12
1: Ducit Amor Patriae The rich legacy of keeping score in video games comes to us largely from the ancestor of the arcade video game: pinball. Many of our ideas in scoring and score based play were tested and proven in the realm of pinball. Long before the giant cosmic silverball2 fell from the heavens and shrouded the industry in seemly unending darkness, mighty pinball machines walked the Earth. For a brief time beyond the memories of many arcade and pinball machines stood side by side.
One Score and Fourteen Years Ago In 1976, Midway Manufacturing Co’s periscope shooter Sea Wolf became more than one among many, it became a legend. With its “High Score” counter in addition to a traditional player score counter it is often credited as being the first coin-operated arcade game to keep track of the highest achievement in play. While the high score kept only the numeric values of the score, the simple act of including a high score was in many ways as epic as man setting foot on the moon. Like a boot print in the lunar soil leaving a anonymous high score was like leaving incontrovertible proof to any explorer that followed that not only has someone had been there before but here was a measure of how far they travelled. While Midway’s Sea Wolf had paved the way two-years earlier by placing the high