For Amusement Only: the life and death of the American arcade (story from The Verge)

I just scanned it. Definitely a must-read for later. Lots of little tidbits I didn't know.
 
Yeah I'm going to load this up on the iPad and read it tonight when I get home.
 
I just finished reading and what a great article! Barcades seems to be a worthy venture for todays economic climate. Can anyone shed some light on how u legally run the roms on modern formats without having to soak up all the floor s
pace? Would owing the pcb be enough?
 
It's a decent article but once they get into the actual point of the article, the arcade scene from a modern perspective, they screw it up. Everyone they've asked except for Nolan Bushnell says its dead, wow great evidence on that. :rollseyes:

Don't get me wrong, I understand it is not 1981 for arcades or even 1991. But I run an arcade that is defined by their strict standards (games only, nothing else not even food). Last month was the most profitable I've had in almost five years of business. Last year I reported on more location openings than I ever had in six years of writing for Arcade Heroes. Aurcade.com currently has 1436 locations on their site and they certainly do not have anywhere near all locations out there listed yet (over 500 CEC locations, 60 D&B locations and they only list a fraction of that). I don't agree that arcade has to be strictly defined to their standards either - if a coin-op game is at any location be it a Dave & Busters, Chuck E. Cheeses or waiting room environment like a dentist or mechanics, that is a sale for the company who makes the game. Seems to me like the writers asked a few people and took that as evidence to pass a judgement on a worldwide industry. Using NYC as an example for the decline of arcade is a horrible example as the article doesn't bother to look up the restrictions that the city places on the opening of such arcades and all of the loopholes one has to jump through to even get open.That is a pretty big factor that is almost always ignored in these kinds of articles.

I believe that the video side of the industry is not innovative currently. Shooting/driving/dancing games aren't setting the world of arcades on fire, just keeping it going along. So I do fully agree with Bushnell on his point at the end that creativity can bring anything back. But this "Everyone agrees that the arcade is dead" is tripe.

Can anyone shed some light on how u legally run the roms on modern formats without having to soak up all the floor s
pace? Would owing the pcb be enough?

I'm not aware of any way for you to legally run anything like MAME at the arcade but no idea if anyone has tried that and had an arcade manufacturer go after them either.
 
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You're right - there is a bigger story there, but the "death" provided the narrative closure the author sought. If you haven't, watch the video report as well - it has quite a different tone in my view; there's more discussion of collectors and the idea that arcades are continuing to evolve (see Bushnell near the end with the Soul Caliber footage) which leaves a different vibe compared to the article.
 
Anyone know of a good Firefox plugin that's allow the video to be downloaded rather than just watched streaming?
 
kind of a lazy article that you feel already made up its mind on its subject before it started. Really misses the mark (laughably so) on the huge arcade resurgence/cultural renaissance we are currently going through.
 
I refuse to read anything that says Space Invaders was made by Activision. Even when the picture of the SI flyer they used says Taito!

:D
 
Cool article. My only complaint with this and most articles on this subject is that it waxes on and on and on and on about what it was like in the 80's, but then when it hits the 90's and the fighting game boom it is kind of like "Yeah. SF2 and MK happened. Parents and politicians got upset. Let's move on". That genre and decade saw a huge change in the arcade sub-culture (a change that some 80's only guys still seem angry/bitter over). It didn't just take arcades off life support, it changed the physical and social environment of the arcades.
 
An OK article but there wasn't much new in there and there were a number of inaccuracies

"…It is also undeniable, however, that the video game arcade would not have happened without him"
I suppose this one is a matter of opinion but I don't think it's at all "undeniable" that the video game arcade wouldn't have happened without Bushnell. My feeling is that if he and Dabney didn't create the arcade video game, someone else would have..

"By definition, an "amusement arcade" is a place that houses coin-operated machines, and for the first half of the 20th century, that meant pinball"
Not exactly. I don't think pinball really came to the fore until the depression, and that was over half way through "the first half of the 20th century"
Before that I think gun games, fortune tellers, jukeboxes/coin-op phonographs, Mutoscope/kinetoscope/peep shows, strength testers etc. predominated. If you'd gone into a penny arcade in the first two decades of the century, I think you'd have been hard pressed to find a lot of pinball/bagatelle machines.

