Long before video game websites could report a new release within minutes, before YouTube channels dissected arcade hardware, and before players could compare earnings, reviews, and industry rumors online, the people who actually operated coin machines faced a basic problem. An operator in Louisiana might know which machines were earning money in his own locations, but he had few reliable ways to learn what operators in Illinois, California, New York, or Florida were experiencing.
That problem helped create Play Meter.
The magazine first appeared in December 1974 and remained in publication until June 2018, placing its run across almost the entire commercial history of the arcade video game industry. The International Arcade Museum now preserves 420 issues containing more than 46,000 pages, an extraordinary surviving record of the games, businesses, people, advertisements, trade shows, controversies, and economic pressures that shaped coin-operated entertainment. The surviving issues and anniversary retrospectives form the backbone of the magazine’s history and were also the strongest materials identified in the research assembled for this article.
Yet Play Meter did not begin as a video game magazine in the modern sense. It was something more specialized and, for historians, perhaps more valuable. It was a magazine written for the people whose livelihoods depended upon putting machines on location and convincing customers to keep dropping coins into them.
Ralph Lally and the First Issue
The idea belonged to Ralph C. Lally II, a New Orleans coin machine operator who was working for TAC Amusements when he began wondering what was happening elsewhere in the business. Play Meter’s own fifteenth-anniversary history recalled that Lally felt isolated inside his local market. He could see what happened around New Orleans, but he lacked an effective way of knowing how operators elsewhere were handling the same problems.
He began working on a trade magazine while still employed at TAC, unwilling at first to abandon the job supporting his wife and young daughter for an uncertain publishing venture. A later twentieth-anniversary account remembered much the same story. Lally worked his regular job and devoted his nights to planning a publication that could connect operators scattered across different cities and states.
The first issue arrived in December 1974.
Lally’s opening editorial made the intended audience unmistakable. Play Meter was a new trade publication for people involved with the coin-operated amusement machine business. Its purpose was not simply to announce products. Lally envisioned a magazine that could report current developments, investigate the industry’s past, evaluate its progress, and create communication between portions of the business that otherwise operated largely in their own circles.
That timing was important. The coin machine world of 1974 was not yet the arcade industry remembered from the early 1980s. Jukeboxes remained central to the business. Pinball was well established. Atari’s Pong had appeared only two years earlier, and commercial video games had not yet overwhelmed the older forms of coin-operated entertainment. Play Meter’s 1989 retrospective remembered its earliest issue as heavily focused on jukeboxes because video games were still a relatively small portion of the market.
In retrospect, the magazine could hardly have chosen a more consequential moment to begin watching the business.
Watching Video Games Take Over
During the years that followed, Play Meter recorded the transformation of coin-operated amusement almost as it happened. Video games moved from novelty machines competing for floor space with pinball tables and jukeboxes into one of the dominant forms of commercial entertainment in the United States.
That makes the magazine particularly useful to historians. Modern retrospectives often begin with the games that survived in cultural memory. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Asteroids, Defender, Centipede, and Galaga appear obvious today because their reputations are already established. A trade magazine written at the time did not have that advantage. Its writers had to judge machines while they were new, when nobody yet knew which cabinets would become classics and which would disappear after a few disappointing months.
Roger C. Sharpe became an important part of that developing critical voice. His reviewing work for Play Meter began in 1976 and evolved into the magazine’s long-running Critic’s Corner. Looking back in 1989, Sharpe remembered an industry in which operators, engineers, salespeople, designers, distributors, and critics were all trying to determine which machines deserved space in arcades. He also remembered how quickly video games moved from an uncertain new form of entertainment into the center of public attention.
The magazine’s criticism was not aimed primarily at helping a teenager decide where to spend a quarter. An operator might spend thousands of dollars purchasing a cabinet. A bad game could occupy valuable floor space while failing to earn enough money to justify its cost. Reviews therefore existed inside a commercial environment where game design, reliability, player appeal, purchase price, maintenance, and weekly collections could all matter.
That operator-centered perspective separated Play Meter from much of the gaming press that followed it.
The Equipment Poll and the Business of a Hit Game
One of Play Meter’s most important contributions arrived in 1979.
The magazine began regularly polling operators about the performance of machines in the field. Its tenth-anniversary retrospective remembered the decision as risky because manufacturers whose games performed badly might resent unfavorable rankings and withdraw advertising. Play Meter moved forward anyway. Early results showed Bally’s Playboy leading the pinball field while Midway’s Space Invaders dominated the video game rankings.
