so how much did a successful arcade pull in weekly back in it's heyday?

kerri369

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so how much did a successful arcade pull in weekly back in it's heyday?

I've often speculated, researched, and even heard rumors of what a busy arcade would pull in weekly. but I'm really curious to know what kind of a business it was back then. anyone know, have any examples, or wanna just make somethin up so i can sleep at night?
 
My friend ran an Arcade here in Michigan and was bothered by the Mob and was made to sell the business, he claimed that each machine he had was pulling in thousands of plays per machine. The arcade run was short lived. Many arcades in bowling ally's did much more better then arcades in malls. The advantage of arcades in malls was that they could hold more machines in most cases, they also did well but not as well as a high traffic bowling ally for example. When I was a kid I used to hang out in the local bowling ally arcade and play forever. In the shopping mall my parents would never stay long enough for me to go in there and play or in most cases play anything more then a couple games. And this is why Arcades in malls didn't do well, unless you lived near the mall the bowling ally was your hangout.

My friends arcade did thousands a month in business. But like I said it was short lived and was especially short lived for him, cause they told him give up the business or get dead. He took the first option.
 
I had heard that Donkey Kong, Asteroids, Pac Man pulled ~$200 per week for close to a year in their heyday from a local mall arcade. I would guess substantially less afterward...

I heard that Dragon's Lair was like $1000 a week for about 6 months.

I do not have first hand knowledge though...
 
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My friend ran an Arcade here in Michigan and was bothered by the Mob and was made to sell the business, he claimed that each machine he had was pulling in thousands of plays per machine. The arcade run was short lived. Many arcades in bowling ally's did much more better then arcades in malls. The advantage of arcades in malls was that they could hold more machines in most cases, they also did well but not as well as a high traffic bowling ally for example. When I was a kid I used to hang out in the local bowling ally arcade and play forever. In the shopping mall my parents would never stay long enough for me to go in there and play or in most cases play anything more then a couple games. And this is why Arcades in malls didn't do well, unless you lived near the mall the bowling ally was your hangout.

My friends arcade did thousands a month in business. But like I said it was short lived and was especially short lived for him, cause they told him give up the business or get dead. He took the first option.

Detroit Area?
 
i was told by a local op that when they put dragon lair at loactions when it came out , about 6 diff locations he got call by all six 3 days later saying they were broke, he said every one of them were so full of quarters that they were jamming up the coin chute's
 
First off, regarding Dragon's Lair. It was the first game to successfully charge $0.50. So the coin box being the same size as a normal $0.25 game made it far more likely to overflow.

The rule of thumb that most operators talked about BITD was the 6 week rule. If a game couldn't pay for itself in 6 weeks, it was yanked. If a game paid for itself in a week (or looked like it would basd on the daily tally), they would drive over to their distributor and pick up as many as they could, usually at least 2 or 3 more for each location. Most places also had a bottom number (usually $200 - $300 a week) where any game making that number would get yanked and put in the warehouse to be replaced with the latest and greatest.

Location also had a great deal to do with the earnings expectations. There was an hierarchy to locations. Non-mall arcades across the street from high schools tended to be the most profitable. Followed by strip mall arcades. Then bar/bowling alleys/entertainment complexes. Lastly were the mall arcades. Oh, and the convenience stores (7/11, Tom Thumb, Quicky Mart, etc).

The mob involvement was quite real. They were interested in any business that deals with the movement a lot of cash, especially where it was difficult to trace. If your counts were getting too high, just unplug the coin counters for a while. Free unreported quarters. Need to launder some dirty money, clip a pulser on the coin counters for a while and infuse the business with a little "outside" makeup cash that gets used to buy a new machine that mysteriously doesn't show up. There are a lot of ways to cook the boks in a pure cash business.

ken
 
A major reason that they did so poor in malls was because of the high rent per square foot in major malls compared with what they brought in.
 
see i find all this quite interesting......that's why i asked if anyone had an idea of weekly takes. the only info i was able to find was which arcade chain location (space port, time out, aladdin's castle, ect.) preformed the best in a particular quarter. but no revenue numbers.
 
I heard that Dragon's Lair was like $1000 a week for about 6 months.

My local arcade had 2 dragon's lairs and they used to empty it 5 times a day (or more) Here in Oz it was 40 cents a game. I remember a staff member saying it did over $8K a week for one of them. The lines were HUGE for more than 6 months.

The Deluxe Out Run made some good coin too. Daytona USA was a killer here too
 
First off, regarding Dragon's Lair. It was the first game to successfully charge $0.50. So the coin box being the same size as a normal $0.25 game made it far more likely to overflow.

The rule of thumb that most operators talked about BITD was the 6 week rule. If a game couldn't pay for itself in 6 weeks, it was yanked. If a game paid for itself in a week (or looked like it would basd on the daily tally), they would drive over to their distributor and pick up as many as they could, usually at least 2 or 3 more for each location. Most places also had a bottom number (usually $200 - $300 a week) where any game making that number would get yanked and put in the warehouse to be replaced with the latest and greatest.

