In 1972 Atari released one of the first arcade machines - Pong - into a world that was very alien to how we live today. Up to that point, games were made by Milton Bradley or Parker Brothers and were decidedly analog, comprised of cardboard, plastic and dice. Or involved a ball and fresh air. But the Atari Pong arcade machine drove people into bars and carnival arcades by the thousands, previously the domain of pinball machines and pellet guns.
Fast forward to 1977 and Atari released their Atari 2600 into the home market. Although dedicated home Pong machines had previously existed, this was the first mass market machine that allowed you to change the games by slotting in different cartridges with new game code hardwired onto their ROM chips. Atari 2600 pong was a reasonable facsimile of the arcade hardware it was trying to emulate, and rightfully so as the arcade hardware predated the shiny new home console by more than 5 years. All was good in the land of Atari.
Except that by 1978 the Arcade landscape had moved on. It had progressed to be light years ahead of the Atari 2600 in terms of hardware specs and raw power. The arcade games were now full color and in high resolution. The hardware specs were cutting edge, with CPUs, GPUs, RAM and sound processors often being hundreds of times more powerful than home consoles. Cabinets on occasion had custom controls and sometimes even included hydraulic force feedback to create more realism for the punter.
The shiny new Atari 2600 was obsolete before it even hit the market by arcade standards. It could never hope to compete, more so because economy of scale determined that for a machine to become mass market it had to offset price against performance, which was not the case with an arcade machine which could be sold for several thousand dollars. Whilst one arcade cabinet could be played by thousands of people and recoup a large price tag, a home console would only ever have one or two users, meaning it had to be affordable to a single family income. Its price had to be a couple of hundred dollars at most, with its internal hardware fitting this tag.
As new games were being released into the arcade by Atari, Taito, Midway, Sega, Namco and many other early arcade game developers, home users wanted to play them in the comfort of their own home. After all, why pay for 5 minutes of entertainment in the arcade when you could own the game and play it forever at home.
And so arcade conversions became the staple diet of the early console industry. Practically every popular arcade game saw a home release. It did not matter how good the arcade machine looked or played, companies looking to make a quick buck would attempt to put out a home console version of their coin-op hits regardless of how futile the effort.
It didn't take punters long to realize there was something very wrong with their home ports of their favorite games. Sometimes the job nigh on impossible due to the vast chasm between the specs of the Arcade and Home machines. It was simply folly to try to shrink down the code of super computer level arcade hardware and get it running on something akin to a glorified pocket calculator/word processor. Many attempts were admirable and commendable in falling short of their mark.
However, more often than not the conversions were sloppy, rushed, bugged to hell and pathetic shameful cash-ins by unscrupulous vendors.
Our venerable Atari 2600 got a woeful Pacman conversion which did not even look like Pacman, and the controls didn't allow you to move through the maze without getting stuck. Nintendo's Donkey Kong arcade had 4 levels, whilst the 2600 conversion looked nothing like the arcade and only had 2 levels. It just wasn't worth the effort.
Now I can go on all day mentioning bad or pointless arcade conversions. I remember playing Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum conversion of Sega's super powered Outrun machine. The only reason why you might believe you were playing Outrun at home is that the packaging box the cassette came in said it was Outrun. The game neither resembled nor played like Outrun. But yet it stayed at the top of C&VGs game charts for years!
Even the 16 bit era saw many many conversion failures. The Sega Megadrive, SNES, Amiga and others all had to vastly scale back when presenting graphics and sound. But the gap began to close, and slowly we began to imagine we could play arcade games at home without compromise. By the end of the Sega Genesis era, Gunstar Heroes would show that with the right programmers you could get close to the quality of graphics that had been attained at the arcade a few years before.
And then something magical happened. Sony released the Sony Playstation in 1994, and for the first time ever home users were playing almost carbon copies of games they could play in the arcades. Tekken and Ridge Racer were as close as dammit to being the real thing, and you could walk out of your local arcade, go to the game shop and buy what you were pumping coins into minutes earlier.
This process of catch up continued through out the 90s and by the time the Sega Dreamcast was released in 1999 there was absolute parity between the arcade hardware and home hardware. In fact by 2003 the Microsoft Xbox was actually far more powerful than any existing arcade hardware. Which ironically was the final nail in the coffin of the already faltering arcade scene. You could now buy a home console that easily outshone arcade graphics, so there was no longer any reason to spend your time and hard earned cash for an inferior experience at the local arcade. By 2005 there were no longer any local arcades to speak of, resigned to be a footnote in video game history. Today game arcades take the form of museums with little to no new content.
But the memories remain. How foolish we were, buying Operation Wolf, Outrun, Afterburner, Space Harrier, Super Hang-on, Midnight Resistance, WWF Superstars and many many hundreds more, hoping to get the same experience at home and then being completely let down by what we found. Or if you were lucky or smart enough, you read the reviews before you bought and got gems like R-Type, Chase HQ, Rainbow Islands or Bomb Jack, arcade conversions that punched so far above their weight that it made putting up with the crummy ports almost worthwhile. Almost...
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