Based upon some of the most elaborate hardware design in Atari's history to date, it is the company's first coin- operated game that features a voice synthesizer chip.
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Tron was awarded "Coin- Operated Game of the Year" by Electronic Games magazine. The New York Times reported that 800 arcade cabinets were sold by 1982. The book The naked computer reported that Tron made $45,000,000 by 1983. In USgamer's estimation 10,000 cabinets were sold and the game made more than $30,000,000 of revenue by 1983.
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It ran on the Namco System 22 arcade hardware. Ace Driver was designed by Tatsuro Okamoto, his known for his work on the classic arcade game Metro-Cross (1985). He was assisted by Pole Position designer Shinichiro Okamoto. The game was a widespread success, winning the "Best Coin-Operated Game" award at the 76th Annual IAAPA tradeshow in November 1994.
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Trivia Master is a color arcade game created by Enerdyne in 1985. The game system was designed by Scott Boden, who previously worked on Star Castle and Solar Quest. The software and graphic design was done by Tim Skelly, who also designed games for Cinematronics, Gremlin, and Gottlieb. Trivia Master was designed as a countertop coin-operated game, and as a conversion board set for existing upright games.
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The officers of one, Local 266 in Manhattan, were nominally attempting to organize juke box and coin-operated game servicemen in the New York metropolitan area. District attorneys around New York began their own investigations into allegations that Local 266 was trying to intimidate employers into allowing the Teamsters to represent their employees instead of other unions they already had collective bargaining agreements with. McClellan called Local 266 "phony and gangster-ridden".
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In 1981 Bushnell turned over day-to-day food operations of Chuck E. Cheese's to a newly hired restaurant executive and focused on Catalyst Technologies. Through 1981 and 1982, Bushnell concentrated on PTT subsidiaries Sente Technologies and Kadabrascope. Sente was a reentry into the coin-operated game business. Arcade cabinets would have a proprietary system and a cartridge slot developed by Data East Corporation, so operators could refresh their games without having to buy whole new cabinets.
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The player controls a car which must be driven along a road at nighttime without crashing into the sides of the road as indicated by road side reflectors. The game is controlled with a single pedal for the accelerator, a wheel for steering and a four- selection lever for gear shifting. The coin-operated game had a choice of three difficulties (novice, pro and expert), which the player could select at game start. The turns were sharper and more frequent on the more difficult tracks.
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While the high price of a minicomputer prevented such a game from being feasible then, in 1971 Tuck and Bill Pitts created a prototype coin-operated computer game, Galaxy Game, with a PDP-11, though they never produced more than two prototypes exhibited at Stanford. Around the same time, a second prototype coin-operated game based on Spacewar!, Computer Space, was developed by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, which would become the first commercially sold arcade video game and the first widely available video game of any kind.
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Ace Driver was a widespread success, with reviewers praising its impressive technological capabilities and realistic graphics. At the 76th Annual IAAPA tradeshow in November 1994, it was awarded the "Best Coin- Operated Game" award for its texture-mapped 3D graphics, force feedback and motion-based cabinet. In Japan, Game Machine listed it on their January 1, 1995 issue as being the second most-successful dedicated arcade game of the year. The game was also a commercial success, with Namco reporting an "overwhelming" number of orders placed for the eight-player version.
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His next design (over which he was given complete creative control) was another licensed theme based on a popular television show: The Twilight Zone (TZ). While Twilight Zone never sold as many units as The Addams Family (although it did sell over 15,000 units,) it is popular amongst pinball enthusiasts, due in part to its complicated ruleset. Its complexity was a mixed blessing, highlighting many of the pitfalls of the coin-operated game industry in general and pinball in particular. That is, the more elaborate the game, the more likely it would overwhelm the average player, which in turn would hurt sales.
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During a meeting with industry analysts on October 25, 2000, Namco supposedly hinted at a major financial loss. On October 29, Nihon Keizai Shinbun reported that it experienced a group net loss of 2.1 billion; as the company was known for its consistently high sales earnings, the announcement spread fear among analysts. Claiming that the struggling Japanese economy and dwindling coin-operated game market were to blame, Namco announced it would begin scaling back its financial forecasts to accommodate its losses. As the Japanese game market began to decline during the mid to late-1990s, its effect started seeping into the global arcade game industry as well.
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Pac-Man interactive exposition at The Art of Video Games Guinness World Records has awarded the Pac-Man series eight records in Guinness World Records: Gamer's Edition 2008, including "Most Successful Coin- Operated Game". On June 3, 2010, at the NLGD Festival of Games, the game's creator Toru Iwatani officially received the certificate from Guinness World Records for Pac-Man having had the most "coin-operated arcade machines" installed worldwide: 293,822. The record was set and recognized in 2005 and mentioned in the Guinness World Records: Gamer's Edition 2008, but finally actually awarded in 2010. The Pac-Man character and game series became an icon of video game culture during the 1980s.
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