But it’s also a social space, even for introverts. People would stop and watch you playing, it was easy to start a chat, or even challenge someone to a game of tekken or dead or alive.
There has to be a business model to bring them back.
Admittedly, the demographic has changed - it isn't 10-15 year old kids all piling into a dark room together with the only "adult" being the 17 year old working there. It is 4-12 year old kids with their parents.
One of the nice things about Stargate was that the high score allowed for several characters instead of just 3 for initials. You could write almost a whole sentence if you beat the high score.
This led to some extremely heated competition as my friend would write very nasty insults about me so that when I would show up to the arcade I would see it and spend hours trying to beat his score so I could post insulting material about him on the high score.
Another friend and I mastered Asteroids and we would have extra lives/ships lined up all across the top of the screen and beyond.
Over time this would lead to some interesting things due to low memory issues like the lines that made up the asteroid rocks would come detached and strange artifacts flickering on the screen.
Years later collecting ROM’s of these old arcade games to play over MAME emulator I was astonished at just how small the programs were.
I miss the arcades of the 80’s
We'd play a two-player game together, and at some point I let him play Street Fighter 2 or Mortal Combat while I shyly tried another game, in the safe knowledge that he was just a few arcades over.
I still vividly remember going by myself because he couldn't join. It was terrifying, but because I picked a mostly-single-player game and I recognized some of the patrons, I managed.
Unfortunately, because I was the only red-headed white guy there, there was a moment where as I was playing some guy thought it would be funny to put out his cigarette on my leg. That set me back for a bit.
But I still consider that arcade experience as the first time I learned to venture out into the scary world, and thankfully the bad experience didn't set me back too much. After that came the Counter-Strike sessions at internet cafés and, with a gap of probably half a decade or so, being a student and actually hanging out in bars with my peers without an arcade game mediating all of it.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. I imagine my next venture into the social world will probably involve table-top gaming or ping-pong. I'm just not that good at socializing without it being centered around something :).
But man, it's rare that I get a wave of nostalgia this big. I had another rare one recently when I watched the Digital Ocean "Final Fight: DF Retro revisits the arcade original, every port, and all sequels" review (https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-retro...). Final Fight and Cadillacs and Dinosaurs were the two arcade games that I remember being somehow significant (other than TMNT: Manhatten Project, but that was mostly because I at least knew of the TMNT. and to be fair it was an amazing game).
Like others have said they've come back somewhat in urban areas as 'barcades,' at least until Covid-19. These kinds of businesses will be struggling for many years to come if they manage to survive at all.
There is. There are arcade-bars that serve alcohol and food to cater to millennials.
I would say Pokemon GO is a good example of an evolutionary / revolutionary game with roots in the arcade-genre. I would like to see more games like this with built-in necessity to bring people together.
Maybe some mixture of peripherals, gesture tech and VR will have to be the way forward. But there really wouldn't be a replacement for getting in a cockpit-like booth complete with full haptic feedback.
Starwing Paradox and Gundam: Senjo no Kizuna come to mind.
or are we having a nostalgia episode?
One recent/current outlier is the Killer Queen arcade game: dedicated hardware, console ports that may capture the game but the in-person experience is entirely different and exclusive.
There's certainly a lot of nostalgia. Arcade games at the time of Street Fighter II were significantly more capable than home games; unless, you had a Neo Geo at home, because somehow $900 for the console and $200 for a game was affordable to you in the 90s. Around the end of the 90s, we started seeing arcade systems that were really supercharged consoles: Sega Naomi is a Dreamcast with more memory and runs from either roms or a ramdisk that caches a whole optical disk at boot. Into the 2000s and beyond, games based on PCs started appearing (some of which will show BIOS screens and windows boot logos at power on... others have the decency to disable video until after the arcade program has started). Most games are simply not impressive in the arcade anymore, unless they're huge, or have a compelling deluxe cabinet. This is part of why you don't see a couple games at a grocery/liquor store anymore --- they'd either have to be classic games, or take up too much space, or a multicade, there's not much coming out that's a standard cabinet, which is mostly what would fit (lots of new pinball though, but those won't fit were you could have had one pac-man, that later became one street fighter II).
The arcade style of game is of course very different than an MMO. There's not usually a lot of state saved between games; a handful of games let you setup a profile and keep upgrades between games, but most start you back at the bottom every time. That tends to make the games more immediate, and less grindy, but also they tend to be less deep. Although, if you want to grind, there's always redemption games.
- large arcade, all games set to freeplay, you pay $x for a couple hours of unlimited play
- a "barcade", cheaper entry fee and you can stay til closing time, where the games are more of a loss leader to bring people in to buy food and drinks while they play. more multiplayer games here to aid in the social aspect. also cupholders at each machine.