quarter by quarter, $6 billion got fed into video game slots last year. that's double what americans spent to go to the movies. >> people flock to them, because the arcade game could afford expensive hardware at the time. and the hardware had enough power to do things we'd never seen before. >> there was essentially an arcade in every mall or in every street corner. the lunch money was not safe if there was an arcade around. >> arcade games at the time were the first machine that we could really interact with. we could cause a world to do something. so we'd grab a joystick and move a character around or fire something at a spaceship. we've never had experience like that before. >> the popularity of these video games is nothing short of a social phenomenon. pac man is seemingly everywhere. retailers can't keep the home version stocked. one dealer describes the demand.