Arcade machines - and by extension the whole genre of the same name - owe their title to the architectural space they originally occupied, namely the arcades forming the entrances to the commercial interiors. Benjamin refers specifically to the space of the passage or arcade (a concept of Latin origin) that led into different services such as cafés or restaurants, stores or guesthouses. This intermediate place that linked other spaces acted as the origin of the commercial galleries. As Benjamin analyses, this area constituted a space of ‘legal exception’. Not being considered an ‘inside’ of the establishments, nor an ‘outside’ in the street, this space did not have such defined rules and laws as the rest. The arcades hosted activities without a specific legal framework, such as street vendors during the day or prostitution at night. When in 1930 gaming machines appeared, initially electromechanical, they were located in these places. The game was not strictly forbidden, although it went through different periods when it was, but it had, especially because of its novelty and the characteristics of gambling, an implicit negative connotation around compulsive gambling (Kent, 2001). Thus, the new gaming machines were located in that space, in the ‘in-between’ in the arcades, the place from which they eventually took their name. Paradoxically, this ‘in-between’ position of arcades is also key to the history of video games, as they constituted the first attempts to make commercial games before they moved completely to home-based gaming devices.
