1978-83 Portrait Games: The Golden Era of Video Games

[MerlinArcade]

As you may know by now, I am building a cabinet for retro classic arcade games and have decided to turn sideways (portrait mode) my TV screen and when I show people what I'm doing, many are asking me why I do this.

My answer to them is... do not confuse arcades with video games. They may look like the same thing but they are not. All arcade games are videos games but not all videos games are arcade games.

That's because a video game can be in a video game console (Atari,NES, PlayStation, Xbox) but the game may not be out in an arcade having it's own arcade cabinet.

Growing up in the 70s and 80s, I know what I'm talking about because I have seen the gaming industry change and leave 1 market for the other.

You see, in the late 70s, the gaming console market was starting but not booming yet. Yes, the Atari 2600 console came out on the market (I owned one) but the games on these consoles sucked. Watch this video if you don't believe me.

So back then, when we really wanted to play games, we had to leave home, go to a place called The Arcade which was basically a big room loaded with nothing but gaming cabinets that we had to put quarters in to play.

We had games like Pac-Man, Galaga, Donkey Kong just to name a few but if you look at the screen orientation of these early games (mostly before 1983), you will see that they were mainly in Portrait Mode.

Even thought some games were in Landscape Mode like Defender, Star Wars, Venture or Berzerk, the majority (over 75% of them) were in Portrait.

This started to change when the home gaming consoles exploded in the 1st half of the 80s. We saw consoles like the ColecoVision, Coleco Gemeni, Intellivision just to name a few and even with the crash of the gaming industry in 1983, the turn to Landscape Gaming was already starting.

That's because home games are meant to be played on TVs and they have always been (even today with PC monitors) oriented in the Landscape Mode.

If fact, if you do some reseearch, you will rarely find a Portrait Game passed 1983. There are a few but those are very rare like Capcom's 1942 that came out in 1984 and Arkanoid in 1986.

In 1986, Nintendo came along (in North America that is) with their NES console and the arcade world was slowly left behind and the dawn of great home gaming consoles and the quality of their games exploded. In the early 80s, it wasn't unusual to have 6-7 kids around the same arcade cabinet watching a guy break the game's high score but in the 2nd half of the 80s, if you could find 7 kids in the ENTIRE arcade, it was a miracle. Clearly the gaming market was changing and people started playing games at homes more and more.

Nintendo and Sega had the late 80s and 90s but they also died at the turn of the century when Microsoft and Sony launched their Xbox and PlayStation consoles. These 2 are still on top today although Nintendo came back to life (barely) with it's Wii console.

Nothing wrong by playing games at homes. After all, who wants to leave home and throw away tons of quarters each day? I would have loved to have my own arcade cabinet like I'm building now but I didn't have the time, money and knowledge to do that.

However, with the drop in price and size of computers, killer softwares like MAME and Launchbox and companies like X-Gaming that let you buy their tankstick console so that you don't have to run after joysticks, buttons, circuit boards, wires and soldering equipement, it has never been easier than today to build your own arcade cabinet.

What makes me laugh though, is that on many BYOAC (Build Your Own Arcade Cabinet) forums, I see many guys in the late 40s like me building their own cabinet to remember the good old days of going to the arcade to play Ms Pac-Man, Galaga or Donkey Kong and yet they built it with the screen in Landscape Mode!!!

That's because we spent decades watching PC monitors in Landscape Mode, our big flat screen TV in the living room has always been in Landscape Mode, video games since the mid 80s up until today have been designed in Landscape Mode... but they forgot that it all started in Portrait Mode (at least for most games played in arcades).

They may have forgetten but I didn't. :-D and that's why my arcade cabinet is build in Portrait Mode. I will still insert games that are designed in Landscape Mode but those were the minority back then.

It may not seem much to many of you but to me, it makes a HUGE difference. Watch...

Here's Pac-Man in both Portrait and Landscape mode. You can clearly see that a game like this that has been designed to be played in a Portrait screen creates big black bars on each side of the game if you play them in a Landscape screen.

 

So if you think old school arcade, think Portrait Mode but if you play modern games, think Landscape.

Cheers,

Merlin

 

Edited January 25, 2017 by MerlinArcade