Classic Arcade Cabinets From the Golden Age

A gallery of arcade cabinets from the years when video games lived in painted wooden boxes at the pizza parlor, the bowling alley and the mall. Each photo shows a machine of the period rather than a modern countertop replica, so you can see the marquee, the side art, the bezel and the control panel the way players first met them. Some have been restored, and the captions say so, along with the details worth checking if you are thinking of buying one. The selection opens with Computer Space and Pong, the coin-op pioneers that set the stage, and then follows the golden age proper, roughly 1978 to the mid-1980s, when Space Invaders, Pac-Man and Donkey Kong turned arcades into a craze. The test for a place is simple: the cabinet's look or its controls had to be part of what made the game memorable, from a trackball or a dial to a steering wheel. Pinball has its own gallery, and later hits such as Street Fighter II belong to the next arcade era, so they are left out here.