The amusement arcade has always been a place to gamble and play games of skill, since the steam age when mammal and machine first encountered one another, humanity has challenged itself to build more and more challenging machines to overcome. Despite this long history many of the arcade games that we play at fairs and shopping malls today are the same games that people were playing more than 100 years ago.

One of the most popular amusements are the shooting challenges. Now we can be special agents, or soldiers or space marines, fighting aliens or terrorists or even magically animated ancient stone statures, shooting them with all manner of insane weapons. The first of these was Operation Wolf from the early 1980s which was a massive hit due to the sub machine gun mounted on the front.

Another old favorite in the world of the amusement arcade is the penny drop machine. Here players will roll a penny or sometimes more money down onto a shelf full of coins, skillful players if they do it right can knock more penny down from the moving shelves. This game has been around since the early 19th century, with the originals using small children inside the machine to move the shelves rather than mechanical devices.

Grab the toy has also been a mainstay of the arcades since the beginning. Traditionally trying to collect a plush toy from a glass box full of them using a mechanical claw this game played a starring role in the popular Toy Story movies as almost a god like figure to the simple toy aliens. Players can often win more expensive prizes such as iPhones and PDA devices nowadays.

One of the most popular arcade games in Japan is Pachinko, with arcades dedicated specifically to the game dotted all over all of the cities and towns of Japan. The aim of the game is to score points by firing small silver balls into pockets to earn points to win more plays or prizes. Although the game is now a super high tech anime inspired wonderland, it\’s roots go back to a French pastime called Bagatelle.

Using the same principle as Pachinko, the traditional French version uses pockets made on a wooden board rather than insane computer graphics depicting alien worlds, but it is essentially the same game.

One of the most traditionally popular machines in the arcade that is somewhat out of fashion at the moment is pinball. This game seems to go through ten year cycles of immense popularity and then obscurity. Dating back to the 1950s, pinball was last popular at the beginning of the 21st century with incredibly flashy and exciting tables themed on films and pop culture eating money at insane rates.

Except for video games it is interesting that the majority of arcade games we see today are the same ones that our grandparents were playing during the blitz or when the first car came to their village with bacon and nylon stockings from America or Europe.

Author Bio: Established in 1975, Canada\’s largest distributor of billiard table Toronto and operator of coin operated amusement machines offers entertainment operation solutions such game room furniture, used pool tables in Toronto, arcade game rental, and pinball repair for your business needs.

Category: Entertainment
Keywords: entertainment, leisure, hobbies, games, arcade, history, culture, society, lifestyle, recreation