A submarine game carries Japanese arcade manufacturing worldwide

What happened

Nothing in the cabinet was electronic in the way later machines were. Model ships crossed a painted backdrop on moving chains, torpedo tracks were suggested by lamps switching in sequence, and a hit set off a bang and a flash. The player looked through a periscope, which hid the mechanism and did most of the work of persuasion. Sega, a Tokyo company whose business had grown out of supplying coin-operated machines to American service bases and Japanese arcades, built it sturdily enough to be crated and shipped abroad.

The export mattered more than the game. Distributors in the United States and Europe took it on, and because the cabinet was large, heavy and expensive to buy, American operators charged twenty-five cents a play rather than the customary dime. The higher price stuck and became the standard for arcade machines for decades. Sega had also demonstrated something less obvious: a Japanese manufacturer could design a hit for its home market and sell the identical product worldwide, roughly a decade before that route carried video games.

The world at the time

Arcades in the mid-1960s ran on electro-mechanical machines: rifle galleries, driving games, baseball novelties and pinball, all built from motors, relays, lamps and painted scenery. Japan had a large amusement trade of its own, and Sega was among the firms treating it as a manufacturing business rather than a local service. Video screens were still years from the arcade floor.

What it changed

Electro-mechanical spectacle games stayed profitable in Japan long after screens arrived, and Sega kept building them. The company's export relationships and American sales operation gave it a running start when video cabinets took over the business, and the quarter that Periscope helped establish remained the unit of arcade commerce until the machines themselves faded away.