how much longer would arcades have lived with no consoles?

vintagegamer

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how much longer would arcades have lived with no consoles?

I hate to admit it, but I personally could not wait as a kid for new games to come out in console format, only because once they came out in console form you could actually get to play them alot. Growing up, my family wasn't allowed to go to the arcade alot, since it was considered a waste of money-

However, now that we all see in retrospect what happened after the Atari 2600 came out, then Intellivision, then Colecovision, etc, one must wonder: how much longer would the arcades have kept going at their current rates had the home console not been invented?
 
Not much longer. The games themselves were getting worse and worse and the stupid-ass laser games were total crap.
 
how much longer would the arcades have kept going at their current rates had the home console not been invented?

If you mean "never" been invented, I would think they'd still be going.
 
At least until Judgement Day this upcoming Saturday...

Arnold-Schwarzenegger-Terminator-Judgement-Day-Wallpaper.jpg
 
I hate to admit it, but I personally could not wait as a kid for new games to come out in console format, only because once they came out in console form you could actually get to play them alot. Growing up, my family wasn't allowed to go to the arcade alot, since it was considered a waste of money-

However, now that we all see in retrospect what happened after the Atari 2600 came out, then Intellivision, then Colecovision, etc, one must wonder: how much longer would the arcades have kept going at their current rates had the home console not been invented?

After getting over their novelty and leveling off the arcades would have settled into their niche and would still dominate today.

It is the home consoles that killed the coin-op industry as it was.

Darren Harris
Staten Island, New York.
 
Nah, I think no real difference.

It wasn't any "console" that I turned to by the mid-80s... it was a personal computer. Specifically the Commodore 64. With it, I could play literally hundreds of high-quality games for a lot cheaper than with any console (the cost of 5.25" floppys and a disk notcher).

Consoles were just for those too lazy/stupid to have a computer :p
[ducks for cover]
 
I think home videos and arcade videos fueled each other back in the day. Buzz from one created sales for another. There is a possibility that home video games helped to legitimize arcade gaming. Since arcade gaming has always been portrayed by detractors as "seedy," I think letting the kids play video games at home created a market that companies like 7-11 and the like were able to capitalize by having games in their stores as well. We very well might still have arcades, but they would be more like pool halls are now as opposed to family fun centers.
 
Arcades were dead long before consoles took over. The tipping point for consoles was when the home version was as good or better than the arcade version which didn't really happen until the PS1 timeframe. By that time, the 'golden age' of arcades was a thing of the past already.
 
As I recall, the consoles of the day crashed at the same time as the arcades back in 1983.

I think the Atari home version of Pac Man was the straw that broke the camel's back for the consoles of the time. One of the worst video games ever made...

As for the arcades, there was a lack of new ideas and too much of the same types of games. Hard core arcade goers stuck it out but the casual people left and didn't come back...

At least that's how I remember it.
 
However, now that we all see in retrospect what happened after the Atari 2600 came out, then Intellivision, then Colecovision, etc, one must wonder: how much longer would the arcades have kept going at their current rates had the home console not been invented?
How much longer would the record have lasted were it not for cassettes, CDs and iTunes? That is a tough question. I know the arcade heydey lasted far longer for me than it did for most of you guys: my parents forbade my brother and I from getting a gaming console and the first one I got was an 8 bit Nintendo when I moved out at 18 in 1989. The heydey was still going strong for me until that point. Most technology becomes obsolete/unnecessary due to new/different/better technology being released. If one could somehow artificially suspend the release of consoles indefinitely to current date and into the future, they could still be in that early 80s mode today and into the future indefinitely. However, that is not realistic.
 
You're all so freaking naive...consoles didn't kill arcades, REDEMPTION GAMES killed arcades.

If consoles killed arcades, they would have been deader than a doornail before the NES even came out in 85. What game couldn't you get on a Coleco or 2600? Or on a computer of that era for that matter?
I had a perfect port of Street Fighter II on my Amiga and Atari ST FFS...

Put the blame where it belongs.
 
As I recall, the consoles of the day crashed at the same time as the arcades back in 1983.

I think the Atari home version of Pac Man was the straw that broke the camel's back for the consoles of the time. One of the worst video games ever made...

As for the arcades, there was a lack of new ideas and too much of the same types of games. Hard core arcade goers stuck it out but the casual people left and didn't come back...

At least that's how I remember it.

