The Rise and Fall of the Video Arcade

That number has been disconnected for twenty years. Wow. Recent quote. Yeah, that's a quote from a movie that hasn't even come out yet. That's awesome. I'm tron legacy, but it actually pertains to what we're going to be talking about. Absolutely. For once, I actually told said what the name of the movie was. Usually, I don't do that. Do you all know that he's every time he does that, he's actually quoting from a movie or song or song. Yeah, sometimes it's a song, that's true, sorry, so yeah, but

usually a movie. I'm waiting to get to the point where the listeners start to write in and tell me what I'm quoting from. What we did? Give that challenge once? Yeah, so I think he just did it. For the subsequent episodes is right, Yeah, you need to go back and listen to I don't know when I started doing that, but yeah, make a list after you were doing the greetings from the world, the world different. Hello. But moving on to our actual topic, which is arcades. That again

pertains to the quote I chose. Um, the we wanted to talk about kind of the rise and fall of the video game arcade. Yes, indeed, I spent many many quarters growing up in video arcades. I started off spending many many quarters, and then I shifted to spending many dollars to get tokens. Yes, because that happened. Well, it was a great money making scheme. Well, I guess we can talk about that too, although that's kind of tertiary

to the full discussion. So to to really discuss the history of video game arcades, I need to cut off Chris just before he's about to say something. What were you gonna say, Chris? Well, I was going to launch into a whole thing, But go ahead, please launch. Okay. So, of course many of you know that I am older than many of our listeners. Um, but I grew up in a skating ring. My brother was really in the

roller skate when I was a kid. No, but I mean you spent a lot of time and as a kid, and I remember, going back to the research, I remember a lot of the things that I've seen as seminal moments in video gaming. I remember the tabletop space uh Space Invaders games and things like Gunfight and all these things, and just watching them go from you know, the he had the rack of video games are pinball machines. You have four or five of those and maybe a couple

of video games. And then gradually they started squeezing out the pinball games and suddenly there were arcades in the neighborhood where you could play all kinds of stuff like Joust and Robotron and Defender Spy Hunter. I mean, you know, the kids growing up in the late seven these in early eighties, like like me, you know, that was a big thing we did. We'd go down the arcade at all.

As a matter of fact, I had a friend whose parents owned an arcade and a score yeah yeah, well, I mean they every once in a while they'd give me an extra dollars worth of of tokens. But but yeah, but that was the thing. It was like, uh, you know, we'd we'd spend quarters on them. And then of course the token thing was sort of a way to get more people involved, but I mean it was for a very long time. That was a great way to spend a summer afternoon when you're a kid. Yeah. Um, so

I have a quick question for you. Okay, So when you were growing up in the skating rink, yes, uh, with the pterodactyls flying around outside and all that, had they actually invented the wheel or were you just kind of skidding along on shoes. I don't like you very much, so, uh my point here is Chris as Old. Um. Yeah, the Yeah, the arcade was kind of a growth out of the whole video game uh popularity boom, because arcades didn't just pop up as soon as the arcade games

popped up. It took a while. You know. They were in places like skating rinks and bars and restaurants. You'd see one or two games here and there, but there

wasn't any arcade to put them in. A back when we talked about pinball machines before, but there weren't any you know, pinball machine arcades, at least not very many of them, right, I think there were there were kinds of well, the same kind of places now where you have you know, for example, ski ball and other kinds of things, but those are kinds of things you'd find

and you know, amusement parks and things like that. They weren't really free standing like the video game arcade at the eighties was right, right, So the previous arcades would be things like a Coney Island. Go to Coney Island and you could they might have an arcade section as in, it's an area where there are games of skill or

sometimes not skill um that you could play. And uh so, so as a combination of that old mode of business, this this idea of an area of entertainment and then the fact the video games that were popping up in places like bars and skating rinks and things like that,

we're getting really popular. So it wasn't a huge lee for people to say, hey, what if I were to create a space, uh like you know, a storefront space and just fill it with these arcade games and then my business will just be having people come in to play the games. Yes, and the arcade was born, the video game arcade. We should say, I mean, I keep on having to specify because arcade, the word arcade has

