Zap! Boom! Pow! The Rise and Fall of the Amusement Arcade

Many of us grew up spending our Friday nights pumping dimes and quarters into pinball machines or Space Invaders games down at the local arcade. These arcades served as sanctums, meeting places, king's courts and on-the-job-training for a lot of budding teen electrical engineers (and a lot of others, too). Now, these places are pretty much gone, sanitized out of existence or supplanted by the rise of the console game and the embrace of the living room couch. Ah, but there was a time...

Over on The Verge, columnist Laura June takes a nostalgic look at how arcades and early video game technology helped shape a half-century of culture, from the mechanical pinball machine to Pong and into the golden age of video games -- and their slow decline. But don't forget to bring a roll of quarters - you'll be there for a while.