Objects/Artifacts which are important (e.g. revolutionary) in the US
What are the objects and why they are significant?
Given the relatively short timeline for video game history, combined with the mass-produced nature of the industry, the creation and veneration of objects/artifacts is highly subjective. To be an artifact of video game culture objects must be of some importance to the culture and carry at least the perception of scarcity. An object like the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), for example, had a huge cultural impact, yet it is discredited as a crucial artifact because it can still be found in most people’s basements or attics across North America. A limited edition game/console/hardware, on the other hand, may be exceedingly rare, and yet still have little to no cultural significance, e.g. the NES Flintstones game, The Surprise at Dinosaur Peak. (Side note: this particular game is prized by collectors for it rarity since it was only released as promotional item within a company, but those outside of the collecting world certainly have never heard of it.) Given these parameters, two obvious choices for North American video game culture artifacts that do adhere to these guidelines are early Pong and Pac-Man arcade cabinets.
The choice of arcade cabinets seems straightforward and unprovocative. Although US gaming history is filled with games of great importance, rarity, and relevance, a NES cartridge is hardly an object of physical presence. This is especially true when compared to an arcade cabinet, which stands over two meters in height and emits alluring lights and sounds. The construction, artwork, technology, and layer of cultural patina sets each cabinet into a specific time and place in history. The removal of their places of provenance, i.e. pool halls, bars, restaurants, and early arcades, and placement in memory institutions, like the American Classic Arcade Museum in Laconia, New Hampshire, feels as jarring as seeing Egyptian artifacts at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.
Discussed in an earlier post, Pong, created by Al Alcorn and sold by Nolan Bushnell, may be the most iconic video game of all time. Soon after the founding of Atari in 1972, Bushnell and Alcorn created Pong, which was clearly at least heavily-inspired by Odyssey’s game Table Tennis. Regardless of the inevitable controversy that followed, Pong was a huge success, and as Atari could not keep pace with the demand, Odyssey’s version sold more to fill the need. Pong was so popular that, even in its first year of production, Atari shipped over 7,000 units (Kent, 2001). The yellow cabinet pictured to the right is more iconic, yet given the rarity of the early bartop test model, it instead occupies a space among the higher echelon of video game artifacts.
Although Puck-man owes its origin to Japanese game designer Toru Iwatani’s desire to create a video game for women, Pac-man (name changed by Midway to prevent obvious vandalism) was indeed an American sensation (Kent, 2001). For the few who are unaware, Pac-Man is a maze-chase game, wherein the players take control of a yellow circle that moves about a maze eating 240 dots - all while avoiding and trying to eat the ghosts: Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde. Pac-Man was a surprise success, and quite the success it was. Pac-Man and its sequel, Ms Pac-Man (MIT based General Computer's enhancement kit), were the only two arcade games to sell over 100,000 units within the United States (Kent, 2001).
Although both Pong and Pac-Man cabinets can both be considered artifacts by the aforementioned standards, they each fall on differing areas of the spectrum. One hundred thousand Pac-Man and one hundred and fifteen thousand Ms Pac-Man units hardly portray scarcity. These numbers do ensure that nearly every American has come across one of these machines in their lifetime, yet still almost no one owns one, which therein cements the perceived legacy. Likewise, what helps cement the legacy of Pong is the plethora of home Pong consoles and the VGS port. These consoles are often mass-produced and small, but they all owe their existence to the hit Pong cabinet (as well as the Odyssey Magnavox and its predecessor Ralph Baer’s Brown Box, but that is another story). 
The arcade cabinets discussed above, along with other notables, are preserved in places like the National Video Game Museum in Frisco, Texas; the Strong Museum of Play (which hosts the Video Game Hall of Fame) in Rochester, New York; and others. Their preservation, popularity, and cultural legacy unequivocally show their importance and influence within American gaming culture. Although empires rise and fall, and industry leaders like Atari come and go, the legacy of these type of classic games have been forever burned into American video game culture, not unlike how the outline of the maze in Pac-Man was burned into their aging CRT monitors.
References:
Kent, S.L., 2001. The ultimate history of video games: from Pong to Pokémon and beyond: the story behind the craze that touched our lives and changed the world, Roseville, CA: Prima Pub.
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