It's hard to imagine now, but there was a time when young people had to go to a local arcade in order to get their gaming fix. Home video games were just a beautiful dream - beyond the reach of then-current technology. Such a time probably seems unthinkable to modern youth, but the truth is, there was an astonishing variety of arcade games available to the young people of previous decades.
Vintage arcades once contained a veritable plethora of gaming choices. Fortune telling machines, diggers, shooting galleries, pinball machines, and baseball and bowling simulators were to be found by the thousands across the nation.
Pinball was once the most popular table game in America
Pinball may have ruled the roost, but it got stiff competition from sports games. Mechanical baseball games allowed players to swing a small metal bat and try to hit the ball to designated targets out on the edge of the 'field.' Bowling and skee-ball games awarded players for knocking down pins and trying to get a perfect score.
Shooting galleries offered players the chance to test their skill against a variety of targets that would pop up or suddenly appear against an elaborate background. Often, these games featured input devices that really looked and felt like contemporary pistols or rifles - or, in more exotic games, even heavy machine guns.
This all may sound pedestrian to modern video game players, but the mechanical amusements contained in the vintage games enhanced play in that they could feature actual moving parts that made the games more amusing to younger players. Such effects as colored lighting (especially black light, which allowed for glow-in-the-dark features) enhanced the experience of the play.
