The life and death of arcades in USA

I was one of the people that was a kid when arcades first became a thing and was around when the saw their rise and downfall over the span of about 15 years. In the early 80's, arcades were incredible and very profitable for the owners as well. These institutions were in just about every shopping mall and Aladdin's Castle was the one I remember the most.

src

I have heard stories that there is one of these that still remains but I don't know for sure where it is. The used to be everywhere though and for gaming fans, this was where you wanted to go most of all. A vast majority of the arcades were dark places so that you could see the screen better, and they didn't sell anything other than the games themselves. Most of them wouldn't even allow you to have food or drinks near the machines but for some reason, smoking inside was ok.... it was a different time back then.

src

These standalone arcades were very popular and mostly they would just be filled with teenagers and I wouldn't really call them family-friendly. This was a place that you wanted to go without your parents and hang out with other kids. At first, the high scores were the most important thing and then a bit later when fighting games like Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat were released, these were the main attractions of these locations.

On the other side of things we had the wildly popular Showbiz and Chuck-E-Cheese pizza restaurants that also contained arcades. There are still a few of these remaining but they don't really have much to do with video games anymore, it is mostly just playgrounds and games where you win token to buy garbage toys. It was very different back in the day.

src

Back in the 80's these places had a dining room with an robotic band that was actually really entertaining. This was the place that everyone had their birthday parties and while I don't remember a great deal about the quality of food, I would imagine it was just ok. Everyone went there for the arcade, the pizza was just an added bonus.

When home consoles began to get more and more powerful such as the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis, arcades started to die because although there certainly was a dramatic difference between the home versions of games and the arcade version we no longer felt as though it made much sense to spend quarters on a game that would could play endlessly at home for nothing.

Arcades slowly but surely started to disappear because these gigantic machines that were capable of playing only a single game were really expensive and therefore owners of arcades stopped buying them since the kids would just get the home version of whatever game had just come out. The only real incentive to go to an arcade other than just buy the game was because games were $30-$40 and not everyone had that kind of money to dole out on a game.

That's why I consider game rentals to actually be the final nail in the coffin for traditional arcades.

src

For just a few dollars you could rent basically any game in existence for 2 or 3 nights, which was normally enough time to defeat a game or get sick of it. long RPG's might have been the only exception to this but if your objective was simply to do a single playthrough it would probably be cheaper to just rent the game than to buy it.

A few arcades still managed to hang on by a thread but when next generation systems became just as powerful as the arcade machines there was truly no reason to have an arcade anymore.

It's hard to imagine that the lifetime of arcades as a business was only booming for about 10 years and then POOF! they basically disappeared in the United States overnight. There are still a couple of them kicking around here and there but after you play a couple games of Donkey Kong to relive your youth, there really isn't much reason to be there anymore. I'm just happy that I was just the right age to experience it when the were all the rage.

src

Stranger Things did a pretty great job showcasing what the arcade experience was like back then and if you missed that because you weren't born, I think you missed a great part of gaming history because there really hasn't been any experience like it once it died.