How Many Arcades Are Left?

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My best guesstimate is that there were approximately 1 million arcades made during the 80's and maybe another 250,000 in the 90s.

http://www.brentradio.com/ProductionNumbers.htm

Given the way these puppies like to break down, one has to imagine that over half of them have been destroyed/discarded in the line of the duty and another 25% parted out/mamed by now. This leaves approximately 300,000 living/undead/waiting to be fixed arcades left. This sort of sounds right, except if half of these are international, it would mean that there are only 5 arcades in every city/town in the US (30,000 small and large towns in the US) and that seems way too low to me. What do you think, how many arcades do you think they made and how many are still out there?
 
way way more than a million were made in the 80's..... more like 3 to 4 mill easily.

about 100,000 pacman's and more than 100,000 ms pacs.... and that's just the uprights. tack on mini's and cocktails for just those 2.
 
Request: are you able to change your thread title? It's confusing as you're talking about how many arcade GAMES are left; not arcades themselves. The title suggests otherwise.

If not, can a mod help? Thanks.
 
The games were never called "arcades" back in the day. More like arcade game, arcade video game, pinball machine...but never "arcades"...that refers to the location not the games themselves...
 
I assure you there are more than 5 games in my city and the surrounding ones. I have over 70 myself, Robran68 has probably close to that if not more and there are a bunch of other guys within a few miles with at least 10.
We may be the arcade game capital of the world, but I REALLY doubt it.......
There are probably hundreds of thousands of games floating around still.
 
I assure you there are more than 5 games in my city and the surrounding ones. I have over 70 myself, Robran68 has probably close to that if not more and there are a bunch of other guys within a few miles with at least 10.
We may be the arcade game capital of the world, but I REALLY doubt it.......
There are probably hundreds of thousands of games floating around still.


Yes I personally know of at least 300 or more locally in peoples collections, including Rob, Jeremy, myself, Wiz,Crdurr,Jlannoo,SpartyMac,Jdubb350,JohnnyNeedles,Saturnkk etc...
 
I will take it further, there are probably millions of arcade games still left (not arcades an arcade is a building). There would have to be, there are 75,000 machines registered on VAPS alone and that is just the games belonging to collectors who bother to register with vaps and even then that only counts the machines that they bother to register.

I assure you there are more than 5 games in my city and the surrounding ones. I have over 70 myself, Robran68 has probably close to that if not more and there are a bunch of other guys within a few miles with at least 10.
We may be the arcade game capital of the world, but I REALLY doubt it.......
There are probably hundreds of thousands of games floating around still.
 
I will take it further, there are probably millions of arcade games still left (not arcades an arcade is a building). There would have to be, there are 75,000 machines registered on VAPS alone and that is just the games belonging to collectors who bother to register with vaps and even then that only counts the machines that they bother to register.

I bet way more than that have been destroyed over the years.
 
I will take it further, there are probably millions of arcade games still left (not arcades an arcade is a building). There would have to be, there are 75,000 machines registered on VAPS alone and that is just the games belonging to collectors who bother to register with vaps and even then that only counts the machines that they bother to register.

Agreed. KLOV may be pretty large considering, but I think the majority of the ones still out there are owned by people that would rather stay private with what they have, and/or have warehouses full of them, waiting to sell at an opportune time.
 
Of course, but you can't save everything. If we did, we would all be knee deep in junk. There would be no place to park or drive because of the 126 years worth of cars triple parked on every road and your game collection would be meaningless because everyone in the country with even the mildest interest in them would have 60 of them in the basement, and they would mostly be broken because they would be so worthless they literally wouldn't be worth repairing.

I bet way more than that have been destroyed over the years.
 
Of course, but you can't save everything. If we did, we would all be knee deep in junk. There would be no place to park or drive because of the 126 years worth of cars triple parked on every road and your game collection would be meaningless because everyone in the country with even the mildest interest in them would have 60 of them in the basement, and they would mostly be broken because they would be so worthless they literally wouldn't be worth repairing.

...And the zombies would be jumping out from in between to eat your brains?
 
Yeah, I'm positive that more than a mil were made in the 80s, and the 90s had to have more than that too. I saw somewhere the Atari sales sheet that showed up until I think Maximum Force, and that still sold like 5000+ dedicated uprights.

I would bet that more than 75% of those produced have been destroyed though -- most got converted, converted, converted, and then broke, and once they were broke they might have been scoured for parts and tossed. Before collecting became, well, collecting, broken machines just sat in operators warehouses until they tossed them.

I worked at a couple arcades. The first we destroyed *every* game once we stopped using it on the floor no matter what (*HATED* that policy). The second had a back room with about 15 machines piled on top of each other that were scavenged for parts from time to time.
 
Request: are you able to change your thread title? It's confusing as you're talking about how many arcade GAMES are left; not arcades themselves. The title suggests otherwise.

If not, can a mod help? Thanks.

It won't let me change the title, we'll just have to pretend that arcades and arcade games mean the same thing. Between Ms Pacman and regular Pacman, I bet there were 250,000 created, but other than a few select games, I'm not so sure that very many games that did break the 100k mark. If we assume the initial number was closer to 4 million, do you think that leaves us with 1 million games still out there? KLOV has 20,000 registered users, but only about 3000 of them are active. If KLOV represented 10% of all arcade owners and each member had an average of 5 arcades, that would get us to the million number. I have a funny feeling that KLOV represents more than 10% of all arcades and that are average per member probably clocks in at closer to a dozen.
 
Klov/Vaps represents probably way less than 10 percent of game owners/collectors (most people don't use message boards). Every time I buy a game from someone I check to see if they are on the forums and they never are (unless I lined the game up on the forums in the first place).


It won't let me change the title, we'll just have to pretend that arcades and arcade games mean the same thing. Between Ms Pacman and regular Pacman, I bet there were 250,000 created, but other than a few select games, I'm not so sure that very many games that did break the 100k mark. If we assume the initial number was closer to 4 million, do you think that leaves us with 1 million games still out there? KLOV has 20,000 registered users, but only about 3000 of them are active. If KLOV represented 10% of all arcade owners and each member had an average of 5 arcades, that would get us to the million number. I have a funny feeling that KLOV represents more than 10% of all arcades and that are average per member probably clocks in at closer to a dozen.
 
There are around 5 local arcades in IL (only arcades not a barcade) that I know of.
Galloping ghost has around 300 arcade games alone...
if your going to find games this should be the place many companies made games around here...
Bally midway
Stern
Williams

There should be a lot with former workers owners and even operators.

G12
 
Surprisingly, we still have an arcade in one of the Malls in Tampa... but it's about what you would expect, a few fighters (tekken 5), a few drivers, a couple of silent scopes, and a crapload of redemption games. Zero classics and zero pinballs :(

I occasionally stop in with the hopes that they'd put a classic game in or a pin, but no luck.

Here's some pics I took last week with my cell phone:


img0368pdv.jpg

img0370yi.jpg

img0371bg.jpg
 
Tilt is a national chain. They sell off a bunch of machines each fall. Thanks to tilt for getting me started on video arcades. I bought an SVC Chaos and a Marvel vs. Capcom 2 there last fall for $200 and $300 respectively.
 
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