These were places filled with video games, pin-ball machines, and many teenagers and children. These building began uprising in the 1970s and stated fall in the 1980s. This was considered the "Golden Age " of arcades. During this Golden Age, "the most popular machines were pulling in $400 a week in quarters and the number of dedicated arcades in the United States reached its peak with around 13,000, " (June) making the industry quite popular. Some of the most popular games included classics such as "Galaga ", "Asteroids ", and "Pac-man " which was, "the most successful video arcade game of all time ".(June) The Golden Age of arcades may have been strong, but it was a short lived one. One of the major reasons for the downfall of arcades was that, "Our culture decided that kids are better off when they're not alone with other kids, " (June) meaning that we believed that unsupervised children were bad influences on each other. Eventually most arcades have shut down and the only arcade games you can now find are at bowling alleys or at movie theaters.
During the arcade uprising, another type of gaming system was also being developed known as at-home consoles. This new technology allowed users to take video games home with them and plug them straight into their own television sets. The gaming console that is considered to be the first at-home system would be the "Brown Box ". The Brown Box was a prototype for the first multiplayer video game program that was created by invented by Ralph Baer and his colleagues at Sanders Associates, Inc. This console included, "six games for the console, namely ping-pong, tennis, handball, volleyball, chase games [or] a light-gun game. " (Poh) As the technology for these consoles became more advanced, they stopped coming with included games and became cartridge based instead, meaning each game came on its individual cartridge. Many top video game companies such as Nintendo, Atari, and Sega started using these cartridge based designs.
