I was one of the people that was a kid when arcades first became a thing and was around when the saw their rise and downfall over the span of about 15 years. In the early 80's, arcades were incredible and very profitable for the owners as well. These institutions were in just about every shopping mall and Aladdin's Castle was the one I remember the most.
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I have heard stories that there is one of these that still remains but I don't know for sure where it is. The used to be everywhere though and for gaming fans, this was where you wanted to go most of all. A vast majority of the arcades were dark places so that you could see the screen better, and they didn't sell anything other than the games themselves. Most of them wouldn't even allow you to have food or drinks near the machines but for some reason, smoking inside was ok.... it was a different time back then.
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These standalone arcades were very popular and mostly they would just be filled with teenagers and I wouldn't really call them family-friendly. This was a place that you wanted to go without your parents and hang out with other kids. At first, the high scores were the most important thing and then a bit later when fighting games like Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat were released, these were the main attractions of these locations.
On the other side of things we had the wildly popular Showbiz and Chuck-E-Cheese pizza restaurants that also contained arcades. There are still a few of these remaining but they don't really have much to do with video games anymore, it is mostly just playgrounds and games where you win token to buy garbage toys. It was very different back in the day.
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Back in the 80's these places had a dining room with an robotic band that was actually really entertaining. This was the place that everyone had their birthday parties and while I don't remember a great deal about the quality of food, I would imagine it was just ok. Everyone went there for the arcade, the pizza was just an added bonus.
When home consoles began to get more and more powerful such as the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis, arcades started to die because although there certainly was a dramatic difference between the home versions of games and the arcade version we no longer felt as though it made much sense to spend quarters on a game that would could play endlessly at home for nothing.
Arcades slowly but surely started to disappear because these gigantic machines that were capable of playing only a single game were really expensive and therefore owners of arcades stopped buying them since the kids would just get the home version of whatever game had just come out. The only real incentive to go to an arcade other than just buy the game was because games were $30-$40 and not everyone had that kind of money to dole out on a game.
That's why I consider game rentals to actually be the final nail in the coffin for traditional arcades.
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For just a few dollars you could rent basically any game in existence for 2 or 3 nights, which was normally enough time to defeat a game or get sick of it. long RPG's might have been the only exception to this but if your objective was simply to do a single playthrough it would probably be cheaper to just rent the game than to buy it.
A few arcades still managed to hang on by a thread but when next generation systems became just as powerful as the arcade machines there was truly no reason to have an arcade anymore.
It's hard to imagine that the lifetime of arcades as a business was only booming for about 10 years and then POOF! they basically disappeared in the United States overnight. There are still a couple of them kicking around here and there but after you play a couple games of Donkey Kong to relive your youth, there really isn't much reason to be there anymore. I'm just happy that I was just the right age to experience it when they were all the rage.
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Stranger Things did a pretty great job showcasing what the arcade experience was like back then and if you missed that because you weren't born, I think you missed a great part of gaming history because there really hasn't been any experience like it once it died.
Its really bad thing that Arcade disappeared. 1 year ago I started playing Tekken and I found out that most of the pro players are using arcade-stick. I wanted to buy one but then I quickly realized that its harder than playing on gamepad, and most of the pro's are experienced in using it because they were playing in those golden times where Arcade was still alive. I started looking for a place in Poland, where I can try playing on Arcade without buying an Arcade-stick, but I couldn't find such a place. At the end I gave up on buying the stick, but I would love to try games like Tekken or Street Fighter on Arcade. I think thats a real gaming history and I'm sad I couldn't experience it, maybe some day I'm gonna really buy arcade-stick to atleast imitate the feeling a bit. I know its not the same, but I can't stop thinking of it. Even after I stopped playing fighter games, I'm so curious about the feeling. Lets hope Elon Mask will make a time-travel machine so we can all experience it again haha :D
There's an entire arcade museum in Kraków where pay for an one-hour ticket and can play all kinds of arcades without worrying about the coins.
Oh shit really? I live in Kraków. Do u have some details on it? Like a name of it or something? If yes then please tell me.
Their address is Centralna 41a, so Nowa Huta. I don't know if I'm allowed to paste their webpage link here, so just type in "arcade museum cracow" in your favourite search engine.
Mind you, I've never visited it so I can't really recommend it, but the place looks quite promising.
