Arcades started in America in the 1970s, but they didn’t gain mainstream appeal until the early 80s after the wide release of Pacman, Centipede and Space Invaders. These were large areas in malls filled with video games, sometimes in department stores (K-Marts notoriously had large arcades placed safely at the back of their stores so that kids could play while parents shopped), sometimes chained with pizza places (Chuck E. Cheese, for example), bowling alleys, etc. In an effort to build customer loyalty most arcades had machines that exchanged cash for “tokens” that were roughly quarter shaped (so as to use the same coin slots) and roughly the same weight, but bore the logo of the arcade. Often there were small but valuable discounts (like 25 tokens for $5) for purchasing in bulk.
It’s interesting for me to talk about arcades with the new generation because I can’t imagine, as gamers, what their similar experiences were with other gamers. I grew up with consoles, but there was no network play (we’d first play online games like Doom when I was a senior in HS, and I cut my teeth online gaming in college on our dorm LAN system). We would go home to play console games when the night was over, but to get a really cutting edge experience, we hit the arcade after school. We often hit it hard, playing for hours. In the summer, we’d even hit the small arcade in the local 24-hour truck stop to hone our skills at Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam, Street Fighter and Tekken.
The reason that the arcade was popular might seem obvious: in those days, arcade machines where vastly superior to consoles. It wasn’t until the PlayStation era that games at home were actually on-par with cabinet games (and they really weren’t– it was PS2/Xbox era where the games started to really seem the same). But the real appeal was the chance to get out, play with others, to socialize. We’d keep lists of Mortal Kombat finishers we’d found scribbled in notebooks in our pockets. People would gain notoriety in certain places due to their prowess. Other notorious gamers would wait for them, to challenge. People would gather just to watch.
The gaming community in most areas was tightly knit. I grew up just outside Richmond, IN (about a 20 minute drive up US 27 from Oxford), and the guy who ran our mall’s Namco Arcade lived a few houses down from me. I delivered his newspaper. He’d often let me stay after the place locked up– just me and a couple of friends– playing the newest games. He wanted our stamp of approval, and he wanted us to tell him what made the games good.
Arcades started to die out in the late 1990s. The most obvious reason for the demise of the arcade is that quality games came home, but the real culprit is the internet. Online gaming, the rise of online communities, etc. meant that video game nerds had new outlets. Without video game nerds flooding the mall (and, in fact, with online shopping and super-strict regulations ending the era of the mall rat), there was nothing to fuel the arcade fire. What an awesome pun I just made.
There are still things “like” arcades. Chuck E. Cheese thrives, and Dave and Busters offers games and food and fun and all that, but the arcades of my youth, the arcades that were the stomping grounds of the generation that made the games you grew up with, are but a faded memory. In a way, it’s sad, but in another way, it’s exciting.
There are also nostalgia projects, like Arcade Legacy or the Barcade phenomenon. The issue that these places run into is that they’re basically catering to the older generation and a few curious youngsters. The generation that is the age to hang out in arcades (13-2o or-so) would prefer to game online with a wider audience and often have friends (large groups of friends) to play with online. They don’t need to go to where a game machine is to play, so the whole concept is different. And that’s good, I think.
What is interesting to me, though, is how monetization has changed from the arcade era to now and how people feel about it. It was super-common to spend $5 at an arcade. My senior year of high school, I was doing it on the daily, sometimes going up to $10 a day. That was in 1994. So if we factor in inflation, that’s the equal of spending $8.25 a pop, for a total of just over $41 a week. That doesn’t seem that outrageous for game spending.
But the pay-in-increment model, the pay-to-play model, is now considered a bad thing by the community, and IAP and microtransactions are looked down upon by most gamers. At one point, the lifeblood of gaming was the quarter, and no one really thought they should leave with anything but an experience.
In that sense, the marketing plan of asking for a $1 fee to download something isn’t that different from the arcade model. We just no longer pay for the use of the machine (that use is now the network, arguably a bigger, harder to maintain machine). Also, in that sense, a $15-a-month game like World of Warcraft is a bargain.
The charm of the arcade is lost in the new generation of gaming, though. It’s most similar to the vibe of a GameStop that has regulars, a social gaming space. If you’ve watched Stranger Things, you saw pretty much exactly what an arcade was like in the 1980s, right down to the nerd who ran the place and the secret back room. There was a territorial battle over the high scores on your favorite games, friendly rivalries, and a constant quest to make sure the machines are still functioning after a long day.
I miss the arcades of my youth, but more than that, I wish this generation could experience them, just for a few minutes. It was a very different time to be a gamer.