The arcade experience can be divided up into three distinct things that will better help explain the birth, death, and phoenix-like rebirth of the video game arcade: (1) venue; (2) hardware; (3) content.
The venue was a place that housed the hardware, or games themselves, and the content was the style of game play. Just in case that wasn't obvious.
Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, realized that games that people pump quarters into could be a sound business model. The first quarter-eating game Atari brought to the market was lamely called "Computer Space". It was a ripoff of an older game called Space War, but they seemed to replace the wrong word when they named their game. It was a flop, but mainly because people couldn't really get into the controls. A certain level of hand-eye coordination that today we take for granted hadn't yet developed.
Ironically, the game "Asteroid", much better known today, came out just a few years later, after the explosion of "Pong" and "Space Command" and was a success; it had the exact same controls as Computer Space: accelerate, fire, rotate left, rotate right. By the time Asteroid hit the arcades, folks understood.
Once the popularity of the games finally took off, the gamers just needed a place to go to play. This is the birth of the arcade as we know it: a dark and dimly lit place where kids spent hours and dollars hunched over games and a weird guy patrolled with a crotch mounted quarter dispenser.
The games, housed in those large plastic cabinets, had a very specific style of game play: they were programmed to kill you. Bushnell and Atari knew where the threshold was for profitability, and they programmed the games as such to make them profitable. What does that mean? Games that offer just a burst of excitement; games that are easy to learn but nearly impossible to master; games that keep you coming back for more.
Venue, hardware, and content set and ready to make millionaires out of some people.
Atari and the millions came later, though, with the home gaming console. Fairchild Semiconductor released their Channel F Video Entertainment System, the first real home video game console. Seeing this as the future of the gaming market, a console you put interchangeable game cartridges into (how revolutionary), Atari jumped into the fray, and a year after the Channel F, the Atari 2600 was unleashed on the world.
The Atari 2600 has gone down in history as one of the most important consoles ever. It (1) made people think video games in your house was a viable activity; and (2) it almost destroyed the entire market for video games in America. Both the creator and nearly the destroyer. It's complicated, baby.
Why mention this in a post about arcades? Well, because it's all connected.
The arcade was for a long time under scrutiny from unhappy parents who didn't want their kids going to some dark sweaty place and spending money hunched over a plastic cabinet. That doesn't seem like it makes men out of those young pimply boys. That's another misconception, that boys were the only arcade gamers. Both Centipede and Pac-Man were very hot commodities with the ladies, not to mention the most popular arcade booth ever: Ms. Pac-Man.
In any case, the Atari 2600 began to sap some of the arcade's business. After Warner, who was brought it as a financial backer of Atari, forced out Nolan Bushnell, then shit all over Atari's game programmers, they left and formed Activision, and took the title of "Fastest Growing Company in the US" away from Atari. What hadn't yet been realized by the honchos at Atari was that video game design is more an art-form than simple computer programming. There are plenty of creative decisions that are needed to be made during the course of game design, and even at that early juncture, there was an obvious difference good game design and poor game design.
When Activision became so profitable, other companies decided to jump in the mix and make cartridges for the 2600. What happened? There was a flood of shitty games for the Atari, so much so that you couldn't distinguish the good games (the few from Activision like "Pitfall") from the awful crap that saturated the market.
It got so bad that two awful missteps, the wretched port of Pac-Man (the bringing of the arcade classic to the home console)(considered one of the two or three worst games ever) and the even worse ET game (considered the worst game ever by many lists) pretty much destroyed then entire market.. Atari literally buried thousands of the ET cartridges in the desert. Check online for reviews and gameplay if you're really interested in seeing for yourself. I recommend it if you like video games and history.
Those two games, coupled with the total saturation of garbage cartridges, spelled the collapse of the market, which in 1983 happened. The home console market was dead, and the arcade was fading as well.
At the height there were maybe 10,000 arcades open throughout the country, but they started closing in the early '80s, and then more steadily after '83.
It took some shrewd business decisions and partnerships, but by 1986 Nintendo hit the Christmas shelves, and by Christmas '87 Nintendo was everywhere.
