Death of the Arcade Age
I recently read that arcades died because the home market was able to match them in graphics, so people didn’t need to head out to get their fix anymore. They could stay home; play with their friends, etc.
Pshaw I say. A false enemy. Home consoles were all the rage in the 80’s and they sold like crazy, they didn’t die because the graphics weren’t as good as the arcades. They almost home systems died because PC’s started to out power them as gaming machines, and allowed games to go beyond eat dots, shoot aliens, simple games, to intricate stories with evil wizards, lounge lizards, and a great underground empire.
Arcades have always been the home of smack talk. They were the first “net game server” and need to be looked to as we go boldly through our internet age of gaming. In an arcade, you’d play against a machine and, if you did better than others at your arcade, put your name/initials on the machine for all to see, and try to beat. High-score boards were ladder systems, and occasionally, arcades even did prize entry contests with certain machines.
Head to head play through fighting games, racing games, etc gave an added edge to the competition and allowed for that immediate satisfaction of beating someone.
So what killed the arcade?
Story based games. I figured it out while I was goofing around with the MAME emulator. I still go back and play Time Pilot, Pac Man, Space Invaders, etc. But games with a story, with an end, with an objective… Those I stop playing the moment I complete the story. I’m done. It wasn’t a competition against Bill, or Joe, it was against the machine, and I won, and now I’m done. If you can’t get another competition out to me before I’m done, then I’ll find somewhere else to spend my time, and I may not come back.
Games at the end felt they needed a story to compete with the home market.
Here’s a hint, they don’t. Don’t believe me? PopCap Games should help prove the point. Simple internet games, fun to play, simple objective, and yet they do just fine. It’s always about beating your own last score, and no visible plot line to speak of.
I don’t want to sound like I don’t like plot or stories in my games; I do, on my computer. In my arcade, I don’t have 3, 4, 10 or 500 hours to try and work my way through a story when I can’t be guaranteed any sort of saving will be there next time I get back.
Even the trend towards story games wasn’t enough to keep me out of the arcades; it was games like Doom and Duke Nukem. The first network games truly killed the arcade as a home to video game competition. Now I didn’t need to go anywhere to truly test myself against machines, players, etc. I could do it at 2 in the morning, without ever running out of quarters.
So what can we learn from this?
A couple simple points:
1) Home systems for stories / Arcade Games for fun.
2) Online games should take a cue for the original network, the arcade. MMORPG’s should have rankings for highest fame, most fame gained in a day, a week, etc. Something for the player to strive to beat or compete with other players, without having to against other players.
3) All Family fun centers should get a stock pile of old games for an archive section. Simple early games, some will play from nostalgia, others will play because the games were just fun.
Unfortunately, arcades aren’t coming back. It was never clearer to me then when I was teaching a couple kids how to play Ms Pac-Man the other day (Don’t ask, it involves bring your kids to work day, and I got volunteered to do this). One of them asked, “Hey you got the cherries! What do they do?”
“Um nothing. They just give you points.” I replied
“Points?” They both asked.
“Yeah,” I sighed “in my days we didn’t have power ups.”
It was a different time, when the game was the point, not what you got from doing it. It was almost zen….
