It’s more than just Arcades, of course. The Cabinet arcade game as it was when we were kids (Born in 1974, used to while away time at Aladdin’s Castle as a kid myself) is essentially dead.
Others here have talked about how more and more of the games you do see are complex immersive things, that you sit in, or something of that nature.
When I was in Jr. High, the local Convenience store had arcade games. Most of them did, in fact.
I can’t remember the last time I saw one.
Sure they do. Now they’re Flash based.
When I was a kid, we didn’t HAVE electronic games. We had pinball, dammit, and we LIKED pinball. I remember going to an arcade and seeing PacMan for the first time. I couldn’t figure it out. I had tried playing Pong before, and that was fairly easy to understand, but not so easy to play. PacMan, though…whole different story. I was familiar, somewhat, of the notion of power ups, as pinball games usually had some way of increasing scores for a time or enabling special abilities. At any rate, I reached the age of majority before video games appeared in America.
I spent entirely too much time and money in various arcades during the 80s. This was made worse by the fact that we lived in Las Vegas during most of the 80s, and that city had quite a few 24 hour arcades, some stand alone, and some in casinos. Video games weren’t my only reason for living, but they were certainly a major factor. I had my favorite games, and games that I hated, and games that I would play if there were no other games available.
I have several classic video games for my various game consoles. Some are just a couple of games on each cart or disk, and some are anthologies. I think that THIS is part of what has driven so many arcades out of business in the US. I used to take ten or twenty bucks down to an arcade, and play for a night. Now I spend twenty bucks, and I can own half a dozen arcade games that I can play for as long as I own a working console. Another part of the demise of arcades is the browser games available online. A couple of hours ago, I was playing Bubble Town. This game has much better graphics and gameplay than the arcade games I used to play…and it’s free. I know of a few free online game sites, and they all offer excellent games that I would have paid good money to pay.
My tastes in games have changed, too. I still like the arcade types, but now I like the longer running games, such as Final Fantasy types, the ones that require playing over a period of time. I just don’t have the fast twitch reflexes any more. I’m probably not going to buy Fallout 3 because I hear that it’s realtime shooting, and I’m just not fast enough any more.
There’s a sort of “time-pause” feature in Fallout 3 called VATS that allows you to freeze time and take aim at specific parts of an enemy (head/limbs/torso/antenna/claw/etc).
On the lower difficulty levels the enemies don’t hurt you much anyway, so your reflex speed really isn’t going to be much of an issue, trust me.
Fallout 3 is one of the greatest computer games ever made (and has an outstanding story and unbelievable numbers of quests, as well as a very believable and distinctive game world) and I honestly believe you’re really missing out if you don’t experience it.
Yes, they’ve become internet cafes.
Well, if I see it at the right price, I’ll pick it up. I really hate to encourage realtime gameplay, though.
I really did (and still do) enjoy Fallout and Fallout 2, so if the same people did a lot of the stuff on 3, I’ll probably like it.
Preach it! I was a total junkie. Do you remember the game show that was on TV, Lynn, where they did something or other to advance and get a chance to play that ginormous pinball machine? The “pinball” IIRC was about the size of a basketball so you can imagine the scale of the rest.
And y’know, one thing pinball had that the others don’t: bump the machine to influence the ball but don’t “tilt.” These whippersnappers in here have probably never humped a game in their lives. I better not catch them on my lawn!
The first video game to reach us in the boonies was Space Invaders. Granted it wasn’t that great, but compared to those original Ataris it was 3D senssurround or something. At that time I wondered if there were collusion among video game authors, reserving the better games for the arcade.
ETA
It was the Magnificent Marble Machine.
Oh Lordy yes - I lived two blocks from Playland and spent far too much money there (mostly on Heavy Barrel).
I never bought a home console system; for me it was the combination of the increase in prices and the decrease in the sort of arcade console games I like to play that drove me away eventually. The arcades I see these days are all Sega fighting, FPS and racing games, none of which I enjoy. I’d rather play wireframe Battlezone than one of those beautifully-rendered fighting games that requires you to memorize a complex (and secret) sequence of buttons just to punch your foe in the face once.
On top of video consoles and cost, I’ll add “the venues”.
Many arcades were located in suburban shopping malls. As enclosed malls have grown less popular (at least in the United States), fewer people went to the arcades inside them. The arcades didn’t make the move to outdoor lifestyle centers, because of the high rents, and because the landlords didn’t want them; they weren’t in keeping with the upscale image such centers are trying to project.
Arcades were also often located in marginal, low-rent retail spaces in uurban downtowns. In the 1990s and 2000s, urban downtowns either experienced a renaissance that drove rents up and the arcades out, or continued decline that saw their customer base trickle away.
A previous poster mentioned Golden Tee in suburban strip-mall bars. Head to bars in rural areas, and it’s various hunting games like Big Buck Hunter that line the walls.
I’ve only seen about two or three Internet cafes in the US, ever. I thought they were phenomenon in developing nations, much like having to head to the post office to make a phone call or something like that.
