Coin-operated arcade cabinets preceded mainstream home video gaming.

Evidence

Atari’s founder, Norman Bushnell, had seen the Odyessy and, like Baer, was enough of a tech geek to know that computers could, in fact, be great fun. He and other computer scientists with access to the mainframes had already been playing a game named SpaceWar! So Bushnell designed a cabinet, about the height of a man, configured somewhat like a phone booth (another obsolete receptacle); for a quarter, one could play the game inside like a pinball machine. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 675

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: why did arcade cabinets — pay-per-play, public, salon-like — succeed as the first large-scale commercial form and how quickly did home consoles catch up as an advertising/attention territory?