The Equipment Poll eventually became far more sophisticated than a simple popularity list.
In 1981, Play Meter revised the system around average weekly gross collections. Editorial director David Pierson argued that operators needed information based on what machines were actually earning rather than merely how many cabinets had been manufactured or how one title ranked against others of the same type. The magazine said its operator polling base had grown beyond 500 respondents, giving it a substantial body of real-world business information from arcades and routes around the country.
For historians, those polls preserve something that retrospective rankings cannot.
They show how games performed when they were commercially alive.
A cabinet might later develop a devoted collector following while having disappointed operators when new. Another machine might be largely forgotten today despite producing excellent weekly collections in its own period. The polls allow researchers to look past modern nostalgia and ask the question that mattered to an operator standing in an arcade in 1981: Which machine was actually bringing money through the door?
That commercial focus was at the heart of Play Meter. Even when Ralph Lally discussed creativity, he did so from the perspective of an industry whose products had to survive in locations. In 1979 he criticized excessive dependence on licensed games and called for greater innovation, while acknowledging that licensing had also helped bring important Japanese games such as Space Invaders into the American market.
The Arcade Boom Changes the Magazine
As video games exploded into mainstream culture, Play Meter expanded with them.
The magazine’s twentieth-anniversary history recalled that its subscriber list climbed to nearly 14,000 during the early 1980s. The amount of industry news became so great that Play Meter began publishing twice each month. Waiting an entire month between issues, the editors concluded, was simply too slow for a business moving at the pace of the arcade boom.
The size of the operation grew as well. A 1994 retrospective reported that Play Meter employed 22 people at the height of the video game boom. The magazine’s workplace evolved alongside publishing technology. Manual typewriters gave way to electric machines in 1978, personal computers arrived in 1986, and Macintosh equipment followed in 1994. The publication moved into a three-story New Orleans building constructed for it in 1982.
Its pages expanded beyond straightforward news.
There were equipment surveys, interviews, buyer’s guides, reviews, technical columns, management advice, tax discussions, reports from trade shows, company profiles, industry arguments, and State of the Industry surveys. Frank’s Cranks, written by operator and technician Frank Seninsky, became another particularly valuable window into how machines were judged by professionals.
Seninsky later remembered insisting that his opinions about games remain intact when he agreed to write for Play Meter. He said Ralph Lally, David Pierson, and managing editor Ray Tilley accepted that condition. By the middle of 1981, Seninsky had begun rating games on a one-to-ten scale, and manufacturers increasingly supplied prototypes for evaluation.
This was game criticism with consequences. Manufacturers were reading. Operators were reading. Purchasing decisions could follow.
Taking the Magazine Beyond the Printed Page
Ralph Lally did not limit his ambitions to publishing.
By the end of the 1970s he believed the amusement business needed a major spring gathering focused on operators and education. In March 1980, Play Meter launched the Amusement Operators Expo in New Orleans.
The first AOE offered 24 seminars on subjects including arcade management, purchasing equipment, negotiating location commissions, accounting, marketing, depreciation, technical troubleshooting, and the economics of running coin machines. Lally argued that the industry’s expertise needed to be collected and shared rather than remaining scattered among individual companies and operators.
The show became part classroom, part marketplace, and part forum.
One feature was a manufacturers’ firing line in which operators could question industry representatives directly. Play Meter’s twentieth-anniversary retrospective remembered rooms full of operators challenging manufacturers about the machines and business practices affecting their livelihoods. The same retrospective credited the show’s timing as part of its success. Spring had become increasingly important to game buyers, and Lally believed an operator-oriented trade show belonged there.
The AOE ultimately became part of a larger lineage of amusement trade shows, but its creation demonstrated that Play Meter had grown beyond documenting the industry. For a period, it helped create the places where that industry met.
From Operators to Players
Although Play Meter was fundamentally an industry publication, players increasingly entered its pages too.
In July 1986, the magazine introduced Players’ Picks, a column associated with Steve Harris and the U.S. National Video Game Team. The accompanying issue described the team as being involved in tournament promotion, game development, sponsorship, and the new monthly feature.