Thanks for the info man! Perfect. I have like 10 minutes max to walk there. Gonna check it out!
wow! One more reason to head over to Poland sometime in the near future!
A friend of mine paid for a joystick for Street Fighter and I agree with you, it really changed the game at made it much more difficult for me. This was something that was irritating about arcades vs home systems at the time in the 80's. Unless you went out of your way to get a joystick, you weren't really going to be any good at the arcade version of the game because it is a very different experience and not just with the stick, but button placement and size as well.
The age where they started making those home controller that would automatically press the button for you as fast as it could possibly be done was a pretty sneaky trick as well.
Yea thats exactly what I've heared before about Arcade sticks.
But I didn't know about the trick with automatic button press. Interesting.
That's right, economically sustaining these machines was quite complex, not only because they were expensive and only had a single game, their maintenance also had to be rigorous and exhaustive, sometimes it was too expensive and they only replaced them with another machine, leaving aside the game machine that was broken. I still remember the first time I went to one of these arcades, it was the best. Nowadays there are Arcades capable of emulating thousands of games, which saves on costs, plus its components are a computer or equal to a computer. That era was golden, I wish I had been born a little earlier to enjoy these machines more.
those thousands of games in one cabinets are ok for the most part, sometimes the buttons are not where I would like them to be but they are a fantastic addition to anyone's playroom that is for sure. Someone was talking about how they have digital pinball tables that can emulate tons of games as well. I wonder what that is like?
The arcade experience of the 80's cant really be brought back. Technology has moved on too much and people just wouldn't be interested. I think that even I would lose interest really quickly even though I have very fond memories of the experience.
I never got to visit a real arcade. Not due to being too young but there just weren't any around since I grew up in a really small town. I have been to places where they would have a few games around though and it was awesome. Time Crisis ftw.
I want to say that Time Crisis was kind of towards the end of the arcade life-cycle. The only way that they could keep people interested in arcades was to create something that was either impossible or at the minimum improbably for people to recreate at home. The same was done with racing games where the chair looked at felt like the interior of a car.
Showbiz pizza! oh wow, that's a blast from the past. I loved those places as well and all the kids, well, at least the boys would have their birthday parties there.
I think my favorite truly old school arcade games would probably be Joust, Pengo, and Dig Dug. As games evolved a bit and fighting games became the main feature I remember how amazing Mortal Kombat was, that would attract a crowd at my local mall.
We have an arcade of sorts here in Vietnam but the games are all shooters with the guns for controllers - these games are extremely dated too and not many people actually play them.
Mortal Kombat was great, but how about MK2? That really impressed the masses and was likely one of the last games that still made money at arcades.
Oh for sure. I was friends with an ultra-nerd in high school and while I went off to college to party and score chicks he was honing his arcade skills. He would amaze the other nerds at the arcade when he had mastered playing with almost every character and could remember all of their rather complicated fatalities as well. While it was expensive for everyone else in the arcade I don't think I ever saw anyone defeat him so he would play for hours on 50 cents.
I was terrible at the fatalities. Imagine how much money they made selling those guide books for reference. The internet was still in its early stages back then so most people probably ended up buying one. Pretty brilliant tactics on their part to make this a part of the game.
I'm not old enough to have been around during the "golden age" but I did go see a pinball museum a few years ago and they had everything from something really old that was entirely mechanical including the scoreboard all the way up to a machine that was completely digital including the play area and the ball. The latter was pretty amazing because there was an intricate series of sensors inside the machine that would vibrate according to what was going on in play. I would love to own one of those things because apparently you can purchase about any pinball machine that has ever existed and play it on this one machine. I am sure they cost many thousands of dollars though.
I remember reading about such a place in NYC. There are likely more. I love pinball as well and would really like to travel to these sorts of places. That's my idea of some amazing nerd tourism.
I remember Aladdin's castle in my town. It was the cleanest one in town but I had an hour ride, both ways. I rarely ever got to go except Saturdays. The new games are just not that complex and I still love the old machines so much I collect them. I'm not good at fixing them but I still try. The emulations are fun but they will be as fun as going to an actual arcade.
You collect actual stand-up arcade games? wow man, that is really cool. Would love to see some pics of your collection.
I try to repair this one but I didn't have enough knowledge about what to do so I modded it multiple times.
dude, that's awesome! one of the best arcade experiences of all time right there.