August 30, 2010 • 28 mins
Whatever happened to the video game arcade? In recent years, many video game arcades have closed or evolved to cope with an increasingly sophisticated home console market. Join Chris and Jonathan as they explore the rise and fall of video game arcades.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
text style from how stuff works dot com. Hello again, everyone,
welcome to text stuff. My name is Chris Poelette and
I am an editor at how stuff works dot com.
(00:23):
Sitting across from me, as usual, is senior writer Jonathan Strickland.
The page came from your dad's office at the 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.
(00:43):
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,
(01:03):
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
(01:23):
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
(01:45):
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
(02:05):
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
(02:29):
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
(02:50):
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,
(03:11):
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
(03:33):
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
(03:55):
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
(04:16):
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
(04:38):
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
(04:59):
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
(05:21):
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,
(05:43):
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
(06:05):
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
(06:27):
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.
(06:48):
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,
(07:10):
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
(07:32):
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.
(07:56):
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
(08:19):
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
(08:40):
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.
(09:03):
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
(09:24):
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
(09:46):
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
(10:07):
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
(10:29):
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
(10:53):
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.
(11:14):
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
(11:35):
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
(11:57):
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
(12:17):
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
(12:39):
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
(13:02):
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
(13:24):
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
(13:46):
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
(14:09):
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
(14:29):
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
(14:50):
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,
(15:14):
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
(15:35):
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
(15:57):
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,
(16:20):
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
(16:42):
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
(17:06):
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
(17:26):
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
(17:47):
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
(18:10):
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.
(18:32):
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
(18:53):
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,
(19:15):
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,
(19:36):
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
(19:56):
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
(20:17):
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
(20:38):
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,
(21:00):
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
(21:21):
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
(21:45):
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,
(22:06):
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
(22:29):
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
(22:50):
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
(23:10):
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
(23:33):
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
(23:54):
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
(24:16):
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
(24:39):
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,
(25:04):
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
(25:25):
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
(25:45):
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
(26:07):
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,
(26:27):
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
(26:49):
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
(27:10):
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.
(27:32):
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
(27:53):
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(28:18):
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I am an editor at how stuff works dot com.
(00:23):
Sitting across from me, as usual, is senior writer Jonathan Strickland.
The page came from your dad's office at the 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.
(00:43):
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,
(01:03):
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
(01:23):
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
(01:45):
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
(02:05):
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
(02:29):
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
(02:50):
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,
(03:11):
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
(03:33):
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
(03:55):
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
(04:16):
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
(04:38):
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
(04:59):
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
(05:21):
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,
(05:43):
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
(06:05):
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
(06:27):
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.
(06:48):
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,
(07:10):
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
(07:32):
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.
(07:56):
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
(08:19):
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
(08:40):
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.
(09:03):
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
(09:24):
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
(09:46):
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
(10:07):
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
(10:29):
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
(10:53):
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.
(11:14):
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
(11:35):
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
(11:57):
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
(12:17):
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
(12:39):
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
(13:02):
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
(13:24):
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
(13:46):
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
(14:09):
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
(14:29):
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
(14:50):
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,
(15:14):
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
(15:35):
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
(15:57):
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,
(16:20):
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
(16:42):
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
(17:06):
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
(17:26):
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
(17:47):
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
(18:10):
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.
(18:32):
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
(18:53):
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,
(19:15):
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,
(19:36):
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
(19:56):
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
(20:17):
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
(20:38):
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,
(21:00):
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
(21:21):
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
(21:45):
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,
(22:06):
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
(22:29):
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
(22:50):
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
(23:10):
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
(23:33):
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
(23:54):
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
(24:16):
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
(24:39):
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,
(25:04):
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
(25:25):
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
(25:45):
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
(26:07):
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,
(26:27):
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
(26:49):
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
(27:10):
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.
(27:32):
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
(27:53):
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
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(28:18):
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Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.