The column gave skilled players a place to discuss what made games appealing from the other side of the cabinet. An August 1986 installment asked what made a good game successful and examined elements such as themes, originality, play mechanics, and player response.
That combination is one reason Play Meter remains unusually valuable.
An advertisement might show how a manufacturer wanted a machine presented. A reviewer might evaluate its design. The Equipment Poll might reveal how much it earned. A technical writer might describe problems operators encountered. A player column might explain why customers liked or disliked it.
Few surviving sources allow a historian to examine so many sides of the same arcade machine within the same publication.
The Crash and the Death of Ralph Lally
The boom could not continue forever.
By the middle of the 1980s, the American arcade industry had entered a difficult period. The flood of machines, changing consumer habits, poor-performing products, competition from home systems, and broader problems throughout the coin-operated business put pressure on operators and manufacturers alike. Play Meter, which had expanded during the boom, now had to document the contraction.
Then the magazine suffered a personal catastrophe.
On December 10, 1984, Ralph Lally was killed in an automobile accident in New Orleans. He was only 38 years old and had just completed work on Play Meter’s tenth-anniversary edition. Contemporary trade publication Cash Box described Play Meter as one of the amusement industry’s leading trade publications under his leadership.
The timing gave the tragedy an almost unbearable quality. Lally had spent the anniversary issue looking backward across the magazine’s first decade while also thinking about its future.
His wife, Carol P. Lally, suddenly inherited that future.
Within months, she was simultaneously managing the magazine and preparing the sixth Amusement Operators Expo. Writing in March 1985, Carol described being thrust into the daily business following her husband’s death. Her editorial also captured the condition of the larger amusement business. After what she called a two-year winter, she saw signs that manufacturers, distributors, and operators were beginning to work together again.
Play Meter survived.
Carol Lally and a Changing Amusement Industry
Carol Lally ultimately led the publication for more than three decades.
During that time, the business Play Meter covered changed repeatedly. The traditional arcade boom faded. Redemption equipment became increasingly important. Family entertainment centers expanded. Pinball survived cycles of decline and revival. Fighting games, driving games, rhythm games, light-gun shooters, networked amusement, and new generations of redemption machines all competed for the attention of operators.
The magazine changed with them rather than becoming permanently fixed in the era of Pac-Man.
By 1986 its pages included Frank’s Cranks, Critic’s Corner, the Equipment Poll, Players’ Picks, industry news, tax advice, product coverage, and international reporting. Decades later, the masthead still carried Ralph C. Lally II as founder while Carol P. Lally remained publisher, and another generation of Lally family involvement appeared in the business.
The magazine’s longevity eventually became part of its importance. It had not simply reported the golden age of arcade games. It had lived long enough to see what happened afterward.
Katrina and the Fight to Keep Publishing
One of Play Meter’s greatest challenges came not from changing technology or falling arcade revenue, but from Hurricane Katrina.
The magazine was based in New Orleans, and the disaster of August 2005 struck the city that had been its home from the beginning. Later accounts from the publication stated that staff members worked remotely from five states after Katrina and that Play Meter continued issuing the magazine despite the disruption. The 2018 announcement of Carol Lally’s retirement specifically pointed to Katrina as one of the enormous obstacles the publication had survived during its history.
For a publication so closely tied to New Orleans, simply continuing mattered.
The story also illustrates how much Play Meter had become an institution rather than merely a magazine title. Ralph Lally’s original goal in 1974 had been communication across a scattered industry. Thirty-one years later, the staff themselves were scattered, yet they continued producing the publication.
The Last Issue
By the 2010s, the media environment surrounding video games and coin-operated entertainment looked nothing like the one Ralph Lally had entered in 1974.
News that once required a trade publication could circulate instantly. Manufacturers operated websites and social media accounts. Operators discussed equipment online. Videos could demonstrate a new machine before many potential buyers ever encountered one in person. Print advertising and subscription economics had changed across the publishing industry.
Still, Play Meter continued.
Then, in 2018, Carol Lally announced her retirement.
The June 2018 edition became the magazine’s last issue, ending a run of approximately forty-four and a half years. RePlay reported that publication had ceased following the June issue and connected the decision directly with Lally’s retirement. The closing announcement credited the magazine with nearly 600 issues across its history and remembered its Equipment Poll, State of the Industry surveys, game reviews, buyer’s guides, awards, trade show activity, and coverage of family entertainment centers.
