The machine that broke because of money
In 1972 a prototype PONG cabinet was put into a bar in California to find out whether anyone would play it. A few days later the owner rang to say it had stopped working. The engineers opened it up and found the mechanism jammed solid: it had swallowed more QUARTER coins than the box could physically hold.
The entire business model arrived in that moment. An ARCADE game had to be understandable without instructions, and short enough that a player would feed in another COIN within a couple of minutes.
The aliens speed up because of a bug
Space Invaders, in 1978, has a famous quality: as you shoot the aliens, the survivors move faster and faster, until the last one streaks across the screen. Nobody designed that. The hardware could only redraw so many shapes each frame, so with fewer aliens left the machine simply had less to do and ran them quicker.
The designer noticed, decided it made the game far better, and left it alone. A limitation of the electronics became the most memorable thing about the game, and one of the first difficulty curves anybody had seen.
A game designed for everybody else
PACMAN arrived in 1980 into arcades full of shooting games aimed at teenage boys. Toru Iwatani set out to make something couples and families would play instead: bright colours, no violence, and a game about eating rather than destroying.
The story that the shape came from a pizza with a slice missing is one he has told and also played down. What is not in doubt is the result — the most recognisable ARCADE machine ever built, with four ghosts who each chase you in a different way, still studied as a model of how to make enemies interesting.
The level that cannot be played
Play PACMAN well enough and you arrive at a broken screen. The game keeps the LEVEL number in a single byte, which can only count to 255. At 256 the arithmetic fails, the right-hand half of the maze dissolves into a jumble of letters and symbols, and the board can never be cleared.
That screen is where the game ends, not because anybody wrote an ending but because the machine runs out of numbers. It is the closest thing the arcade era has to a final BONUS, and it is a bug.
Tetris came from the other side of the Iron Curtain
TETRIS was written in 1984 by Alexey Pajitnov at a computer centre in Moscow. Under the Soviet system his employer owned whatever he made, so the game travelled the world, sold on millions of handhelds, and earned him nothing at all for years. He only began receiving royalties in the 1990s.
The cabinets themselves have mostly gone, along with the ATARI and SEGA machines that filled the arcades. The games keep coming back, though — on phones, in compilations, and in the deliberately chunky PIXEL art of new games made to look thirty years older than they are.