They’re popular over here: you take your laptop there and use their WiFi. Or use one of their dedicated terminals.
I’ve never been much of a TV watcher, and I don’t remember that game show. And I remember bumping (and tilting) pinball machines. I was frequently told that I didn’t bump nearly hard enough, but I almost never tilted, either, unless the ball got stuck and I actually physically lifted the machine so I could get it to roll out of the stuck spot.
To answer another poster, I know of at least a few cyber cafes in my city. One of them offers things like WoW characters that are owned by the cafe, so that one can try playing the game before commiting to it. I’ve vowed that the next time my internet provider goes down, I’m gonna just go to the cafe for several hours a day. Waiting for the repair guy sucks. I’ve always gone down to the library to use the computers there, but those are very, very slow, and I always feel a little guilty about using them, as I can afford to pay for my access.
I think they died faster than they should’ve due to the prices. I remember many times being a young teenager in the mid 90s, walking around in the mall, thinking I’d like to spend my last $5 or 10 at the arcade, but knowing that since every game now cost .50/.75/1 for a relatively short game time, my money would be used up in no time flat. If that arcade had charged $.25/.50 per game, they’d have gotten my $10. Since they charged more, they got $0 while the machines sat idle.
Even though you could get most of the same experience at home, I liked the social aspect of arcades. And they’d still do a lot of things better - most people don’t have a booth/force feedback/gear shifting mechanism for racing games at homes, light gun games are rare for home systems, various other novel peripherals. I think arcades could’ve had more of a place for longer if they’d have kept the prices low. I mean - the machines are going to consume the same negligible amount of electricity whether they’re being played or not - you may as well lower the price until they’re in constant use rather than hope someone will occasionally play it for a buck a minute.
I know of one place that charged an admission fee of something like $5 per person, no matter how young or old the person was. With the admission fee, though, each person got a number of tokens, I believe 50 of them. All the games ran on tokens, most took one token, a few took two. And the tokens cost a nickel each, and if you bought $5 at a time, you got bonus tokens. It was a game player’s heaven. It also kept out the loiterers, which was one of my big complaints. I always hated the people who just hung around the arcades, making comments on the players’ skills, and begging for quarters.
If more arcades had gone to using tokens in the games, then they could have raised the prices incrementally, like to thirty or thirty five cents a game, instead of doubling the price overnight. These days, I imagine that games could very well be fitted to accept some sort of arcade specific debit card, which could be refilled multiple times.
The problem with the token system is that it discouraged “casual” players- ie, the type with 20 minutes to spare before their bus but might put have a couple of goes on a pinball machine.
When they wandered in, saw they couldn’t use $1 coins, and had to buy “tokens”, they’d just leave because it was too much hassle for the time they were prepared to invest.
The arcade that ran on tokens was pretty much a destination arcade…it was rather out of the way, and people went to it specifically to play games. It wasn’t aimed at the casual players at all, since it charged an admission fee. Nobody could wander in, really, though people could come into the lobby/snack area and see an assortment of games that were available to play. At the time, many arcades had a big problem with people loitering around the arcades with no money to play the games, so charging an entrance fee, but setting the price of the games at 1/5 the normal price, was this arcade’s way of dealing with the problem. The loiterers weren’t just harmless, they usually were abusing the games, causing repair bills, and they annoyed the people who actually did want to play the games. The arcade was fairly successful, too, as the avid gamers would tell their friends about this place. It was known to have a good selection of both new and classic (well, as classic as video games get) in the place, and it was very rare that a game was out of commission.
This business plan wouldn’t work to draw in all sorts of gamers, but it did work well enough to keep it busy and profitable.
Putt-Putt (a chain for playing minigolf and video games) also used tokens, which one could buy individually, or buy a dollar’s worth, or five dollar’s worth, at a machine. One token cost one quarter, a dollar bought five tokens (so they were twenty cents each) and five dollars bought, I believe, something like 30 tokens. Obviously, the more tokens you bought at one time, the cheaper each individual token was. Putt-Putt didn’t charge an admission fee for the arcade, though it did assume that you were going to play a full round of minigolf at each session.
That talk about admission reminds of a pinball joint (any place that specializes in pinball has to be a “joint”) in San Francisco I heard about on A Life Well Wasted. The owner collected pinball machines, repaired them, and now just has a little place where you pay an admission fee to go in and play as many games as you like. That sounded like a great time to me but it is the opposite side of the country for me…
It is in my belief that the internet completely killed arcades. Even when Xbox and PS2 were around we still would always find time to spend at the arcades. Once the internet came out all that changed.
Maybe if they’d kept more low-tech stuff, they could have held on longer. E.g. pinball, foosball, pool tables. Last time I was at an arcade that had a heavy duty version of the old table top hockey games, like this:
http://www.thefunones.com/dome_hockey.jpg
A lot of people would enjoy those types of games without wanting to save up for it or letting it take up permanent residence in their homes.
You mean 1969?