Timeline of arcade game history - Definition and Overview

This article contains a timeline of notable events in the history of arcade gaming:

• 1976: Barricade, the first game in the "Q-Basic Snakes"/Tron Lightcycle genre is released, almost immediately copy cat games are made

• 1981: Deco releases Cassette, the first standardized arcade platform, for which many games were made.

• 1981: Mahjong, by Taito, the first in a huge genre of mahjong games is released.

• 1981: Qix is released, beggining the genre of Qix games, mostly used in conjunction with revealing pornography.

• 1982: Buck Rogers Planet of Zoom, is released by Sega with the first use of scaling sprite 3d effects

• 1982: Black Widow, a Vector graphics game which invented the Smash TV genre, is released

• 1983: I, Robot, the first commercially produced 3d-polygonal game is released

• 1983: Bally Midway releases Journey, the first game with digitized sprites.

• 1983: Minefield was released by Stern, the first game to use paralax schrolling

• 1983: Crossbow, by Exidy, is released. It is the first game with fully digitized sound and graphics (previously games featured only pre-recorded cassette playback of realistic sound). It also features some of the most advanced graphics of the time.

• 1983: Exidy releases Fax, the first game in the Quiz genre of arcade games.

• 1986: Exidy releases Chiller, the most violent arcade game ever made until the Mortal Kombat series, and to this day considered the most gratuitously violent arcade game.

• 1988: Narc, by Midway is released

• 1988: Reikai Doushi, by Home Data is released, the first digitized fighting game and the first claymation fighting game.

• 1989: Exterminator, the first game with fully digitized graphics, is released. It will have the highest quality digitized graphics until the release of Mortal Kombat 2.

• 1992: Sega releases Holosseum, a game which uses a holographic monitor.

• 1993: Mortal Kombat II is released, featuring high quality digitized graphics, and the most advanced sound system in arcades at the time, the DCS sound system which allowed for MP3 style compression to all sounds.

• 1994: Killer Instinct is released, the first arcade game with a hard disk, up to that point the game with the highest quality graphics pre-rendered by a rendering program, featuring to this day the highest quality use of the movie background technique.