10 Most Profitable Arcade Games That Made BILLIONS
7. Asteroids - Atari (1979)
Revenue To Date: $2.835 billion
Asteroids is one of the earliest video games, having been inspired by the first game ever made, Space War. The game featured a small ship in the shape of a triangle, and players could completely control its movement. The ship rotated could fly in any direction, and it could teleport elsewhere on the screen.
Players had to shoot a random flying saucer while simultaneously blasting asteroids into smaller and smaller bits. As soon as a stage was cleared, the gameplay reset with greater difficulty as a new level, and play continued from there.
By today's standards, Asteroids was ridiculously simple, but in 1979, it was groundbreaking technology nobody had seen. The game made a huge splash when it was released, and it helped grow the popularity of arcade video games.
Asteroids cabs began showing up everywhere, and when all was said and done, 100,000 cabinets were sold with 70K popping up in the States, and another 30K were sold overseas. The total sales for Asteroids cabs amount to a staggering $2.835 billion, which is insane when you think of the number of quarters needed to reach that number... it's 3.2 billion quarters based on the pre-adjusted net of $800 million.