The Hidden Truth Behind Arcade Games The Industry Doesn't Want You To Know

Much like the current business model used by mobile games, arcade titles from the 1980s were built around the idea of delivering small amounts of content to players. This effectively meant that a financially successful game would be one that would make users pay to get access to new content. Players would only be able to get access to a certain amount of the overall experience if they didn’t keep coughing up coins – with designers using a variety of different techniques to achieve this goal.

One of the core design concepts in any arcade machine is that the manufacturer has to be able to control how long most players will spend on a machine per turn. It would be of no use if a single quarter would allow a player to continue playing for a long time as that significantly reduces the amount of money that a machine can make. Instead, they want users to only play for a small amount of time before they have to insert more coins to keep playing. To that end, many machines would come with adjusters so that operators could change the speed and health of enemies.

The easiest way to limit the amount of time a user could keep playing for in a single turn was to make games more difficult. The harder a title was, the less chance a player would have of staying alive for a significant amount of time. Designers had to strike a careful balance between making a game challenging enough that it couldn’t be completed within a single life but not too frustrating that it put off new players.

Sometimes they wouldn’t get this right and would have to release new games that were harder. This was the case with Atari, who developed sequels to their classic game Asteroids because experienced players were able to stay on the game without dying for hours at a time.

Early developers such as Atari and Namco quickly realized that what drove players to keep coming back to their favorite games wasn’t the desire to beat the game. Instead, most players wanted the thrill of beating a high score. This would allow them to input their name on the leader board and demonstrate that they were the best in the local area. In a world where the paying customer was more interested in accumulating the most points rather than seeing the ending to a game, it meant that designers had the incentive to make titles that would ensure users kept inserting coins to have one more go at topping the leader board.

Most arcade games were built with the philosophy of making them easy to pick up and play for beginners but complex enough to provide a challenge for veteran players. Atari founder Nolan Bushnell explained this idea, saying: "All the best games are easy to learn and difficult to master. They should reward the first quarter and the hundredth."

To that end, games would become increasingly more intricate and difficult in later stages. This not only made them harder - ensuring the player was more likely to die - but provided users with a challenge that matched their skills. Experienced users would therefore not become bored even after playing many times.

Many arcade games were not designed to reward the gamer for their accomplishments. They were actually built to be as addictive as possible, incorporating familiar themes and ideas so that players would feel comfortable with them as soon as they first inserted a coin. In this sense, it is easy to see why the games often became harder after an initial easier period, as the user would already be hooked and likely to want to keep playing.