricade, the first game in the "Q-Basic Snakes"/Tron Lightcycle genre is released, almost immediately copy cat games are made.
- 1976: Atari releases Night Driver, the earliest example of a first-person perspective racing game.
- 1981: DECO releases DECO Cassette System, the first standardized arcade platform, for which many games were made.
- 1981: Mahjong, by Taito, the first in a huge genre of mahjong games is released.
- 1981: Qix is released, beginning the genre of Qix games, sometimes used in conjunction with revealing pornography.
- 1982: Buck Rogers Planet of Zoom is released by Sega with the first use of scaling sprite 3D effects.
- 1982: Black Widow, a Vector graphics game which invented the Smash TV genre, is released.
- 1983: Crossbow, by Exidy, is released. It is the first game with fully digitized sound and graphics (previously games featured only pre-recorded cassette playback of realistic sound). It also features some of the most advanced graphics of the time.
- 1986: Exidy releases Chiller, the most violent arcade game ever made until the Mortal Kombat series, and to this day considered the most gratuitously violent arcade game.
- 1988: Reikai Doushi, by Home Data is released, the first digitized fighting game and the first claymation fighting game.
- 1989: Exterminator, the first game with fully digitized graphics, is released. It will have the highest quality digitized graphics until the release of Mortal Kombat 2.
- 1993: Mortal Kombat II is released, featuring high quality digitized graphics, and the most advanced sound system in arcades at the time, the DCS sound system which allowed for MP3 style compression to all sounds.
- 1994: Killer Instinct is released, the first arcade game with a hard disk, up to that point the game with the highest quality graphics pre-rendered by a rendering program, featuring to this day the highest quality use of the movie background technique.
