Before video, arcade amusements were built from relays, motors, lamps and mirrors — periscope gun games like Sega's Periscope (1966), driving cabinets with spinning painted drums. Their designers were mechanical engineers who sculpted play out of physical linkages. Within roughly five years of Pong, microprocessor video games had erased the trade; pinball survived only by converting to solid-state electronics itself in 1977–79.
Electro-mechanical arcade engineer no longer exists as a living trade. Here is what erased it, and which profession took on the work.
1800 – 1950
The authored game
The nineteenth century invented the game author twice: von Reisswitz's 1824 Kriegsspiel made rule design a military science, and industrial lithography made parlor games a business — Milton Bradley's The Checkered Game of Life sold some 45,000 copies in its first year, 1860–61. Yet authorship rarely paid: Lizzie Magie's $500 for the patent behind Monopoly, against Charles Darrow's millions, showed exactly how little the industry valued the person who designed the rules.
What else was happening then
1904
Lizzie Magie patents The Landlord's Game
Washington stenographer and Georgist Lizzie Magie received US Patent 748,626 for a board game designed to demonstrate how rents enrich landlords and impoverish tenants. Three decades later Parker Brothers bought her patent for a flat $500 while publishing Monopoly, the derivative Charles Darrow had sold them as his own invention — the profession's founding lesson in authorship.
1958
Tennis for Two at Brookhaven
Physicist William Higinbotham wired an analog computer to an oscilloscope for visitors' day at Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York, letting the public bat a glowing dot over a net. Queues formed around the exhibit. Higinbotham never patented it, considering it a trivial use of laboratory equipment.
1962
Spacewar! escapes the lab
Steve Russell and fellow MIT students wrote Spacewar!, a two-ship dueling game, on a PDP-1 minicomputer. Passed freely between university computer labs, it became the common ancestor of the arcade generation: both Nolan Bushnell's Computer Space (1971) and the industry that followed began as attempts to sell Spacewar! to the public.
1972
Pong and the Odyssey found an industry
Ralph Baer's Magnavox Odyssey, the first home console, and Atari's Pong — built by engineer Allan Alcorn as a training exercise — both shipped in 1972. Pong's prototype at Andy Capp's Tavern in Sunnyvale famously stopped working because its milk-jug coin box had jammed full of quarters, the moment coin-operated video games proved themselves a business.
Where that work lives now
The architect of play — the person who decides what a game asks of its players, from Senet's ancient board to Tetris and today's three-billion-player industry.
🎮 Game Designer →