Remember quarters?
The other day I walked out of Gameworks video-game arcade with 60 cents in my pocket. It wasn’t 60 cents per se, just a game card with six credits in reserve that the friendly Gameworks employees told me is worth about 60 cents.
All the same, it was a weird experience for someone who lived through the height of the video-game-arcade era.
These days the arcade has been reduced to a mini-Las Vegas, where expensive lighting and carpeting dress up the fact that players pay premium rates to eat, drink and play games that, for the most part, they could enjoy at home.
Around the height of the arcade era, say, the very Orwellian year of 1984, kids would play video games stuck in any convenience store or pizza parlor they could find. And arcades were dark places anchored in shopping malls, filled with cranky teenage employees and row after row of gloriously blinking, flashing and winking video games.
Whether you walked into one of the these gaming dens with a $10 bill earned on a paper route or 5 bucks’ worth of hush money from your mom to keep you busy while she shopped, the end result was the same. You left with nothing but the smile on your face and the burning desire to return as soon as possible.
“Gorf,” “Tron,” “Galaga” and “Dragon Quest” were some of the regular stops on this digital mystery tour. Later in the arcade era, kids would line up to flash “Mortal Combat” and “Tekken” skills.
Today, the arcade struggles to compete with the Xbox and PlayStation. Perhaps nothing has been the same since Sega moved “House of the Dead” from the arcade to console. While the Dreamcast was almost a company-destroying product line for Sega, it was certainly a heavy blow to the arcade.
“HotD” was an arcade winner. Two players would mercilessly gun down undead monsters in high-resolution gore with plastic guns. In some respects, it was the perfect nerd first date. If your partner could shoot in a clutch, then you knew it was true love. “HotD” gave big-box arcades like Dave & Buster’s and Gameworks a reason to live.
The Dreamcast provided a pixel-perfect version of the arcade game and offered plastic guns to complete the set. And the cost benefit worked out well for the home gamer. The price of arcade tokens plus the cost of arcade-
priced beer and eats compared with a cheap evening of microwave pizzas and a case of your favorite beverage meant it didn’t matter that your home TV was smaller than the arcade games’ screens. With the Dreamcast, you could play the arcade hits at home.
With “Dance Dance Revolution” leading the way, the modern arcade has done a good job of reinventing itself as a social space with games and food. Now, the next challenge is giving gamers more reasons to use up all their quarters.
THIS WEEK | Upcoming game releases
TimeShift, X360, Vivendi Games, released Sunday; FlatOut 2, PS2/PC, Vivendi Games and Empire Interactive, Sunday; Super Monkey Ball Adventure, PS2/PSP, SEGA, Sunday; Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII: Lost Episode, Cell, Square Enix, Sunday; VeggieTales: LarryBoy and the Bad Apple, PS2, Crave Entertainment, Sunday; Sandlot Basketball, Xbox, Vivendi Games, Friday; Neverend, PC, Dusk2Dawn Interactive, Wednesday; Sandlot Football, Xbox, Vivendi Games, Friday; Sandlot Hockey, Xbox, Vivendi Games, Friday; Lost Planet, Cell, Capcom, Sunday; No Brainer 3D, Cell, Superscape, Sunday|Source: GamerMetrics.com
