Requiem for the Arcades
Earlier this week, GBGames posted a link and commentary on an article in the Chicago Tribune entitled, "Video Arcades' Last Gasp." I was kind of surprised to feel as much nostalgia and sadness reading the article as I did.

I guess there's a thing about the "formative years." You assume life will always be the same as it was when you were thirteen - except the things you personally want to change, of course. For me, Gary Gygax was immortal (as was everyone else around me), Vinyl LPs were THE medium for music, Van Halen was going to rock forever, Harrison Ford was perpetually 40, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were always going to make great movies, and video arcades and coin-operated video games were going to be permanent fixtures of American culture - though they'd just keep getting better and better.

In 1981, the video game craze was just starting to hit full force. Expert pundits were daily proclaiming that video games were only a passing fad, soon to be as forgotten as hula hoops and pet rocks. "Pac Man Fever" began sweeping the nation, even garnering nods from Time Magazine. Coin-op arcade machines were found almost everywhere - from the neighborhood 7-Eleven to the corner nooks of any casual restaurant. Handheld gaming hadn't come of age - rather than bringing a DS around with us, we kept quarters in our pocket. Video gaming was rarely more than a couple of blocks away.

But the real action was in the arcades. While not ubiquitous, by 1983 they were fixtures of almost any shopping center. You'd see a supermarket, a Radio Shack, maybe a record store or Chinese restaurant, a video store, and - hey, there'd be the arcade. They were usually dark (the better so see the screen, and the better to scare the parents, making them doubly attractive to us), noisy, poorly decorated, and a garden of geekly delights. There's be the strains of music from a radio (or even a juke box) pouring out - some classic rock or 80's pop, usual. Something by The Fixx or Foreigner or Van Halen or even... Men At Work. Or Journey. If not from the radio, then from a pretty awful video game bearing their name, digitized faces, and the synthetic beeping of their top tunes.

Illumination often came from colored neon lights, theoretically there to make the environment more like a science-fiction setting, but often more closely resembling that of a bar. The neon could have just as easily spelled out "Budweiser." Either way worked for most gamers. You'd hunt down a particular noise first, the unusual clanky-clanky sound of a change machine. And you'd find out if the arcade took quarters or tokens just by the noise the machine made when the currency of the realm hit the metal cup. Tokens sucked unless you came to that particular arcade all the time (the use of tokens is, naturally, designed to encourage that).

In the back of the room, you'd find the old standbys - the "classics" that had stood the test of time (time being measured in months - a two-year-old game that still attracted quarters was by definition a classic. That's where you'd find Defender, Asteroids, Pac Man, Galaxian, Space Invaders, Tempest, Centipede, Joust, Robotron, Dig-Dug, and several others. You'd also find some overlooked oldies that just had no resell value, or the owner picked up for a song. Or something. Sometimes the back of the arcade felt like digging for buried treasure. You'd occasionally stumble across some "antique" that was all of two years old that you'd never heard of before. And once in a while, you'd find that it didn't suck, and you'd find yourself blowing a couple of bucks on some quirky old game that you'd never really played before.

Pinball machines stood side-by-side with the video games at the time, borrowing from the technology of their younger siblings to include more advanced sounds and behaviors, little marquee mini-games and visual effects, and advanced game logic and stages.

The real action was in the front - the new games. As time went on, these became depressingly predictable, with the new "hit" games appearing in every single arcade. But like the search for buried treasure in the back, the new games putting in their rotation. Usually they were dominated by one to five older kids who had "mastered" the game in the last week, hogging up the machine for a half-hour on a single coin. But it was almost as entertaining to watch these strangers who has mastered a game as it was to play it yourself. And these kids usually drank up the attention. It was community at an infant level, but it was something. Regular arcade-goers got to recognize each other by face and by game, even if they didn't always know each other's names. It was enough to greet each other with a "hey."

The arcades also exposed players to a wide variety of games, all at once. Rather than choosing to play what was being hyped the hardest in magazines, websites, or on TV like we do today, players chose their games based on browsing the actual selection and seeing the game in action. Granted, there was a layer of insulation there between the producers and the players (arcade operators tended to choose games based on the hype at the industry level and at trade shows), but it did allow more dark-horse winners to emerge. Like Pac-Man and Defender versus the AMOA favorite Rally-X. There was also a fairly immediate Darwinism that took place. They were designed to kick your butt within two minutes. They had to hook you, thrill you, and then beat you within that time. Games that could do all three would fill their tills quickly. Those that did not were replaced.

But it was awesome to be confronted with a real, playable GAME that you had never tried before in the back of an arcade, or in a convenience stoor, or nestled in an alcove of a pizza parlor. I remember discovering Qix and Mappy at a local Pizza Hut one afternoon. I would have forgotten to eat, had I not run out of quarters. I had no idea a sequel to Asteroids existed, but I found Asteroids Deluxe in a grocery store on a road trip with my family. My brothers and I spent half the trip talking about what the rest of the game MIGHT be like, had we had enough time to play more than a two games.

The arcade games were the big brothers to the consoles in that era. The "console wars" were Intellivision versus Atari versus Colecovision versus some various other platforms that could only offer a crude approximation of the arcade experience. So crude, in fact, that the skills and techniques did not transfer from platform to platform. We were invariably disappointed with the home versions of games, but we bought them anyway. Because a crappy Pac-Man was better than no Pac-Man at all. But that was the relationship - the coin-op titles were always superior.


As game developers in the mid-90's, we all hoped to work on coin-op games. A coin-op title was prestigious. The feeling still lingered that the coin-op titles were superior to what was on coin-op. But with the advent of the 32-bit machines, it was evident that this relationship might not be sustainable. Even with the 16-bit games on the SNES and Sega, nearly arcade perfect home versions were no longer a rare exception. The superiority of the arcade games over the home consoles was based on the pace of video game technology dwarfing all that had come six months earlier. No more.

For the new generation of game developers, arcades have lost their glamor. They may have fond memories of the last of the glory days, when Street Fighter II and its peers ruled the less-common-but-still-surviving coin-op world. But the developers coming out of school today were still young when the X-Box and Playstation 2 were released, and it has always been renting the newest games from Blockbuster for their consoles, or contributing to the endless churn of used games at GameStop in much the same way.

I still can't walk into a mall without expecting to see an arcade or game room somewhere on the bottom floor, though it has been almost two decades since they were common. Only a few years ago, I heard some rumblings about what it would take to bring back the arcades. None of the strategies made much sense to me, but I still rooted for them. I would love to see the return of arcades.

But would I go any more frequently than I do now, when there are about three coin-op game rooms within a reasonable driving distance? Probably not. The home gaming systems and computer, with Internet capability and affordable peripherals, have managed to absorb almost all of the benefits of the arcade experience. Game developers can no longer crank out a new game every six to nine months (well, except for certain driven indies) as required by that business to keep things current.

The arcades were largely an artifact of the technology of the era, like record studios, videocassette recorders, and pay phones. Technology moves on. As much as I miss the experience, I really can't see how they can make a comeback, or find a reason why they should other than, "it would be cool."

And they really were.

Labels: Biz, retro

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:45 PM (Permalink)