C:\Games\DarkAges\Penny_games
Spread of penny arcade games
Arcade without electricity
The first commercial application of technical games can be traced back to the 1920s. Board games have been around for thousands of years, but the moment a board game became an electronic game was probably sometime in the late 1800s or early 1900s. It wasn’t until the 1920s that the first companies that sold or rented electronic games emerged, giving birth to the technical gaming industry. The video game industry is not yet 100 years old, but electronic games – of which video games are a subset – are now almost 100 years old!
Then, in the 1930s, something very interesting happened: coin-operated electromechanical games were developed. Whereupon automata such as fortune-telling and force-testing machines and mutoscopes were built and installed along with other attractions at fairs, traveling carnivals, and resorts. David Gottlieb is credited as the inventor of the first coin-operated electromechanical game in 1931 and the founder of the arcade industry. Soon, entrepreneurs began housing these coin-operated devices in the same facilities that required minimal supervision, creating penny arcades near the turn of the 20th century, the name taken from the common use of a single penny to operate the machine. Video arcades were developed in the 1950s with the advent of computer monitors and screens, but arcades with coin-operated electronic games had been around since the late 1920s.
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Table of contents
| YEAR | NAME | LINK |
|---|---|---|
| — | Introduction | |
| 1910+ | Bafflen Ball |  |
| 1933 | Pin-based Games |  |
| 1939 | The Nimatron |  |
| 1941 | EM Games |  |
| 1951 | Nimrod |  |