Arcade etiquette in the 80's?

GhostyDevil

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Having been born in 1980, I pretty much missed the golden age of arcades and was wondering how turns were taken on a popular game. Was it just simply saying "I got next game" or stacking a quarter on the cp to let people know, or did you just stand there and wait. Just curious.

Tim
 
all of these applied but it would depend on what arcade you were in and who was playing the game. Often people put up quarters or tokens on the bezel or marquee area to signify they had the next game. This was all pre fighting games where they made the convenient plastic coin holders in the cp/bezel area. Bezels and marquees generally had a ledge where one could squeeze a coin in so they worked well as holders. Of course a guy might line up a dozen coins to signify he was gonna play a dozen games in a row.

At some arcades people didn't really do the coin on the game thing. Generally they would stand near the machine and watch the player waiting for the guy to die and hopefully get the hint to give up the game. Some players would be courteous and others would keep playing and if someone protested would simply shoot them the evil eye and maybe a rude comment.

Sometimes people would throw out the "I got next" but once again this would come down to who was playing. Sometimes it would be ignored or generate a response ranging from alright to kick rocks.

Other than places like Chuck e Cheese arcades were really geared to young adults and adults so I would say the atmosphere was more like a pool hall of today rather than a family friendly fun center. Basically some people had attitudes and others had etiquette or manners. The bigger bolder guy usually got his way and the smaller younger kids waited for the machines to free up or they risked confrontation with the bigger guy.

Don't recall seeing a lot of fighting but a lot of people got verbally punked by the bigger or cooler guys in the arcade.
 
Being a 9-to-11 year old kid I was always leary of parking my tokens on the machine. Those high school guys smoked and cursed and squeezed their women's butts in public and I was always afraid they'd just as soon take my coins and use them to play their own games. Half the fun of the arcades in the Golden Age was being a kid in fight-or-flight mode at every turn.
 
The code in my town during the 80s was quarters usually on the marquee, sometimes on the bezel on the edge of the control panel, to indicate "next game." Things became a bit hazy if a game had a "continue?" feature, but usually the player had to wait until the original player was done continuing, and it seemed to me the quarter-on-the-game system became less common as players just approached a cab when it was free.

In the early 1980s the quarter code was universally respected; it wasnt uncommon to see multiple quarters on the marquee reflecting a line of waiting players - it was rare when someone tried to jump the quarter queue since the rest of the waiting players would enforce the order of placement.

The code had other perils - i can remember players losing quarters down the edge of the control panel if there was a gap that allowed a quarter to side down underneath. Marquees were generally safer since the marquee bracket was half the width of a quarter, so it wouldnt disappear in the same way.

I can also remember the high score code; if a waiting player noticed that the previous player had a high score that allowed initials, you'd verify with them if they wanted to enter their initials or not. If not, usually AAA got the score!
 
I grew up in NJ in the late 70's and early 80's.. Loved Space Port at the mall!

Quarters on marquees was the rule for who's next

We traveled all over the country during the summers and the quarters on marquees seemed to be universal where ever I went to arcades
 
The worst was putting your quarter/token above the CP and having it slip down underneath.

I never had to worry about dudes bullying me or whatever because I was typically at arcades with my brother, who was much older/taller/bigger/meaner than me.
 
you put your quarter up and just waited till it was your turn.

Having been born in 1980, I pretty much missed the golden age of arcades and was wondering how turns were taken on a popular game. Was it just simply saying "I got next game" or stacking a quarter on the cp to let people know, or did you just stand there and wait. Just curious.

Tim
 
Depends where you were. There were only a few games that really had a long wait. Donkey Kong was the first one I remember. I remember the holders on the cp or marquee that some would ops would glue on to hold the quarters like the foosball and pool tables had. I also remember standing in an actual line to play a couple games. The bad part about that is I was around 12 and the high school kids would just cut in line and push me and the other kids my age out of the way.
 
When I was 12, I was playing a game, and an 8-year-old came and put his quarter on the bezel above the control panel.

"Sweet - thanks!" I pocketed it.

He ran off, yelling "mom!", almost crying. He came back with mom, who asked if I took his quarter.

"Oh, that was his quarter? I'm sorry, my mistake." Mom gave him another quarter, and left.

He put his new quarter on the bezel above the control panel.

"Sweet - thanks!" I pocketed it.

He yelled at me this time. I replied, "Look - it costs 50 cents to play this game, yes?"

He hesitated, then answered: "Yes."

"Right", I said. "So, thanks for playing."
 
Some of my games in my garcade are on free play, some require quarters. For the ones that require quarters, I line the coins up on either the marquee or CP like others have said, and I've told my daughter the tale of how that methodology was *supposed* to work BITD. Thankfully I never had an issue with that myself when I was a kid, I always just waited if someone was playing a game I wanted to play, or I went and played something else and came back. I don't remember there being any all-day players BITD where I would go, so, having to wait to play a game was never really a huge issue for me.
 
