Read this first. Everything here is original writing. There are no screenshots, sprites, logos or box art from real games, and facts are stated in general terms. How we work.
The glass
Raster games draw into a grid of dots held in memory, and the grid decides everything. In the early 1980s memory was the expensive part of any machine, so the grid was small and the number of colours each dot could take was smaller still. A picture of 256 by 192 dots sounds modest today, but with one bit per dot it still needed a few kilobytes, and with more colours it needed several times that. Every extra bit per pixel was money.
So designers invented ways to cheat the bill. One was the sprite: a small image, often 8 or 16 dots wide, held apart from the background and slid over it by dedicated hardware. Moving a sprite meant changing two numbers, not redrawing a hundred dots, so a processor with very little to spare could still animate a dozen characters. Sprites were the reason this era had characters at all, rather than blobs and lines.
Another was the tile map. The background is built from a short list of 8 by 8 pieces, laid out in a grid, so a whole level costs a table of small numbers. Brick, sky, water, floor: a handful of tiles, repeated. That repetition is why games of this period look so rhythmic. The constraint turned into a visual grammar.
Colour with strings attached
Some home computers saved memory by storing colour separately from shape. The picture was a bitmap of on and off dots, and each block of 8 by 8 dots could use only two colours chosen from a small palette, one for the dots that were on and one for those that were off. Draw a yellow sprite across a blue block and the block picks up a stray colour as the sprite crosses it. Players called this attribute clash, and artists learned to love it, to avoid it, or to design whole levels around it. You can try it yourself in the palette toy.
Arcade boards were more generous. A coin-operated cabinet could afford dedicated graphics chips, large sprite counts and a palette of a few hundred colours from which a few were chosen per sprite or per tile. The result was the saturated neon look the era is remembered for: pure primaries and glowing magentas against a flat black, because black cost nothing and made every other colour sing.
The glass again
These images were shown on cathode-ray tubes with a mask of coloured dots or stripes just behind the front glass, which gave every pixel a slightly soft, round edge. Scan lines showed between the rows because the beam’s spot was smaller than the gap. Sprites were drawn for that softness: a hard square pixel on a modern display looks harsher than the artist ever saw. The CRT simulator exists to let you feel the difference.
Sound came from small synthesiser chips that produced square waves, a noise channel and sometimes a triangle. Three or four voices at once was generous. Composers built melodies that you could hum after one hearing, because the hardware could not hide a weak tune behind production.
The input
The classic arcade control scheme settled in this period: an eight-way stick and one to three buttons, bolted to a panel at a height that put the player’s shoulders slightly forward. It was the product of long argument between cost, durability and feel. A good joystick was a short metal shaft with a ball top, a spring, and four microswitches that clicked underneath. You could hear a diagonal.
Home consoles of the middle of the decade introduced the cross-shaped directional pad. It was thumb-operated, flat, and cheaper to make than a stick, and it did something sticks never had: it let you hold a pose with one thumb and press with the other hand. It also changed games. When you can move in exactly eight directions with no ambiguity, level design becomes tile design, and you can ask a player to walk along a narrow ledge.
Keyboards still ruled the home computer. Many games used four keys for direction, one to fire, and a spare for jump, and hand position was a matter of public debate. Light guns, which read where a screen was lit at the instant of a trigger pull, put a plastic pistol in the living room. Some games ran on a different logic altogether, offering a single button and asking the player to understand timing.
Difficulty by design
Coin-op games were built to earn. A run was meant to last two or three minutes for a skilled player and ninety seconds for the rest, and the curve that produced that result was tuned with great care. Enemies sped up. Patterns changed. A rare bonus told you that you were doing well. The fairness was in the rules, not in generosity, and that clarity is why people kept feeding coins in with a sense that the next try would be better.
The room
By the mid-1980s the arcade was a destination. Purpose-built rooms with rows of cabinets under blacklight posters, a change booth at the back, and a counter that sold tokens; shopping centres with a bright corner by the escalators; seaside amusement halls with the sea air making the cabinets smell of salt. Standing rows of upright cabinets, cocktail tables with a screen set into the top, and sit-down cabinets with a wheel and a seat for the racing games.
Culture grew up around the machines. Players kept notebooks of patterns and boss tactics. A rumour about a secret level would be passed from one school to another and, as often as not, be true. Local high-score tables were held for months by the same three initials, and the person behind those initials acquired a reputation in a very specific neighbourhood. Nobody wrote it down, but everyone knew.
At the same time, home play was returning. After the market crashed in North America in the early part of this period, the revived home consoles arrived with a different bargain. Cartridges were cheap to make and hard to copy. A game could be longer, because you could save a stage or collect a password, and the family’s television got a new place in the evening routine. The arcade became the place you went to see what was coming next, and home became the place you finished it.
Magazines, tips lines and playground diplomacy all spread knowledge. A hand-drawn map passed across a desk was worth more than a hint book. Players learned to read the screen quickly because the screen was all they had, and an attract mode that demonstrated a game taught more than any manual.
Three design ideas we borrowed
Make the grid the puzzle
When movement is tile-by-tile, the level becomes a diagram you can read in a second. Blitz Bellhop puts five lifts in a row and asks which one you are about to ride, and which two you should swap. The whole game lives in a grid with just enough rules to stay interesting, which is how the best tile games of the decade were built.
Reward the loss
In Skyline Salvage a raider you shoot down leaves wreckage you can wear as armour or throw back as a spear. The player is always one decision from the outcome: keep it, or spend it. This is the rhythm of the best shooters of the period, where every kill gives something, and nothing is ever just a number going up.
One more go, honestly
The cleanest arcade promise is the run you could have won. Brickwork Bandit, which is still in the workshop, is built on a half-finished tower and a sack of bolts, aiming at a game where every fall is your own and the second attempt is instantly available. A short run, a visible reason for failure and zero ceremony between attempts is the formula.
Brickwork Bandit, 1987 In the workshop
Games from this era on Eracade
- Blitz Bellhop Play
- Skyline Salvage Play
- Neon Burrow In the workshop
- Brickwork Bandit In the workshop
What ended the era
Arcade attendance stayed strong into the late 1980s, then wobbled as home consoles caught up with, and in some ways passed, the cabinets. A living-room machine could now show smooth scrolling backgrounds and large sprites and sell you a game that lasted forty hours. A coin slot is a poor fit for forty hours. The business model that created the golden arcade, charge by the minute for the thrill, was outcompeted by a different one: charge once for the box and let the player decide when they stop.
What survived were the lessons. Players now expected colour, character and a clear reward for improvement. They also expected a score table, a pattern to learn and a first minute that taught the controls without a word. Those expectations are the inheritance of this hall, and they did not die when the coin slots did. They moved into the next hall, where there were suddenly many more colours to learn to use.
Further reading
Outside links are chosen for being stable, general and free to read. We link; we do not copy.
- Sprite (computer graphics) (Wikipedia) How hardware sprites kept animation cheap.
- Arcade cabinet (Wikipedia) Construction, controls and the different cabinet formats.
- Video game crash of 1983 (Wikipedia) The market collapse that preceded the home-console revival.
- Color depth (Wikipedia) Bits per pixel and what they buy you.
Stamp this hall
If you have read this far, take a stamp for your Passport. It is saved in this browser only, next to your game stamps, and nothing is sent anywhere.
Spotted a mistake? Send a correction to hello@eracade.com.