oldArcade machines (emulated via MAME) were the showcase of gaming — the best graphics and ideas of their time. Pac-Man, Street Fighter II, Galaga and hundreds of other coin-op legends.
- Maker: různí
- Since: 1980
- Play via: EmulatorJS
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Arcade machines were never general-purpose computers. Each cabinet was purpose-built hardware designed to do one thing at a level home systems could not match, and to do it convincingly enough that you kept feeding it coins. That produced a rate of technical progress nothing else in gaming matched: Namco's first video game, Gee Bee, appeared in 1978 as a black-and-white block-breaker designed by Toru Iwatani, who went on to make Pac-Man. Fifteen years later the same company was shipping textured 3D racing hardware. Because the boards were all different, arcade preservation depends on MAME, the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, first released in February 1997 with the explicit goal of documenting how this hardware worked before the surviving boards died.
What our arcade catalogue actually holds
Our 805 arcade titles lean towards the late 1980s and the 1990s rather than the golden-age canon. Capcom's CPS-1 and CPS-2 boards are well represented: the beat 'em up Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, the two Dungeons & Dragons arcade games Tower of Doom and Shadow over Mystara, the fighters X-Men: Children of the Atom and Marvel vs. Capcom, and the vertical shooters 19XX and 1944: The Loop Master. Namco supplies the 3D era with Tekken, Tekken 3, Ridge Racer and Time Crisis. Konami is here with Vendetta, Crime Fighters and Salamander 2. And the catalogue covers the bullet-hell lineage properly: Toaplan's Batsugun, then CAVE — founded by former Toaplan staff — with DonPachi, DoDonPachi and Guwange. Earlier hardware appears too, including New Rally-X, Lady Bug, Super Xevious and Hang-On.
Playing arcade games in your browser
441 of the 805 arcade titles here run directly in the page, with the emulator recreating the original board inside your browser. Nothing is installed and nothing is downloaded. Worth knowing before you start: arcade games were tuned to take your money, so difficulty ramps steeply and continues were the business model. Credits are free here, which changes the experience — but it is also the only practical way most of these machines can be played now.