Attract-Mode Premise

Vignettes play automatically between stages, or while a cabinet waits for a coin. Nothing is controllable; characters simply act out a relationship, usually in a few seconds and using the same sprites the game already contains. Cost is close to zero and the payoff is characterisation, since a pursuer that is briefly pursued becomes a personality rather than a hazard. Attract sequences also demonstrated play to passers-by.

Namco's Pac-Man in 1980 inserted brief cartoons between mazes, in which a ghost chases and is then chased. Reason was partly commercial and partly humane, because a game with no ending needs punctuation, and a cabinet in a room full of competitors has to be watchable when nobody is playing. Character was also a deliberate strategy, aimed at an audience beyond the young men who played shooters.

Consequence was that fiction entered arcade games through the gaps rather than through the play, establishing a division of labour the medium has never fully resolved. Story arrived as something shown between the interactive parts, which is the direct ancestor of the cutscene and of every argument about cutscenes. Merchandising followed at once, since a character with a personality can leave the cabinet entirely.