been around for much longer. Yeah, it's actually kind of funny. Um, any of you who have had the moment when you realize that a song that you really like is a cover of a song that is very old or you know, decades old and in fact um and you sort of had that feeling of regret and let down, you know, Man, I didn't realize that somebody else actually did this song. I had the same moment when I, you know, went to get my haircut in an arcade and I couldn't figure out why they the games were. I had that

come on, I and where are the games? It's an arcade. It's like, no, actually that's not literally video game in arcade are not necessarily it's anonymous, right exactly. Yes, I had the same experience because I also grew up in the eighties. Um uh, both the Wheel and the Fire had been around for a while when I was a kid. U. So yeah, they started popping up in the seventies and the earliest days of arcade games. So we're talking about things like Pong and Space Invaders Galaxy and that kind

of thing. Um, And they got more popular as more video games started coming out, and for a while there was a little worry among arcade owners that the video game home market could could make an impact on arcades. But the early video game home market was really limited. Uh. You normally, your graphics and your sound and everything that you got out of a home video game console, and we're talking about the late seventies early eighties here, just could not compare to what you could get in an arcade.

Like a video game arcade, the games would be more sophisticated in the arcade than they were in the home market. Also, Uh, the style of games was totally different, and it it You have to think of this from a business standpoint for it to really make sense. Video game arcade video games. So the ones that you would actually find in these places were designed to be really intense and fun, but last for a relatively short time span, like any individual

play session. You have hit on the crux of the problem. Yeah, yes you have. So if I go into an arcade and I want to play a video game, that game has been built, has been designed with the experience in mind that it should be fun and challenging, but it should also not last very long because otherwise you can't make money, right, Because I mean, it's a per play. A pay per play model, so that means that every time you you play the game, you're paying some money.

It's not like it's a time based model. Like if our kids were more of a you pay a certain amount of money and then you get unlimited plays for an hour, it would be a totally different story right now. But because it was a pay per play system and meant that you had to keep the plays at a short uh time span, or else you lost money because you had a kid plunk one quarter into a game

and then stand there all day playing. That's right, Yes, that was the ideal video game customer because I came in and dropped, you know, six dollars with the quarters in there, and about ten minutes. Yeah, it doesn't take long if you are not particularly adept, or if the game is designed to be really really hard, or in some cases the game's just playing unfair. Oh yeah, and it's there's you can And there were some that would allow you to allow the the game owner to set

the complexity of the game. Yeah, you could make it where the you could set the difficulty level for some games. And of course the once game started to include the continue feature, that was a real boon as well, because it meant that you could uh coax the player into spending more money to keep the experience going without losing all the progress that he or she had made. Yeah, it's uh, it's kind of funny though, but yeah, that's

exactly the point. I mean, if you've got an arcade full of video games, um, and you've got a steady stream of people coming in to plump quarters down or uh you know, even more for some games, depending on the situation, then you basically have a semi captive audience. And anything uh you know, you have the the video game level set maddeningly difficult, um you know, where people will just go, I'm gonna try it again and drop another quarter in there. Or the continue game feature, well

then uh you certainly do that. And and the multiplayer games where you had you know, two, three, four people getting involved in a game. Yeah, that's where you get the social aspect, which was something else that home video game systems were not terribly good at. I mean, you had a lot of the early home video game systems were designed for two players, but that was as much

as you could get. And and it's difficult to have a group of people over to play games where only two people can play at the same time, because people are always waiting for the next turn. And in arcade you had variety, so people could go and play other games, while if if their favorite game was occupied, they could either wait or they could play something else. Home video

games not so much. Um. In fact, early home video games, and we'll probably talk about this in another podcast, UM, some of the early consoles were limited to four games hard coded on the console itself. This was before the cartridge four, before the yeah four games, Yeah I have one.