The publication that began when Pong was still a recent invention survived long enough to report on an arcade business operating in the age of smartphones, digital distribution, online gaming, esports, and virtual reality.
Why Play Meter Matters to Video Game History
The importance of Play Meter extends far beyond the history of one magazine.
The Strong National Museum of Play considers nearly complete runs of Play Meter and RePlay vital sources for understanding the evolution of the coin-operated game business after the mid-1970s. Those magazines preserve not only which games were manufactured, but how companies marketed them, how operators and players received them, and what concerns occupied the industry at different moments.
That distinction matters.
Video game history can easily become a history of famous designers and famous games. Trade magazines reveal the machinery underneath that story. Somebody had to manufacture the cabinets, sell them to distributors, convince operators to purchase them, repair them when they broke, negotiate their placement, determine pricing, advertise them, and decide when an old machine had stopped earning enough money to remain on the floor.
Play Meter documented that world.
Its Equipment Polls captured the economics of individual machines. Its advertisements preserved how manufacturers sold their products to business owners. Its reviews recorded contemporary judgments before reputations hardened into nostalgia. Its columns preserved the voices of operators, technicians, critics, executives, and players. Its trade show coverage followed an industry constantly trying to guess what customers would want next.
For more than four decades, the magazine measured the arcade business while that business was still moving.
Ralph Lally began Play Meter because he wanted operators to know what was happening beyond their own routes and cities. He could not have known that generations later the same pages would give historians something even larger: a running record of an entertainment industry learning, almost issue by issue, what a video game could become.
Sources & Further Reading
International Arcade Museum. “Play Meter eLibrary, 1974–2018.” International Arcade Museum Library. https://elibrary.arcade-museum.com/Play-Meter
Play Meter. Vol. 1, no. 1. December 1974. International Arcade Museum eLibrary. https://elibrary.arcade-museum.com/magazines/pm/PlayMeter-1974-12/PlayMeter-1974-12-001.pdf
Lally, Ralph C. II. “From the Editor.” Play Meter 1, no. 1 (December 1974): 2–3. International Arcade Museum eLibrary. https://elibrary.arcade-museum.com/Play-Meter/1974-December/2
Sharpe, Roger C. “New Pins in Review.” Play Meter 2, no. 7 (July 1976): 28, 48, 54. International Arcade Museum eLibrary. https://elibrary.arcade-museum.com/Play-Meter
“Play Meter Equipment Poll.” Play Meter, July 15, 1979. International Arcade Museum eLibrary. https://elibrary.arcade-museum.com/magazines/pm/PlayMeter-1979-07-15/PlayMeter-1979-07-15-055.pdf
Play Meter. “Equipment Poll.” October 15, 1980. International Arcade Museum eLibrary. https://elibrary.arcade-museum.com/magazines/pm/PlayMeter-1980-10-15/PlayMeter-1980-10-15-023.pdf
“Play Meter Revamps Survey to Track Industry Trends.” Play Meter, August 15, 1981. International Arcade Museum eLibrary. https://elibrary.arcade-museum.com/Play-Meter/1981-August-15/15
Play Meter. June 1, 1982. International Arcade Museum eLibrary. https://elibrary.arcade-museum.com/magazines/pm/PlayMeter-1982-06-01/PlayMeter-1982-06-01-003.pdf
Play Meter. Tenth-anniversary retrospective. December 31, 1984. International Arcade Museum eLibrary. https://elibrary.arcade-museum.com/Play-Meter/1984-December-31/29
“Ralph Lally Dies in Auto Accident.” Cash Box, December 22, 1984. World Radio History. https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Music/Cash-Box/80s/1984/CB-1984-12-22.pdf
Play Meter. Industry retrospective. December 31, 1985. International Arcade Museum eLibrary. https://elibrary.arcade-museum.com/magazines/pm/PlayMeter-1985-12-31/PlayMeter-1985-12-31-020.pdf