Location also had a great deal to do with the earnings expectations. There was an hierarchy to locations. Non-mall arcades across the street from high schools tended to be the most profitable. Followed by strip mall arcades. Then bar/bowling alleys/entertainment complexes. Lastly were the mall arcades. Oh, and the convenience stores (7/11, Tom Thumb, Quicky Mart, etc).

The mob involvement was quite real. They were interested in any business that deals with the movement a lot of cash, especially where it was difficult to trace. If your counts were getting too high, just unplug the coin counters for a while. Free unreported quarters. Need to launder some dirty money, clip a pulser on the coin counters for a while and infuse the business with a little "outside" makeup cash that gets used to buy a new machine that mysteriously doesn't show up. There are a lot of ways to cook the boks in a pure cash business.

ken

wow, thats some good history right there about the DL and the biz in general.Sounds like a crazy time and add to mob to it,it makes for a good movie. great post.
 
In the 90's, a strong earner in a mall arcade would make $700 a week. Games like Street Fighter 2: Hyperfighting and racers like Daytona and Super GT are good examples of such titles. One thing that people need to understand about Mall arcades is the fact that a lot of arcade chains (like Namco, for example) had to pay a percentage of the game revenues. As you can imagine, it would be pretty hard to "accurately" report such revenue when your rent is tied directly to it.

"GamerTerry" (here on the forums) was a district manager for a major arcade chain, and perhaps he might weigh in here as to how they earned. He was there from the heyday on through the late 1990's...

Lee
 
Seems in the 1970's most games were part of another business. In the early 80's arcades became a stand alone business then later in the 80's through early 90's the malls were the hangout and the arcades moved there... There are exceptions of course but it is interesting to see the evolution.
 
My arcade was around during the period talked about here.

My experience was Missle Command was my first 50¢ game. Dragon's Lair was good for $700 a week until heat chewed up the disc player. After that it was down hill rapidly as players learned the moves.

Pac Man I got rid of once they could play it for 15 minutes for a quarter. Which was less than a couple weeks.

The only game that paid for itself fast was Gauntlet.

Anyone claiming games did thousands a week, ask to see their tax records.

During the video fad we made good money, and most of it went to keep up with the latest equipment. That was why most places closed when the fad ended, they didn't have the thousands the games supposedly took in to try and keep open.
LTG :)
 
I would guess that when new games were ordered by arcades it was a real crap shoot to guess which would make money and by the time you discovered it, every other arcade did to and they were all clamoring to order the same games and likely had to wait... by the time they got them they probably cooled down and thus it became a bit of a gamble?
 
I was at an auction a while back and the coin counter on a Daytona USA Deluxe had 1.5 million clicks on the coin counter. Must have made a lot of money for someone. I thought I read somewhere that Daytona USA is the highest grossing arcade game in history but perhaps its pac man. I guess being $.50 helped, and having head to head competition....

I played mostly at Mall Arcades back in the day. They did very well when arcades were big. There was a line for many games and people would put their quarters or tokens on the bottom rail of the marquee to mark their place in line. But the glory days were pretty short lived and for a lot of kids the arcade was a short lived fad...
 
I worked at an arcade in Miami from 1994-1996 and in Chicago in 1997...

Arcade in Miami with 35 games was pulling $8000-10000 a week in tokens.

Fridays -$1500, Saturdays-$2500-3000, Sundays-$1800-2000. There were RARELY days the arcade made less than $500 on a weekday.

in Chicago it was a bit trickier since it was a 5 cent arcade change from tokens but the business itself was pulling it $40,000-60,000 a month and still exists right now but I have no idea what their earnings are...

To put that in perspective, my friend has an arcade in Miami in the SAME location (next to an AMC) pulling about $6000 a month and my arcade in Nashville pulls between $4200-4600 typically, but half of that is console sales.

When I was at Rivergate Mall we had $4000 in quarters a month for the short time we were there and that was 2010...
 
I work/worked with a few people who worked at Edison Brothers HQ here in St. Louis during the mid-90's when they bought up large arcade chains:http://mcurrent.name/atarihistory/adventure.html#EdisonBrothersStores From everything they said, they lost money like mad. Basically, the number of locations making money was greatly outweighed by locations losing money. They told me that some licenses per machine were as much as $800/year per station (ie, 8 stations on an 8 player Daytona) in some places like Puerto Rico, Boston, and Philly supposedly. So most likely they were underwater right out of the gate. They also told me that Dave and Buster's actually made them a crapload of money, but then they sold it off, and that's also why Edison Brothers it out of business amongst other reasons. Tieing into what others said about the mob, a lot of locations demanded very personal information about the upper executives such as personal bank records and the whole nine yards in order to approve locations. Also in case anyone recalls, there was some sort of National Video Game Museum in St. Louis in the mid-90's. That was fronted by Edison Brothers who's HQ's were only a few blocks away. I never did visit it, I'm sure some of you have to know what it was though.
 
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