They only had three, right, right, Some of the earlier ones had even fewer, but at any rate, so the arcade had the advantage over there in the social aspect for a really long time, right, And it had the advantage of graphics and sound for a really long time. But eventually the home market started to catch up, and on top of that, players began to divide up into two camps. You had the people who really like the arcade experience in the sense of the kind of games

that have that really intense but short time frame. The video game market at home, you could create games that lasted a really long time, had a really extended experience, and because you've already paid for the game, right, I mean you you went out and you plug down fifty dollars for a video game. Uh, whether you play it once or whether you play it forever, that you've already poured all the money you're going to into that game, at least until we get to downloadable content, which was

much further down the road. So at that stage, you could go ahead and design a game for players that would be very you know, an extended experience. It's something that you can't get in our arcade without sacrificing profit. Yes, uh. And then as players began to value that experience, they stopped going to arcades as much, um, and so the arcade attendance began to suffer. And that's when you say

it's also really expensive actually to maintain in arcade. Well, talk about talk about the costs, the relative costs a enemy you uh you have. Let's say I'm making up a generic console home console game. You you spend say three dollars for the console and about fifty dollars sixty dollars for a game, and that's expensive. I mean to get started when you're first getting buying a new console. I mean if it's something like you know, a brand

new Xbox or or PlayStation. Um, you know, when it first comes out, it could be six seven hundred dollars from the machine. Still one uh one stand up coin operated arcade game much more expensive than that, especially if it's new, yes, or paradoxically some of the older ones as well, because they become collectors items. Indeed. So I mean,

and that's just one game. If you're trying to you know, pay rent on an arcade space every month, pay employees, which is going to be one of your largest items on the budget anyway, I mean staffing, uh, and then you have to pay for the electricity to run all these electronics in your your establishment. You have to get people in and they're they're dropping in a quarter at a time. I mean, that's why, you know, the the economics of it are just so are just so bad

unless you have people thronging through the doors. And that's why I think, Um, that's a big thing that had a lot to do with the rise and cost of the video games. I remember going back into an arcade and in the nineties, you know, after dropping quarter after quarter in the games before and then finding that a lot of them were at least fifty cents to play, if not a dollar, and you're going, you know, I can't afford to, you know, play more than four or

five games of time. Yeah, and and so it's expensive. And you can see that reflected in the way arcades started to change strategies and how to charge customers. When we talked about the tokens thing, Really, the tokens come down to you spending more money than you normally would because if you put a dollar in a change machine, you get four quarters out. There's no guarantee that you're gonna spend those four quarters at the arcade. You may

just be using that change machine. You might play one game and then you walk away with seventy five cents. If you get tokens, you can only use it in the arcade. And a lot of times they would use a little techniques like you know, if you buy, you put in a dollar, you get four tokens, but if you put in five dollars, you know, maybe they'll throw in an extra dollar's worth of tokens, so you get tokens, you know, So it entices you to spend even more

cash at the arcade itself. Yeah, because they're just selling time on machines. They're not. There's no loss for them to throw in some free tokens. And then then you have establishments like David Busters that uses a hard based system where you're buying credit and the credit is put on a card and then you slide the card in the games. This is brilliant because now you've reached the

point where you've you've removed the value from the game itself. Like, unless you're really good at doing math in your head, it's really hard to establish how much money each per play is costing you, because you know, you put in twenty bucks, you get twenty bucks worth of credit on your on your card, and it's it's transferred into points, and then each game is worth a certain amount of points.

Unless you're like doing that conversion in your head, you're not thinking, hey, this has cost to be a buck twenty five per play or something like that. Um, and I just pulled that number of thin air, so sure, yeah, that was just an example. Um yeah, as I always do. We have to do that sometimes to set up an example. So right, So, so those were some some ways of arcades trying to extend their their lifespan and some of them are still around, like Damon Busters. Of course you

can find those locations around the United States. Excuse me, had a little hiccup there. Um. And of course those cards are reloadable, so you could bring it back next time you come. Yeah, you can actually use them in different locations to see. That's another enticement there, because back as as opposed to the tokens, which might only work in one arcade, if you if you go to a franchise, you might be able to transfer those those credits towards

another game system, although that's not necessarily seamless. I had. I experienced a problem when I visited Philadelphia and went to a David Busters and tried to use my Atlanta David Buster's card, and the person behind the counter, because I was actually going up to the counter at that point, the automated systems were full, uh look and said, something's weird here. It's telling me that you're from Atlanta. That's not weird. That is where I'm from. Are you calling

Atlanta weird? I mean, I'm not gonna be mad. I'm just wondering what you're basing that on. And we got into this big philosophical discussion, and I didn't get to play my ski ball, but that's a story for another podcast ski Ball. That's actually a good point, oh about how arcades would try and differentiate themselves from the home market. Yes.

