Any true retro gamer should read ‘Attract Mode – The Rise and Fall of Coin-Op Arcade Games’ by Jamie Lendino

Photo by Kay Savetz
Photo by Kay Savetz (@KaySavetz)

Jamie Lendino has published his new book, Attract Mode: The Rise and Fall of Coin-Op Arcade Games. The book tells the history of the Arcade game industry since the inception of electromechanical machines from the early 20th century until its crash and rebirth.

When I started reading Lendino’s book I wasn’t really sure what to expect regarding its format and what the narrative would be but being now halfway through I couldn’t be more pleased. The author takes us on a journey that mixes history bits about the business side, details about the games and their mechanics, the cabinets design, and even insights about the operators’ side, like different settings for the game, how the machine performed, revenue, and so on.

On the business side, the impression I have is that Jamie decided to be more on the succinct side, giving a quick overview of a certain manufacturer before talking about the company’s games. Although I like knowing a lot of details about the origins of the companies, I found that this more direct approach is perfect for keeping the flow going: “this is the company, that is how they worked, these are their more relevant and/or successful products. Next!“.

Another interesting aspect of the book is that despite the theme, the book is economical in illustrations. With so many “visual” retro gaming books on the market, one might think that hundreds of pictures should be all through the book’s pages, but Attract Mode takes another and good approach. The author goes through such detailed descriptions of the game and its mechanics and the cabinet design that you really don’t feel you need to see them. For some of the most obscure games (at least for me), the occasional photo of the screen or the cabinet was there and satisfied my curiosity. Another “side-effect” the book causes is the urge to look many of them all up on the Internet for more videos and photos.

The book follows a chronological order which is divided into eras. It gives a quick perspective of the pre-historical age, which is great for letting you know where the arcades came from. Most of the book focuses on the Bronze Age (1971-1977), the Golden Age (1978-1984), the Platinum Age (1985-1991), and the Renaissance (1991-1994).

Throughout each stage, you will learn details not only of the main releases, like Space Invaders and Pac-Man but also about some of the less known ones but for one reason or another, crave their place in the arcade history. Notably, the arcade games that were the first on something, like “the first that included initials in the high score table,” “the first that added the continue feature,” etc. I have to tell you I am learning so many things that I didn’t have a clue about!

The book focuses on the US market, but because of its intertwined history with Japan’s, many of the arcade’s games mentioned in the book also include information about its origins in Japan or how it was received in both markets.

This morning, I was able to talk with Lendino over Twitter briefly and asked him a few questions about the book and his process to write it:

ViTNO: What motivated you to write this book?

Jamie Lendino: What motivated me to write this book, and the earlier Atari books (Breakout, Faster than Light, and Adventure), is that I keep trying to get at and capture what it was like to play and experience these games when they were new. At the time, they led the development of the game industry and culture surrounding that. I know we can appreciate old games in an emulator, but what I keep finding lacking in the discussion about them is the sheer wonder that accompanied playing these games, the what were then incredible advances in technology, graphics, sound, hardware design, and the visual aesthetics and artwork that accompanied these games. When I play Star Castle or Defender today, I *still* experience in my head how amazing these games look and sound. It may seem almost ridiculous next to games on the Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5, but that’s exactly what I’m trying to push against—no, this was amazing to us then, and this is what it was like to experience each technological advance as it happened and why it was significant, and what changed from game to game and year to year. Everything was new—games without timers, vector graphics, continues, perspective changes, and so on. *This* is what we experienced when we first played Asteroids, or Pole Position, or Gauntlet in an arcade, and this is why it has stayed with us ever since. I mean to convey nothing but joy about all of this—we can joke, “har har, in my day, we had to walk three miles uphill to play and the games looked like two stick figures shooting each other, and we liked it!”—and it’s not like that at all. The game industry today is an amazing thing; it’s realizing the dreams we all had 40 years ago of what games *could* be like someday. But every bit of that wonder was also there in 1980.

ViTNO: How did you do your research? How long it took you to complete the book since its conception?

JL: I conceived of the book in early 2015—I’ve had a plan and outlines for at least six books, with several more possibilities afterward, from back then—and I’ve been plugging through writing each book, starting with Breakout (about the Atari 800) that same year. Attract Mode took 15 months of solid work, from picking up an earlier outline and refining it back in April or May of 2019, to doing all the research, playing, and writing.
I always work with tremendous stacks of research materials across books, archive sites with PDFs, original manuals, brochures, videos, magazines—anything I can find with special priority on materials from the time period. Then I go about gathering research for each topic and subtopic and then each game that I want to cover in more depth. At all times I had a game fired up in an emulator with various arcade-style controllers, which certainly helped jog my memory and test out things I was looking at with each one.

ViTNO: Were you able to play the games you mentioned in the book? Have you played all of them? Mostly emulation? Which one (if any) you went back to play on an actual arcade machine just for the book?

JL: With the exception of some TTL games and especially electromechanical games that are hard to find in working condition, I’ve played just about everything in the book—much of it during the early 1980s and certainly the rest since. Many of them incessantly. I’ll never get tired of Asteroids, Star Wars, or Robotron: 2084. I love Zaxxon, but I’m terrible at the arcade version. The pandemic cut short many of the trips I had planned, with all the arcades shutting down. But certainly, emulation and fan videos have helped fill a lot of the gaps and to remind me of details about a machine I hadn’t played in a while. (Did Turbo have an LED or gauge speedometer, since there wasn’t one on-screen, or were the LEDs only for scoring? How did the engine sound compare with Pole Position a year later, or Wheels back in 1974?)

And you couldn’t rely on emulation, either, because the sound may not be perfect, or the way the speaker configuration worked or the way vector games looked on CRTs, the black lights, the overlays, and so on could make the actual experience very different. Certainly with the controllers, which were often custom for each cabinet. One of the running themes in the book is not that emulation is bad (far from it!), but that the components of the arcade machine often made the game the full experience it was, and that’s the easiest portion to “forget” with today’s emulators. Even something as basic as the aspect ratio could be off, because the way the tube actually displayed the graphics that the chips or code generated may not correspond pixel by pixel to the real image.

And for any machine I couldn’t touch by hand at all—mostly early ones such as Space Race or Wheels, though I never found a Tac/Scan either—I watched videos and worked off of as many research materials as I could find. Videos of the machines were extra helpful in these cases. You really need to see, hear, or otherwise experience in person the actual machines at some point for a book like this, and in some cases, there were just too few working examples.
In this respect at least, it was easier with the books I wrote about Atari systems because I had all of them and could eBay or otherwise secure anything I either never owned, or used to own and gave away or sold 20 years ago. With this, arcade machines are just too big and heavy! And it was impossible for me to have day-to day-access to every coin-op I talk about in the book. But having so much in the way of accessible research materials made the huge job easier (and in some cases, even just possible to begin with, for everything I needed to cover)


The book is available at your “local” Amazon store in paperback and Kindle versions, for US$17 and US$7.50 respectively. For more information about Attract Mode and Lendino’s previous books, follow the links below.

Link: Attract Mode at Amazon.com
Link: Lendino’s Website

Author: Paulo Garcia

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