I've heard this story before and I disagree. I went to the arcades until I got an Atari 2600 in 1982-83. After that, I saw no need to try to scrounge up a ton of quarters and hope to get a ride to the arcade and then get a ride home. I now got to beg for the newest Activision cartridge and if I got it, I could play it over and over again for free, as soon as I got home from school or woke up on Sunday Morning. (Saturday mornings were for cartoons.) I know what long time collectors and arcade history buffs give as the standard answer for what killed arcades, but for me, consoles killed the arcades, or at least made them irrelevant. Wonder if I was the only one?
 
I know the death for the trips to the arcade came for me and my friends is whe the game DOOM came out. 4 player on a Thin net using Western Digital Network cards with 486 dx2 80 cpu. That when the arcades died for me and my friends.
 
Actually, I still went to the arcade fairly regularly until I gained access to a couple other forms of entertainment (more or less simultaneously):

- a car
- boobs
 
I've heard this story before and I disagree. I went to the arcades until I got an Atari 2600 in 1982-83. After that, I saw no need to try to scrounge up a ton of quarters and hope to get a ride to the arcade and then get a ride home. I now got to beg for the newest Activision cartridge and if I got it, I could play it over and over again for free, as soon as I got home from school or woke up on Sunday Morning. (Saturday mornings were for cartoons.) I know what long time collectors and arcade history buffs give as the standard answer for what killed arcades, but for me, consoles killed the arcades, or at least made them irrelevant. Wonder if I was the only one?

I dunno, for me there was still nothing like the arcade during the time of the 2600. I got my 2600 in 77 I think and had it all the way until the Colecovision came out. I'd say also that by the time it was 82/83 the golden age was already ending so it would kinda line up with my opinion that the greatest days of the arcade were already over by the time the consoles blew up with the NES etc. by 83, it was computer games that took me away not necessarily consoles. I was buried in my atari 400, not my coleco. Part of it was also probably just simply us kids starting to grow up rather than anything to do with consoles or arcades. By the time redemption crap came out, I was already long since bored with mortal kombat 8987982342 and Rush the Mall driving games, so I don't think calling people naive is necessarily fair as it really has more to do with your age and when your vision of the best times were. If you remember pac man as a great day then the endless run of fighting games killed arcades, likewise if Mortal Kombat is what your memories are of, redemption probably did it. Ask the same of kids growing up in the EM game days, or EM pinball moving to solid state, moving to DMD.. all age groups will have different answers that are all accurate to that group, doesn't make them naive or wrong.
 
I've heard this story before and I disagree. I went to the arcades until I got an Atari 2600 in 1982-83. After that, I saw no need to try to scrounge up a ton of quarters and hope to get a ride to the arcade and then get a ride home. I now got to beg for the newest Activision cartridge and if I got it, I could play it over and over again for free, as soon as I got home from school or woke up on Sunday Morning. (Saturday mornings were for cartoons.) I know what long time collectors and arcade history buffs give as the standard answer for what killed arcades, but for me, consoles killed the arcades, or at least made them irrelevant. Wonder if I was the only one?

I got one for Christmas 1977 and we never called it the "2600"...that name came 5-6 years later. It was called "The Atari"...Yeah it was cool, but the games generally were not as good as the arcades, and we went to the arcades for better graphics, and typically, better gameplay. The Atari never offered anything better than what the arcades offered, in my opinion. It was outdated technology almost immediately after it was released. As I recall the people buying Ataris in 1982/82 were just casual game players or people with kids who were just coming of age to play the games, and they were actually a bigger group of people than the core fans who were moving on to other systems like the Commodore 64. The new people abandoned the system very quickly and thus you had landfills full of unsold games....
 
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Consoles definitely influenced the arcade industry in many unintended ways.

For example, Atari would have definitely been more competitive/profitable if it hadn't frittered away so much money to license for 2600 games like Pac Man, E.T. - Rubik's Cube, for god's sake - in the early 80s.

Also, the VCS department also stole a lot of the attention (and glory) away from the original designers/programmers of the arcade version of the games. According to at least one book I've read (the Steven Kent one) there was some real resentment over this within the arcade division of Atari.
 
All great answers, and I love seeing how everyone has a diff take on what went down.. Like Phet, I grew up knowing the 2600 as 'the Atari'. I also remem console game graphics and sounds not holding a candle to arcade graphics until DK came out for Colecovision. In my youth I only knew one dude with a C64. We all looked at it as the console's grumpy cousin..
 
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