One of the things that I read that uh, that may also have played a smaller role in the decline of the popularity of video games, or at least the video game arcade, is that a lot of the organizations now that still maintain a lot of video games and other kinds of amusements like that they switched to a ticket reward system, so and a lot of video games didn't offer that, and you didn't see you know, frog

pumping out tickets. It's hard to it's hard to compete with the home video game market today because home video

games are so sophisticated. Yes, right, So if you go and get the PlayStation three and Xbox three sixty we or a really you know, a decent gaming computer, you can run games that that are phenomenal, that are really deep, rich experiences, that have amazing graphics, you know, and and can have hours and hours of gameplay to them, whereas, uh, you know, our kids just can't compete with that experience.

So One of the ways that they get around that is by offering these amusements, these these games of skill or chance or whatever that that rewards you for playing with tickets. And then of course eventually you can trade the tickets in to get something. For example, a friend of mine who I will not name, uh, played these enough at a Dave and Busters to get an Xbox. Yeah. If you've ever yeah, if you've ever looked at the points needed to get some of these big ticket items,

they're astronomical. So you sit there and you start doing the bath, like, all right, how many plays of various ticket winning games did he have to did he have to go through in order to buy essentially, you know, to trade the tickets in to get an Xbox? And I wonder how many actual consoles he could have purchased with the money that he's spent, you know, buying it so that he could play those games. We know people were uh to do that. I wasn't going to say

that he's stupid, he doesn't listen to this show. I'm alright, alright, yeah, um, but uh but yeah, I mean that they were trying all kinds of things at one point. I mean, hey, there was this game that you could dance on and there were different colored pads on the floor and you could you know, match this stuff on the thing, and you couldn't do that at home except when they brought it home. Yeah, so you know, and see, that's those are the kind of games you're going to see at

arcades now. They are the games that tend to be bigger, immersive experiences than things that you typically will see at home until the next big innovation, like until Connect comes out or or the next generation of consoles come out where you can kind of simulate the arcade experience even further in your own home. The way that arcides differentiate themselves is through these games like the dance dance games and the racing games where it's actual it yeah, and

you're usually racing against other players. Or there are a lot of light gun games, lots and lots of those, because these are experiences that are not as easily replicable at home. So clearly that helps differentiate them from the home video game market and gives you a reason to go in there and play these games. Uh. But as the market gets the home market gets more sophisticated, that

spells more trouble for these arcade systems. That also is what makes old fogies like me and Chris cry when we walk into an actual arcade establishment that still exists, because while most of them died out, not all of them did. Some of them are still around. But when you walk into one and you're an old timer, you kind of get upset because you look around and you're like, well, all the games here are the same. They're all either racing games, dance games, or gun games. Where where's the rampage,

where's the elevator action? Where's the pack land? Yeah? Uh, yeah, I want to play that new pac Man game that you saw at CES. Oh, the four the Four Persons simultaneous pac Man game, which is only available in an arcade version. Right. Yeah. But if you are an old fogy like us, uh and you're interested in catching up on something, you might check out this one place I read about in an article on the Christian Science Monitor

by Ethan Gilsdorf. Um Up in New Hampshire there is the American Classic Arcade Museum, and there's nothing and there it's it's over an arcade, but no machine in there is newer. So it sounds like a lot of fun for those of us who are into that kind of thing. There were some good games made after that too, but sure,

this is the classic. Really, the arcade didn't truly start suffering until about the mid nineties, which is which is when you started seeing some of the more advanced home consoles start to come out of that point, the ne S and super A nes UH didn't take a huge chunk out of the Arcade AIDS until until much later, and like I said, until the mid nineties. So but yeah, there there plenty of great games that were made eight or earlier discs of tron Um Elevator Actions by Hunter

Fantastic Games. So yeah, that's that's kind of the story between about the rise and fall of arcades. I mean, like I said, we could still find a few of them scattered here and there, but they aren't they aren't as omnipresent as they seem to be in the early eighties. I mean, it used to be that there you couldn't walk into a shopping mall without finding at least one arcade. There are some malls I went into that were big enough to have to remember that, and they were always

packed with people too. Yeah, and and you know there's certain experiences that you just can't get like you can play on Xbox Live. You can play against other players, which is fantastic, and other other game systems supports similar uh competitive or cooperative game play online, and that's fantastic.