Arcades were still around, but on the wane, when the "The Legend of Zelda" was released for the Nintendo Entertainment System.
Compare the game play of an arcade game and the first Zelda: one is built on short bursts of excitement and designed to kill you fast, while the other has no clock, makes it necessary to simply explore a world, lets you save your progress, and has no score.
Once home gaming became this sophisticated the arcade experience really started to look antiquated.
The venue was changing to a living room or bedroom, the hardware was now a tiny console you could put different games into, and the content, or style of gaming, was radically different.
The last throws of life was seen in the cartoony Street Fighter 2 and it's more realistic rival, Mortal Kombat.
The legacy of Street Fighter 2, you could say, came from it's six button and joy-stick control setup. That game allowed players to do special moves with specific combinations of stick-directions and button strokes. Mortal Kombat also had this feature, and it can be argued that this complexity of button control helped usher in a world where very complicated controllers and game styles became the norm of what today we call hard-core gaming.
Meanwhile, in Japan, the 1983 collapse hadn't effected either the home gaming or arcade market.
Really, at the heart of this business model you have venues, hardware, and content.
Japan began to look at which arcade experiences were successful there and how they might fare in the States. One of the first import games of the rebirth era was Dance Dance Revolution. This is a rhythm game where a player uses their feet and body as the controller, jumping up and down on a controller pad.
Like Mortal Kombat a decade before, it began to garner a crowd. People loved to watch someone who was really good at it. Here was a gaming experience you couldn't have at home (until the home pad was made available, but the idea is sound). That's come to define one of the three main directions in which the arcade experience has gone: things you can't do in your living room.
Nowadays there are games you literally climb into that whip you around while simulating a flight mission. There's even a house-of-horror type game where you're using a light-blasting automatic weapon protecting yourself from marauding zombies. It's like lazer-tag, a haunted house, and those mirror-rooms combined.
That's the main direction of the hardware aspect of the rebirth of the arcade.
Besides places like Dave and Busters, Kitchen Den and Bar, and Chuck E. Cheese's, a separate direction for the venue evolution of arcade games are bars with the ubiquitous Megatouch consoles.
(Chuck E. Cheese's incidentally was founded by Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, as a relatively safe place for your kids to play arcade games--a venture from which he made more money than Atari due to his early ousting.)
At the end of many, many a bar in this country's watering holes sits a coin-operated television touch screen that has pre-loaded hundreds of puzzles and games. We've all seen them, right? This may seem a strange inheritor of the title arcade game, but these consoles number about 100 million, which is as many Pac-Man cabinets there were at that game's apex. Megatouch games only trail Ms. Pac-Man for the top arcade gaming apparatus in history.
Now in the realm of content, that fast-paced style of game play that was left by the way-side as gamers went for the Zelda and Final Fantasy style of role playing and exploration games, has seen a resurgence as well. People who made franchises like Halo and Gears of War and Call of Duty very profitable entities have become on occasion tired of such long adventures. Those games take on the order of 30 to 40 hours to complete, and sometimes you just want a quick burst of action.
Besides hand held devices like the Sony PSP or the Nintendo DS, both of which offer fast paced style games, possibly the best example of this new/old style of game is Geometry Wars. The game is beautiful, all action all the time, easy to learn but hard to master, over quickly, and, for the first time in maybe fifteen years, the score is beginning to matter again.
The full circle.
There are a few things that I, while not a gamer per se, respect and admire about the industry, and represent a few things I'd like to touch on later: the fact that the industry generates nearly three-times as much revenue as the NFL; that casual gaming is so pervasive that I had to convince someone that yes, Angry Birds is a video game; that hard-core gaming has become so involved as to bring about MMO games (Massive Multiplayer Online--the top banana being World of Warcraft)--online worlds where people spend more time than they're regular ones...
...I don't know. Anything that has such a wide array of related objects of human observation--casual gamers playing on their phone or getting grandma to play Wii bowling, versus the hard core gamers spending fifty, sixty, maybe even seventy hours a week using an avatar to run around a virtual world with friends they've never met in person--has got to be worth observing and reported about.
That shit is almost past pop-culture. It affects people and commerce in staggering numbers.
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