Play Meter. Fifteenth-anniversary retrospective. December 1989. International Arcade Museum eLibrary. https://elibrary.arcade-museum.com/magazines/pm/PlayMeter-1989-12/PlayMeter-1989-12-038.pdf
Sharpe, Roger C. Fifteenth-anniversary retrospective. Play Meter, December 1989. International Arcade Museum eLibrary. https://elibrary.arcade-museum.com/magazines/pm/PlayMeter-1989-12/PlayMeter-1989-12-087.pdf
Seninsky, Frank. “The Evolution of ‘Frank the Crank.’” Play Meter, December 1989. International Arcade Museum eLibrary. https://elibrary.arcade-museum.com/Play-Meter/1989-December/114
Seninsky, Frank. “The Evolution of ‘Frank the Crank,’” continuation. Play Meter, December 1989. International Arcade Museum eLibrary. https://elibrary.arcade-museum.com/Play-Meter/1989-December/116
Cognevich, Valerie. “A Very Special Year.” Play Meter, January 1994. International Arcade Museum eLibrary. https://elibrary.arcade-museum.com/Play-Meter/1994-January/10
“We’re Not Getting Older, We’re Getting Better.” Play Meter 20, no. 13 (December 1994). International Arcade Museum eLibrary. https://elibrary.arcade-museum.com/Play-Meter/1994-December/20
“Twelve Things You Never Knew About Play Meter.” Play Meter, December 1994, 120. International Arcade Museum eLibrary. https://elibrary.arcade-museum.com/magazines/pm/PlayMeter-1994-12/PlayMeter-1994-12-122.pdf
Play Meter. April 2013. Vol. 39, no. 4. Retro CDN. https://retrocdn.net/images/f/f9/Play_Meter_-_Volume_39%2C_Number_4_April_2013.pdf
“40 Years of Play Meter.” Play Meter 40, no. 12 (December 2014): 28–44. International Arcade Museum eLibrary. https://elibrary.arcade-museum.com/Play-Meter
Play Meter. Bonnie Theard retirement material. August 2016. International Arcade Museum eLibrary. https://elibrary.arcade-museum.com/magazines/pm/PlayMeter-2016-08/PlayMeter-2016-08-029.pdf
Play Meter. Vol. 44, no. 6. June 2018. Final issue. International Arcade Museum eLibrary. https://elibrary.arcade-museum.com/magazines/pm/PlayMeter-2018-06/PlayMeter-2018-06-009.pdf
Video Game History Foundation Library. “Play Meter Buyers’ Mart No. 7.” ca. October 1983. https://library.gamehistory.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/17885
ISSN International Centre. “Play Meter.” ISSN 1529-8736. ISSN Portal. https://portal.issn.org/resource/ISSN/1529-8736
Saucier, Jeremy. “Finding Video Game History in the Archives.” The Strong National Museum of Play. January 3, 2013. https://www.museumofplay.org/blog/finding-video-game-history-in-the-archives/
Saucier, Jeremy. “Coin-Op Century: A Brief History of the American Arcade.” The Strong National Museum of Play. May 9, 2013. https://www.museumofplay.org/blog/coin-op-century-a-brief-history-of-the-american-arcade/
Audureau, William. “Jeux vidéo: cachez ces notes que je ne saurais voir.” Le Monde, February 18, 2015. https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2015/02/18/faut-il-noter-les-jeux-video_4577841_4408996.html
Video Game History Foundation. “Donate Video Game Magazines.” Video Game History Foundation. https://gamehistory.org/donate-video-game-magazines/
Minter, Casey. “Play Meter Shuts Down.” RePlay Magazine, August 8, 2018. https://www.replaymag.com/play-meter-shuts-down/
Arcade Heroes. “Play Meter Magazine Publisher Retires; Final Issue Was June 2018.” August 8, 2018. https://arcadeheroes.com/2018/08/08/play-meter-magazine-publisher-retires/
The Strong National Museum of Play. “The Strong’s Comprehensive Collection Chronicles More than a Century of Coin-Operated Games.” June 30, 2022. https://www.museumofplay.org/blog/the-strongs-comprehensive-collection-chronicles-more-than-a-century-of-coin-operated-games/
The Strong National Museum of Play. “Carol Kantor: The Video Game Industry’s First Market Researcher.” https://www.museumofplay.org/blog/carol-kantor-the-video-game-industrys-first-market-researcher/
The Strong National Museum of Play. “Tournaments, Contests, and International Scoreboards: A Prehistory of Esports in the 1980s Arcade.” https://www.museumofplay.org/blog/tournaments-contests-and-international-scoreboards-a-prehistory-of-esports-in-the-1980s-arcade/
Retromags. “Play Meter.” Retromags Magazine Database. https://www.retromags.com/magazines/usa/play-meter/