Arcades were developing alongside all of this. Atari's Pong came out in 1972, and games like Space Invaders, Asteroids, Pac-Man, and Donkey Kong helped make video games a regula…

Arcades were developing alongside all of this. Atari's Pong came out in 1972, and games like Space Invaders, Asteroids, Pac-Man, and Donkey Kong helped make video games a regular part of public entertainment. Different machines could have completely different controls, artwork, sounds, and rules. You could walk from a shooting game to a maze game to something based around climbing and jumping, all in the same room. A lot of characters and ideas that eventually became familiar on home systems were reaching people through those cabinets first. There was also a different way of learning those games. You put money in, got a limited number of chances, and had to figure out what you were doing. Getting farther could mean learning enemy patterns, knowing when to take a risk, or watching somebody who was already better at the game. High scores gave people something to compete over even when they weren't playing at the same time. As arcade games expanded into more elaborate racing, fighting, and cooperative action games, the cabinets could offer experiences that were difficult to reproduce exactly at home. That matters when talking about older gaming, because the arcade versions and home versions could be very different experiences even when they had the same name.