When I was a child. there were arcade games in Pizza shops and movie rental places around where I lived. If I didn’t mind traveling, I could find a huge arcade full of arcade games and pinball games. Now I don’t know of and arcades and very few stores have arcade games or pinball games. What caused this industry to die off so quickily? Are there still arcades, but I don’t know where to find them?
There’s still many of them here, usually at seaside resorts, although not exclusively.
My local town centre has an arcade and it’s nowhere near the sea.
Perhaps though with the advent of more powerful home computers, and more sophisticated games, arcade machines don’t have quite the attraction of the past.
Where do you live?
'Round here there are a few nickel arcades, and a Dave & Buster’s, and over in Santa Cruz there’s one attached to the boardwalk.
I’d say most arcades are now attached to something else, and might not be advertized.
The home console gaming experience killed them off. For a time, in the early nineties, they were still ahead, but the power of console games quickly eclipsed the power of arcade machines to the point where the new Virtua Fighter or Mortal Kombat looked just as good, if not better, on your home system. At one point, the most popular arcade games were even literally running off of Playstations (at least the chipset) inside their cabinets.
At least that’s why people stopped going. I’m sure there are other socioeconomic reasons that they vanished.
You can still find them, a couple of malls around here have them. While I agree that home games have really hurt the industry, so has the high price of each game. Just a regular game now costs $3000+, any of the sit down types cost a lot more then that. It’s hard to get people in to play the games to recoup the costs.
Well what about pinball games?
This is a seperate topic. Pinball games are addictive, yet comparitavely boring to most people.
Arcades are actually still alive and well. The machines are pricey but most of not all basic machines can be “rekitted” to a new or different game for significantly less than the cost of a whole new machine.
Arcades did take a hell of a blow from cheaper high quality home systems but regular arcades still can and do serve as social magnets and competitive outlets for many. Another huge hit has been a growing hesitancy to let kids wander unsupervised. In my arcade days I used to walk alone at age 10-11 about 1.5 miles to a shopping center with an arcade to play here and there. Many people would worry about doing so nowadays.
Many arcades nowadays focus more on experiences the home systems cannot easily replicate like the sit down driving games like Sega’s Daytona, bigscreen shooters with simulated recoil on games like Time Crisis, or head to head separate view gaming like Steel Talons, T-Mek, Cyberball, or others. Don’t even get me started on the Dance Dance Revolution, drum simulators, Top skater,
The one thing home systems cannot easily replicate is redemption games. Skee-ball, claw games, and other ticket dispensing skill games (aka gambling for children) are huge draws in most arcades of any size.
I know my examples are dated, its been a few years, but it gives you an idea of things arcade machines can do well that home systems are less good at.
I was going to say this. Unless it’s attached to someplace attractive to parents, kids won’t go there anymore, because they’re never that far from their parents anymore.