The first pinball machines had been introduced in the 1930s but gained a reputation as games of chance and had been banned from many venues from the 1940s through the 1960s. Since the early 20th century, skee ball and other pin-based games had been a popular arcade game. After several traditional companies closed or migrated to other fields (especially in the West), arcades lost much of their relevance in the West, but have continued to remained popular in Eastern and Southeastern Asia. There was a resurgence in the early 1990s, with the birth of the fighting game genre with Capcom's Street Fighter II in 1991 and the emergence of 3D graphics, before arcades began declining in the West during the late 1990s.
The arcade market began recovering in the mid-1980s, with the help of software conversion kits, new genres such as beat 'em ups, and advanced motion simulator cabinets. At this point, saturation of the market with arcade games led to a rapid decline in both the arcade game market and arcades to support them. The industry grew modestly until the release of Taito's Space Invaders in 1978 and Namco's Pac-Man in 1980, creating a golden age of arcade video games that lasted through about 1983. The history of arcade video games originated in 1971 with the introduction of Computer Space by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, the founders of Atari, Inc., who followed on that success the next year with Pong. Up until the late 1990s, arcade video games were the largest and most technologically advanced sector of the video game industry. Arcade video games are often installed alongside other arcade games such as pinball and redemption games at amusement arcades. An arcade video game is an arcade game where the player's inputs from the game's controllers are processed through electronic or computerized components and displayed to a video device, typically a monitor, all contained within an enclosed arcade cabinet.