[Arcade] Arcades: Now & Then

I was the assistant manager of a video arcade back in 1995. It was an "Aladdin's Castle," which was operated by Namco. My town has always been somewhat lacking in activities for kids, so the mall - and subsequently, the arcade - was always a popular hangout. They'd kill time there while waiting for movies to begin.

We had quite a lot of space but I'd estimate that 75% of the cabinets languished in unappreciation. Every other Wednesday, I had to stay late and do a census (empty the token bins and track the play tallies.) It was typical to find only a smattering of tokens in anything that wasn't a head-to-head fighter. Some older games would routinely see no play at all. It was only the fighters like Mortal Kombat 3, Tekken 2 or Killer Instinct that saw the business. Business was fantastic within that genre but it was at the expense of most everything else (driving games did okay.)

I remember being eight years old and visiting the "Land of Oz" arcade (an early chain that was bought out by Bally's, and subsequently, Namco) at my mall in 1984. It was a different world back then, packed to the gills with people. My mother told me not to enter, it was bad for my eyes and would rot my brain. But my dad, who repaired pinball machines during his teen years, was as mesmerized as I. He and I would spend an hour in there. Those days were magick because the industry was still primitive, still full of surprises. Sure there was the Atari 2600 but that was a crude mockery of the true arcade thrill. (If you've ever played Pac-Man on the 2600, then you know.)

I think what constituted the demise of arcades (other than home consoles) was/is the proliferation of ticket games. They occupied roughly 50% of the game floor and offered no better experience than a traditional arcade cabinet. A few were fun if you had a buddy but most required no multi-player effort and were subsequently boring as hell. Many of them put ridiculous odds against the player and made no point to hide the fact that every play was basically a Hail Mary. Very few people are willing to buy into such scams.
What was worse is that the reward for playing those games had very little value. You received tickets, redeemable only at that arcade, with no representative cash value. The aggregate value of the tickets was completely arbitrary; the management could set the tickets-for-prizes cost to whatever they wished. Some prizes were deliberately overcosted just so that the staff would almost never have to bother with removing them from the "glamour wall."

I once calculated the relative costs of each prize, on a one-ticket-equals-one-quarter basis (Yes, sometimes you received multiple tickets for one quarter but there has to be a baseline standard.) The results were an insult to the intelligence of any customer. We had small bins of candy, stuff like Tootsie Pops or Laffy Taffys. To get a Tootsie Pop, you needed 20 tickets. The converted value of that was $5.00. It was theft and not even the small children were fooled. The large prize costs were obscene. A portable black-and-white VHF/UHF television required something in the neighborhood of 22,000 tickets. That's $540!

So when half the arcade floor is littered with undesirable pay-for-tickets games, you're wasting space and alienating an audience that seeks the experience and not the material reward.

Another contributing factor was the not-so-discreet inflation of credit costs. We had a regional manager who was a money grubbing son-of-a-bitch. He'd show up every week to look over the records, noting which games saw the most play. If a cabinet was overwhelmingly popular, such as MK3, he'd raise the play cost to see if the market would sustain itself. Sometimes it did, so he'd push the envelope further, to the point where addicted saps were dropping $1.00 for each play. But most people recognized the scalping for what it was and stopped coming around. I once suggested it'd bring in more revenue if we lowered the credit costs to attract larger crowds, but I was told in no uncertain terms that I was a moron, how could you make more money if you didn't raise prices?

Of course, modern arcades stand no chance. The operation costs have become too inefficient when compared to the similar experiences home consoles now offer. It's a natural progression and aside from the nostalgia factor, we're not missing a ton by losing the arcades. They were symbolic of an era, like 8-tracks, but have been obsoleted. It's also far more convenient to play the classics on a Gameboy than it is to drive all the way to the mall.

Jam it back in, in the dark.