Why did 80’s arcade machines mostly only allow 3 character names on the high score leader boards?

Question

I’ve played quite a few arcade games recently and there seems to be a limit on how many characters can be entered on to the leader board this is usually limited to 3 characters, why is this?

In: Technology

Answer 1

Every character takes up one character’s worth of space in memory. Memory was expensive back in the day, so people were actively looking for ways to save a byte everywhere they could. A lost art of sorts.