Oh yeah, it all started with the arcades. There was a whole culture attached to it, and they were very popular.
I think it’s fascinating to learn about how the developers figured out how to do things back then, the limitations, scaling/distribution, and then the rapid arms race between customers and devs to make games harder and harder to beat. There was an excellent documentary about this on Netflix a few years ago, but I can’t remember the name off the top of my head.