When I was younger there were amusement arcades with videogames, pool halls, video poker machines etc. in nearly every town in Ireland and there were a plethora of them in the city centre of Dublin. Nowadays they seem to have all but died out. The small local ones in my town died out sometime in the late 1990s and although there are a couple in the city centre they’re not as vibrant as they once were and some have arcade games that were first released in the 1990s, e.g. Sega Rally et al. There are still ones in seaside resort towns too. I don’t know how common “the musies” are/were in the UK or the US but I’m wondering why they died out. Was competition from home consoles just too much? Are big success arcade machines no longer manufactured? Sega Rally and Daytona Racing both seemed to be ubiquitous in arcades here and we pumped £££ into them like it was going out of style.
Apart from the bigger, brighter ones incorporated into bowling alleys and other leisure facilities (some of which are still extant) the ones here always had a fairly seedy reputation. Ne’erdowells sitting around smoking all day etc. The last time I was in the US we went to a Dave & Busterswhich is similar to some of the larger amusement place here but there again the videogames were fairly old hat. A recentish iteration of House of the Dead is the main one I can recall.
Although home systems made a great stab at it I’ve never enjoyed games like Street Fighter II as much as I did in the smoky amusement arcades of my youth.
There USED to be several large arcades near the UT campus, but they all shut down about a decade ago. Not surprisingly, because kids can play better games at home or in their dorms.
Chuck E. Cheese and Dave & Busters are about all that’s left here in Austin.
I was suprised to see one still in the mall ~4 miles west of here. It’s in a little room on the top floor between one of the anchor stores and the wing that was added for the movie theater. It had been in a much larger room just off the food court, next to McDonald’s.
With the exception of primary purpose, no. By that I mean things like bowling alleys, movie theatres and sports bars that have a handful of games. I don’t know of any dedicated arcade in my area. The closest one to my previous home suffocated and died. In Boston there’s Gillian’s, which is sort of like D & B.
There’s one in the basement of the student union, but it’s mostly just the pool tables and bowling lanes that see any action any more. There’s hardly ever anyone at any of the machines.
I used to put a few dollars a week into the Gauntlet Legends machine (along with usually 1-3 others at a time), but then they upgraded it to a Gauntlet Dark Legacy machine, that didn’t have the old characters saved on it, so all the folks who played it all left at once.
I imagine there might be a few quid to be made opening one that specifically appeals to nostalgia, get the most popular machines from the 1970s to the 1990s together in the one place, I really wouldn’t be that surprised if some such places already exist though I’ve not heard of any. Or perhaps emulators sate everyone’s desire?
We used to get old arcade machines donated to our church. We let the kids play for free. And we still wound up getting rid of them because nobody was using them.
(We now have a gaming station made up of last gen consoles.)
I haven’t seen a standalone video arcade in over 10 years. The last one I remember was in a mall, and the mall closed. The closest thing we have are the “Family Fun Centers”, which have an arcade mixed in with miniature golf and go-carts. Boomers and Mulligans are two big ones in Southern California. The arcades mostly consist of air hockey tables, skeeball, various ticket redemption games, and a few huge console-type games that would be unwieldy at home (stuff like Dance Dance Revolution or racing games where you sit on a specialized seat that tilts). There’s also a kinda rundown one on the Redondo Beach pier that has a Tilt-a-Whirl ride next to a few retro consoles (Space Invaders, Ms. Pac-Man) that always get a few quarters from me.