Ye Olde Arcade

BLUE WIZARD Has Joined the Game.

And with those words my whole life changed. I spent my entire childhood and most of my teenager years in various arcades (oh Wizard's Castle how I miss thee). It's really too bad that no such places exist anymore. The dingy hole in the wall dark place with all the sounds andf bells and flashing lights. Man kids nowadays will never ever understand just what a utopia those places were. :(

Speaking as an Englishman, he has this spot on, and I've only read the first page. I'll probably come back to post more once I actually read it :)

Man, I grew up in th arcade. There were very few thrills like getting $10 and going out to get a whole roll of quarters. I got caught skipping out by my dad at the arcade, after which I was grounded and told videogames would get me nowhere in life. I always bug my mom about that now. I committed my first petty crime in an arcade by drilling a hole in a quarter and attaching it to a piece of thread to rack up credits. If it got caught or someone came around we just yanked the thread. That system worked great until some moron used 50lb fishing line. Ahhhh, the arcade.

It is sad and depressing to me how shitty the arcade scene is now. It's dead. Gone. It used to be so lively, full of competition and "talk". I used to live in arcades. Now when I go, all I see are families playing that stupid ass 2 Fast 2 Furious racing game, or Area 51.

All of the people I met and grew up with in the arcades now just play XBOX Live. Halo... Madden... and it's just not the same. Maybe it's just Dallas. I need to get out of here.

The reason for arcade failure is easy to figure out: In the 80s they represented the latest in gaming technology and they asked for 25 cents per play (US, of course). Later the home machines started catching up, technology-wise. What did the arcades do? Since they were losing business they decided it was necessary to double the price on everything. So you have less-impressive games costing twice as much. It doesn't take heavy analysis to see why this would not attract customers.

Arcades will succeed again when people see the value in visiting them. The easiest way to do this is to lower the price per play. This might require lowering the cost of the machines themselves, or it might mean going out and buying a bunch of used machines (there is at least one successful nickel arcade in the Dallas area).

Other ways to improve value are to focus on places where home systems fail. Multiplayer, for example. Stocking more multiplayer games, maintaining high score leaderboards, or offering free WiFi are all ways to motivate people to come to your establishment for multiplayer fun. There are plenty of other ways to improve value too. I think more arcades should consider combining their business model with other successful ones, like game shops, coffee shops, bookstores... anywhere potential game players like to loiter.

The point is, all the arcades that tried to stay the same as they were in the 80s have pretty much died off. The ones making money now are the huge conglomerate mini-amusement parks who use electronic cards to mask the $0.75 price tag for playing Area 51 (I went to a place the other day that was charging $075 for SKI BALL). Yeah that's one way to make money, but I think we all agree those places are awful. Spare me.

I have more fun playing old arcade games than most modern computer and console games.

I should write a guide to how you get started in arcade collecting. It's cheap compared to other forms of gaming, cheap and simple, after you have some basic skills in maintenance and repair and have lugged a huge heavy arcade cabinet up the stairs.

I was lucky and grew up in Chicago during the Midway boom. Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam, and Killer Instinct first! RIP North Pier. :(

man I remember spending soo much money after high-school at the local Putt-Putt Golf & Arcade. Street Fighter 2 & its various versions, Mortal Kombat 1 & 2, Killer Instinct ate soo much of my money! :P

That place closed up quite a few years ago.. I don't think I've seen on in the DC area since that place closed up.

I've always been a big fan of playing both Player 1 and 2 of the gun games.

Dual Pistol Style....

Never seen anyone else do it thou.. wonder why.. its so much more fun, than 1 Player...

What I miss is the good old Pizza Hut restaraunts with their dank, dark red environments and two or three arcade machines, usually Ms. Pac-Man and one or two others. Today Pizza Huts are almost exclusively delivery/carry-out affairs and the ones that do remain tend to not have any arcade machines, jukeboxen, etc.

Good Stuff Remo, love the *type* of material you dig up. Makes me all whispy eyed about gaming again.

That said, sometimes I wonder if the arrival of Fighters both brought back to life and killed the arcade industry all at once. The only reason I have for saying this is how a trip to the local Fun & Games and Alladin's Castle suddenly became a competitive venture. While this was the best change ever if you were hardcore about Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat, but once you fell out of that a quick enjoyable game at the arcade just wasn't possible without being "owned". I don't think your casual player wants to face off against someone who is going to "own" them, so the market dwindled and now we go to arcades to play on hardware that we could never play on at home. (DDR machines, Ferrari simulator, and in Japan LAN'd touchscreen rpgs).

At the same time, Arcades were pretty much sucking before that genre came out and made them the place to be again. *shrug*

I never looked at arcade games as actual games, more of flashy gimic machines designed to take my money as quickly as possible.

My response got a little long so I turned it into a blog post: http://www.coolpowers.com/blog/?p=1121

The writer's name is actually Spanner, by the looks of it.

I used to love going to the seaside and playing in the arcades (never used to have them near where I lived). I remember my first go of Op Wolf, with the machine gun, fondly :)

about the only thing close to an arcade is a lan center, but those places are filled w/12yr olds and its just not fun to pay to play on a pc, when i can play the same game on my own pc and get the same enjoyment out of it

Reminds a bit of the arcade scene in Australia as well. In Melbourne you had/have the brightly lit family friendly and expensive arcades like Timezone on the main streets, but if you went around the corner you found the dark smokey dubious but nice and cheap establishments.

Spent a lot of free university class time in them in the late 90s. You had to be careful not to go right down the back though, where the extremely well dressed gentleman seemed to be conducting a lot of business involving various underlings shuttling back and forth. For some reason a friend of mine, but never myself, would often get asked if he wanted some 'go'.

I had to keep my mouth shut once when I saw a friend of mine who was a cop doing undercover drug work hanging around the area.

Man you have definitely shattered the Shack paradigm. Here on one hand we have Maarten who is scared to post Adventure game news because it strays from the FPS roots, and on the other we have Remo with an ARCADE NOSTALGIA post.

Keep it up, I'm pro-diversification! That said, I hope the kickbacks you're getting from escapistmagazine.com won't prevent you from posting articles from other sources. Try some Gamasutra stuff!

Aaah, I remember the arcade at the point in Milton Keynes. What a dingy shithole. What great games