In mid-1972, Nolan Bushnell founded Atari Corporation. His first product was a game called Ping-Pong. Pong became the first commercially successful1 video game. But the Pong fad2 only lasted a couple of years because people were tired of playing a game that was predictable and that they learned so easily. Then in 1979 came Space Invaders, an electronic game manufactured by the Taito Corporation in Japan. Space Invaders quickly became a hit.
Space Invaders was not alone in the arcades for very long. It was followed by another Japanese game: Pac Man. In this game, players guided a ravenous yellow circle through a maze, while it ate dots and avoided monsters. Namco, the Japanese company that created Pac-Man, sold more than 300,000 of the game machines worldwide, making it the most popular arcade game of all time. Then there appeared Defender, Centipede, Scramble, Donkey Kong, Star Castle, Asteroids, Missile Command, and an ever-increasing variety of electronic versions of sports and card games.
Many of the arcade games also became available for play at home. Some were played on home computers; others used the television screen as a monitor; some were self-contained, hand-held, battery-powered, or table-model games. Pong, manufactured by Atari, was available early as an arcade game and for home television.
The coin-operated video game business boomed. In 1981, Americans spent 75,000 person-years and $5 billion, playing video games at an estimated 4,300 arcades in the USA.
In 1982, Walt Disney studios released a movie entitled Tron. In it, a video game fanatic is taken into the microchip and circuitry world of the game itself. The film is symbolic of the millions of people who became addicted to3 playing electronic games. The fad with the games was so great that children skipped school and adult workers took long lunch hours in order to pass as much time as possible with Pac Man, Asteroids, and other games. This obsession, of course, led to a reaction. Schools demanded that arcades be moved away from their vicinity, or they refused to allow students outside during lunch hours. Some towns closed the arcades or limited their number. In the Philippines, the reaction was so strong that President Ferdinand Marcos decreed in 1981 that all machines be destroyed.
By the end of 1983, however, interest in video games had dried up4. About 2,000 game parlors in the USA had closed, and many had cut the cost of playing the machines.
Notes: 1to be commercially successful – пользоваться большим спросом;
2fad – увлечение;
3become addicted to – стали заядлыми любителями;
4to dry up – проходить.