When I was 12, I was playing a game, and an 8-year-old came and put his quarter on the bezel above the control panel.

"Sweet - thanks!" I pocketed it.

He ran off, yelling "mom!", almost crying. He came back with mom, who asked if I took his quarter.

"Oh, that was his quarter? I'm sorry, my mistake." Mom gave him another quarter, and left.

He put his new quarter on the bezel above the control panel.

"Sweet - thanks!" I pocketed it.

He yelled at me this time. I replied, "Look - it costs 50 cents to play this game, yes?"

He hesitated, then answered: "Yes."

"Right", I said. "So, thanks for playing."
You're my f-ing hero. :D
 
Cool bro, bro................ :D

Yeah bro, my bro didn't hesitate, you know? He'd be so, "Whoa! No! You don't hassle my little bro...we'll come to blows, so if you'd like to keep living as the status quo, don't touch him, yo, or take his dough.... Otherwise me and you, outside we'll go, bro, and leave your sorry toes stickin' out of the snow."

Yeah, in the arcades it was advantageous to have a big older bro, bro.
 
Being a 9-to-11 year old kid I was always leary of parking my tokens on the machine. Those high school guys smoked and cursed and squeezed their women's butts in public and I was always afraid they'd just as soon take my coins and use them to play their own games. Half the fun of the arcades in the Golden Age was being a kid in fight-or-flight mode at every turn.

^^^this^^^ I remember playing a few games where some teenager would come up with like 13 quarters, lined them up on the marquee and then proceeded to stand over me waiting until my game ended. So intimidating.
 
I was 18 in 1977, so for me it wasn't a problem. The tried and true method was to put your quarter up on the glass above the control panel and stand behind the guy presently playing. Then take his place. It worked 98% of the time.

Once in awhile you got a wiseguy who thought he could play as long as he wanted to or someone would try to cut in line, but since I was bigger and older than most of the guys. That usually didn't happen. If it did, I would just stand behind them and breath on top of their heads until they got really nervous and went away.
 
The only game I could play as long as I wanted was Asteroids. Someone would come up and put their quarter down and I would say you are wasting your time and would watch me play for a while and get mad and pick their quarter back up.
 
This thread has caused me to stop and search my soul for the one main reason I love the old machines so much.

I am tempted to believe that it might have everything to do with what the arcades symbolized to me then: these dark, other-worldly, dungeonesque dens of iniquity into which my mother naively let me wander. It was like nothing no place no how, no less, in there. Sex, cigarettes, and (what I deemed) "hard rock" music. Sinister aliens and killer robots with their electronic pings and whizzes and synthetic voices and thugs and hussies with plumped perfumes and cigarettes and boozy breaths. The only light in there came from 40 schizoid screens. It wasn't like we had grown up on Nintendo and Sega, either. The whole dang thing was brand new and impossible to comprehend. The stalwart protestant puritans who testified that these things were Satan's tools and that the whole fad would prove the detriment of mankind seemed plausibly right on the some hand. I felt like a wide-eyed white knightling on an odyssey into the abyss when I went in there.

But the truth is that I loved a Breakout that was in a college-oriented burger house before there were arcades, to which I was allowed to walk on Sunday afternoons with money in my pocket to buy the family's lunch. (So I was 5 or 6 the first time I stole quarters from my parents? Heh.) And I loved a Sea Wolf that was at the front of a grocery store and the Space Invaders in the foray to Wal-Mart before I knew there were arcades. So I guess I love(d) them for what they are, simply and foremost, without mystique or romance.

Back on the subject: Yeah, the coin on the control panel/marquee was the rule of thumb. I just stood in line, though. It's not like anything ever happened. I can't even recall anyone ever picking on me. But I had to guard my money with my life because when it was spent I had to leave the arcade and rejoin my mom in like Pier 1 or something.
 
Yeah bro, my bro didn't hesitate, you know? He'd be so, "Whoa! No! You don't hassle my little bro...we'll come to blows, so if you'd like to keep living as the status quo, don't touch him, yo, or take his dough.... Otherwise me and you, outside we'll go, bro, and leave your sorry toes stickin' out of the snow."

Yeah, in the arcades it was advantageous to have a big older bro, bro.

Hehe, you may have missed my hidden joke- there's another KLOVer here who, in every thread he posts in, always ends up posting "cool story, bro". So, I took this opportunity to mock him. :D
 
Our local etiquette (L.A.) was always a coin up on the bezel. Some folks put the coin on the CP, but you'd get a wise guy playing the machines who would bang down on the CP creating a gap and then your coin would disappear.

It was pretty civil, once in a while you would get a wise ass who would put a bunch of coins in at a time or put their own coins on the bezel, but that was quickly discouraged.
 
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