End of the Arcade

Well, it's almost the end of 2010, which has got me thinking about the end of arcade gaming. There are still plenty of arcades around, especially at seaside resorts, in motorway services and in theme parks, but they are no longer filled with shoot 'em ups, platformers and beat 'em ups from the likes of Capcom, Taito, Midway or SNK.  Sega has managed to hang on, thanks to their generally more elaborate cabinets still attracting attention, so games like Sega Rally, Manx TT, Daytona USA, Ghost Squad and House of the Dead can still be found.  Likewise, Namco's Time Crisis and Final Furlong and Konami's world conquering Dance Dance Revolution are still common sights, but most of these machines are pushing a decade old now and usually in pretty poor condition.

Dance Dance Revolution - bringing teenage girls to arcades since 1998.

What killed the arcade? 

General consensus is that it was the rise in home gaming during the mid to late 90s. For starters, there was the birth of the 32-bit, polygonal games consoles, the Sony PlayStation, the Sega Saturn and the Nintendo N64. These machines were capable of providing the best conversions gamers had ever seen, with even the latest games migrating relatively unscathed. Plus they offered their own unique, often more cinematic experiences, with games such as Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy VII. As for the hardware in the consoles, it was often based on the same hardware as current arcade machines. A case in point was the Sega Dreamcast, from 1998, which was essentially a home version of the Naomi system board.

Sega Naomi logo

There was also more and more gaming hardware emerging for the PC, with major leaps forward including the 3Dfx Voodoo graphics add-on card. By the end of the 90s, the PC had left arcade games far behind, with increasingly more powerful hardware and landmark games like Quake 3 Arena, Unreal Tournament and Half-Life offering a new breed of fast paced, competitive gaming.

The Quake series was one of the first to popularise online competitive play.

Another issue was pricing. Back in the 80s, a credit on an arcade game would cost you 10p to 20p, with only light gun games and hydraulic cabinets costing more than that. At the time, the average price for an 8-bit video game was around £30 (with console games generally costing more than computer games). Fast forward to the end of the 90s and average price for a console game was still only around £35, while the bottom price for a credit was 50p, with some arcades charging as much as £2 for games like Silent Scope.
This rift seemed to get worse during the current console generation, with some really good indie games costing less than a tenner and smart phones offering some decent gaming experiences for the price of a Mars bar. In short, arcades priced themselves out of the market.

My own time with arcades - at least the time when I sought out arcades as my primary gaming fix - was while I was at university in 1995. As well as frequenting the arcade in town, the city centre where I studied had a fairly well stocked Namco Station arcade. Between lectures, a few friends and I would spend our spare time playing Tekken, Ridge Racer, Time Crisis, Area 51, Virtua Fighter 2, Street Fighter Alpha, Mortal Kombat 3, Sega Rally and few others I can no longer recall. Sega Rally was certainly the biggest draw for my friends and we would take it in turns to race against each other on the twin-seat cabinet.

Sega Rally was the last arcade game I played a lot.

Happy days, although it arguably contributed to my premature departure from uni. After that, I too drifted into PC and console gaming and I have only visited a handful of arcades since. I guess that made me part of the problem, but in my defense - and in defense of all lapsed arcade gamers - I don't think we ever thought it would end like this. Once arcades failed to deliver gaming experiences above and beyond home machines, their appeal waned.

Is the end nigh?

Reportedly the biggest arcade in the world, Funspot in New Hampshire, USA, is still going strong but there are also retro arcades popping up in America.

Fun Spot in New Hampshire, USA, is apparently the biggest arcade in the world.

In Japan arcades are still huge, with fighting games being the biggest draw.  Virtua Fighter 5, Super Street Fighter IV and Tekken 6 are as big now as their predecessors were in the 90s. And new fighting games include such as Guilty Gear and BlazBlue continue is this proud tradition. Shoot 'em up developer CAVE also appear to be unstoppable, with games likes Progear, Espgaluda, Deathsmiles and numerous sequels to DonPachi appearing in arcades since the turn of the millennium.

Club Sega in Akihabara is one of the most famous arcades in Japan.

And every few years, you'll get wind of another arcade starting up and doing well, partly because of retro nostalgia, but also because the owners have modernised their pricing structure, offering blocks of time, rather than charging per game or coming up with gimmicks like offering tournament nights.

But what about here in the UK?  There are two noteable arcades in London.  First there's Funland in the Trocadero Centre,  Piccadilly Circus and also a Namco Station in County Hall on the South Bank, but elsewhere things are not so promising. Even places like Alton Towers, which has about a dozen mini-arcades, has no traditional arcade games. And if video arcade games are suffering, pinball machines are defunct entirely. You don't even see them in bars any more. You'd think they would have survived better, thanks to there more mechanical and elaborate designs, but sadly they died out with the video games that they paved the way for, back in the 70s.

The truth is, arcades games on the whole have had their day. They are no longer scattered around the country in random locations and there are unlikely to ever be again. When a smartphone can play games like Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja and Cut the Rope, and the internet gives people access to all the emulators and ROMs you could ever want, only the most die hard fans of the arcade will ever miss them.

MTW

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More Info

• Funland, Trocadero's website: http://www.funland.co.uk/entertainment/Games
• Namco Station, County Hall website: http://www.namcostation.co.uk
• To find out more about Funspot see: http://geekoutnewyork.com/2008/06/funspot.php.
• To find out more about the Japanese arcade scene see: http://www.retrogarden.co.uk/features/big-in-japan-a-look-at-the-japanese-arcade-scene/

 And if that isn't enough, check out Arcade Mania: The Turbo-Charged World of Japan's Game Centers by Kotaku's Brian Ashcraft and Jean Snow.  It's available from Amazon, priced £7.99: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/4770030789