It's still not quite the same as lining up to a an arcade console and or arcade cabinet rather and plunking a quarter down on the screen to mark that you have the next game as two people are battling it out in Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter or or something like that. I remember when people used to put a quarter up on the screen glass to let you know next game. Yeah, I remember. So, So let's let's wrap this up with do you have any like favorite arcade stories at all? I have one I can tell

if you want to think of one. Okay, go ahead, okay. So I attended a science fiction convention in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Uh in, oh gosh. It probably would been in the early nineties maybe, And sadly, one of the biggest attractions at this tiny, tiny convention was a copy of gaunt Let Too that was in their little game area for for the hotel. It was the hotel's arcade machine and one of the convention guys decided that it would be fun to go ahead and invest and get tons and

tons and tons of quarters. I know that some people hate me using the phrase tons of stuff, but anyway, lots of quarters and allow people to play this game as long as they wanted to. So I got in on level one and played Gauntlet too with three other people until we got to some ridiculous level like in the hundreds and uh and that was one of the most fun experiences because it was just, again, you've got four people working together. They're cooperating trying to to play

through this game. And uh and you know the the jokes that come up as people accidentally do things like shoot the food. If you've ever played the Gauntlet games, it has some very uh distinctive phrases that come out as you play, like, you know, warriors shop the food elf, your life force is running out, Wizard needs food badly. So uh yeah, that just ended up becoming a great community experience. Yeah, I um, I don't really have a

story like that so much, but I do. I do remember going to my friend's parents arcade, and you know that I was pretty much guaranteed to see somebody I knew there, which was really really cool. And then I used to go to this one pizza place all the time when I was a kid, and my parents would just you know, give me five bucks to play until the pizza showed up, and you know, there was always

something good. Marble Madness, Spy Hunter Tapper, Marble Madness. Wow, yeah, that was That was the first time I encountered Dragon's Layer and uh, you know, trying to figure out the sequence of moves that would get you to the next level. And yeah, I finally got to see a laser disc of Dragon's Layer which showed how to go through the whole game and win at the end. And then after it ran through that, it showed all the ways you can die. Yeah, though the different ways you could die

part was about three times longer than the actual gameplay part. Um. Yeah, it's it's it's definitely one of those experiences. It's kind of sad to see it go away. But at the same time, financially, it's hard to justify operating an arcade. It's just really challenging to do it in a way that that will make enough money to pay all the bills, much less turn a profit. So it's challenging. I'd still like to find that cow milking video game that you

were talking about. Go to Japan, dude. We should also add that this is really only true necessarily in North America. There are other places where arcades are still going strong, and Japan is one of those places. You can go to Japan and there are plenty of different arcades, and they have really innovative games, and sometimes they're really crazy, like a a Milk the Cow arcade game where you

actually milk the electronic utters of a plastic cow. But it was basically like Simon, right, Yeah, that's what That's what it looked like to me. I didn't work up the courage to actually play it because I was certain that video of me playing it would show up online later. And sadly, that particular arcade no longer exists. International Bowl and Arcade off Bufford Highway. I miss you. Just goes to show you if you get the opportunity to play

an unusual coin operated video game, sees that opportunity. Dude. Did you ever play any of the arcade arm wrestling games? Okay, we'll get into that later. Okay, any of you guys have any questions, comments, topic suggestions, or anything like that.

You can write us our email. I just is text stuff at how stuff works dot com and Chris and I will arm wrestle you again really soon if you're a tech stuff and be sure to check us out on Twitter Text Stuff hs ws R handle and you can also find this on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash tech stuff h s W For more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com and be sure to check out the new tech stuff blog now on the house stuff Works homepage.

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