"The first successful coin-operated game was called Baffle Ball"
Again, not exactly. It may not have even been the first popular pinball machine. I think Whiffle came out a bit before Baffle Ball. And there were a number of other successful coin-op games before Baffle Ball (such as ABT's pistol games) going back to the 1880s.
Of course, "successful" is a pretty ambiguous term.

"Bally and others originally made much of their money manufactuing slot machines"
Arguably, depending on what you mean by "originally". Bally actually started out making pinball games (not counting their years as Lion Manufacturing) and didn't enter the slot field until 1936, about five years after Ballyhoo (the first game under the Bally banner).

"The coin-operated amusements industry had…its roots in gambling"
Again, it depends on what you mean by "roots". While slots began appearing in the 1890s, coin-op amusements in the US appeared at least a decade before and during the first decade "athletic testers" and other machines predominated. Gambling games did appear early on, however.

"Computer Space was the first commercial arcade game released by Palo Alto-based Nutting Associates in 1971"
Computer Space was not Nutting's first arcade game. They were also located in Mountain View, not Palo Alto at the time.

"The release of Taito's 1975 Gun Fight in Japan became significant when its licensed American version Western Gun…"
Western Gun was the Taito version. Gun Fight was the American version.

"The success of Pong signaled the decline of pinball as companies rushed to produce video games. Arcade operators and games distributors quickly realized that video games had…"
Not exactly wrong, since video games arguably "signaled" the EVENTUAL decline of pinball but the article (and others) give the impression that Pong led to the immediate decline of pinball.
In fact, in terms of machine earnings, pinball was slightly ahead of video games in the late 1970s, especially after solid state pins began to appear. It wasn't until Space Invaders that video games clearly pulled ahead.

[Death Race] "…was widely banned."
A lot of sources have repeated this claim but the never seem to provide examples of locations that banned Death Race in particular (rather than all video games) or that banned video games specifically because of Death Race. I've found plenty of stories from 1976-77 talking about the controversy the game engendered (though I don't think there ever would have been a controversy had it not been for one Seattle reporter) but none that report that the game was "widely" banned.
Some stories even reported that entire countries banned the game but I've found no incidence of this happening and Exidy's marketing director at the time said he'd never heard of a country banning the game.
On another note, both the game's designer and Exidy's founder told me that the game was not based on Deathrace 2000 (I suppose this could have been to avoid legal ramifications - even though I talked to them 25 years after the game came out)

"By 1985, Steve Epstein's Times Square institution, the Broadway Arcade…was forced to close"
The Broadway Arcade didn't close until 1997. It was forced to move in 1985 but it moved to a location next door to the old one and the old location closed when the Novotel hotel opened on top of it.

"Millions of E.T. cartridges were produced, sold, and then returned, ultimately ending up in a landfill in New Mexico."
Not really but I'll let you read Atari Inc, Business if Fun if you want the straight skinny.

Keith Smith
http://allincolorfor...r.blogspot.com/
 
Cool article. My only complaint with this and most articles on this subject is that it waxes on and on and on and on about what it was like in the 80's, but then when it hits the 90's and the fighting game boom it is kind of like "Yeah. SF2 and MK happened. Parents and politicians got upset. Let's move on". That genre and decade saw a huge change in the arcade sub-culture (a change that some 80's only guys still seem angry/bitter over). It didn't just take arcades off life support, it changed the physical and social environment of the arcades.

Excellent point. Wired featured an article on arcades in February 2012 that focused on the legacy of the 90s fighting genre/revival -- "In Back Alleys and Basements, Video Arcades Quietly Survive":

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/02/southtown-arcade-game-center/

Definitely more to be written about this era as well!
 
People thought consoles were dead too until Nintendo proved them wrong. As long as people are looking to go out and spend money to have fun, coin-op will always remain a business. It's just a lot harder to make a successful arcade game than it is to make a successful console game. What I mean by that is, with a console game you get their $60 up front. With coin-op, your game has to be really good and replayable because you have to get their money 50 cents or whatever at a time. Game design has gotten lazy and bloated in general, and the hardcore keep buying the same garbage and reinforcing the bad design decisions.

In the early 80's, basically everybody played video games to some extent. Then when the creativity died, Nintendo took over, and kids started playing video games again. It is only now, basically 30 years later, that video games are being played by all demographics again due to simple but fun mobile games. The social element that arcades provided has STILL not returned to video games, however. Despite Facebook games being called "social games", they are not in the slightest bit social.

End rant
 
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