Mechanical Coin-Operated Games
The video game industry as it exists today primarily sprang from two independent sources. The first of these was the coin-operated amusement business that began in the late nineteenth century at amusement parks, boardwalks, bars, and bowling alleys and consisted of mechanical devices operated by patrons who inserted coins to make the machines work. Starting in 1948, the jukebox became the most profitable and important coin-operated amusement device, but the most important game was pinball. The pinball industry began in 1931 when David Gottlieb created the Baffle Ball machine, which was the second pinball machine but the first to be successfully mass produced. The pinball market really took off in the 1950s during the post-World War II American economic boom. The pinball business was responsible for the creation of the production, distribution, and consumer channels used by the new video game industry in its early days, and important American video game companies such as Bally Manufacturing (est. 1932), Williams Manufacturing (est. 1943), and Midway Games (est. 1958 and purchased by Bally in 1969) were all established for the creation of pinball and other coin-operated devices. In addition to pinball, these companies created mechanical sports games, driving games, and shooting games using light guns that were all forerunners of video game genres.
Following the Korean War, the strong American military presence in Japan also served to expand the coin-operated amusement industry into that country. Because World War II had greatly depleted Japan’s manufacturing infrastructure, the early coin-operated companies in Japan were generally established by foreigners and imported American products. As the Japanese economy recovered and coin-operated amusements became popular, a large number of native Japanese companies entered the business as well. Taito, founded by Russian Jew Michael Kogan in 1953, was the first important company to enter the business in Japan, and it was soon joined by Service Games, founded in 1952 by American Marty Bromley to bring coin-operated amusements to American servicemen in Japan and later the biggest name in jukeboxes in Japan under the name Sega, and Rosen Enterprises, established by American Korean War veteran David Rosen as an instant photo booth importer in 1954 and a manager of arcades beginning in 1956. In 1964, Rosen instigated the merger of Sega and Rosen Enterprises into Sega Enterprises, which began creating its own mechanical games in 1966 with Periscope, which due to the high cost to import to the United States and Europe, set the long-standing standard play price in the arcade of twenty-five cents.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia