[Arcade] Arcades: Now & Then

Crash brings up a point with those redemption games. There's an arcade around here that's held on to a lot of old classics through the years, which has kept people coming in. I used to stop in and play a quick game of Arkanoid after class quite a bit. At the beginning of this summer, I stopped in one day, and everything changed. A third of the arcade was now ticket redemption games - Ski ball, put a coin in a chute and maybe get a ticket game, pay a quarter to push a button and win tickets - you know, all the fan favorite redemption games. Gone were a handful of games I always played. No more Arkanoid. No more Tetris. An older DDR machine was gone. Even Elevator Action Returns had freaking disappeared. 80% of the stuff I played at that arcade is now gone. Sure, it still has Golden Axe, and DDR Extreme, and a couple fighting games. But a lot of the games I would be putting my money into.

I talked with the owner, and he made no effort to hide that those games are a rip-off, since we both knew. But he said it was getting harder to make money, and he brought those in because it's easier to turn a profit on them. They require little maintenance, since the games just have flashy lights and dispense tickets, and they're cheap games. But those things don't attract crowds or get customers to keep coming back. They just get a couple dollars out of casuals who stop by.

What arcades really need are what other people have been talking about in this topic. They need something unique to arcades that want people to keep coming to arcades. It used to be that arcades could provide visuals far above what home consoles could, but those days are gone. The strong points arcades have now are innovation and interaction. Unique cabinets, like DDR machines and car racing machines get people to come to arcades for an experience they can't find elsewhere. And then a good competitive atmosphere can draw crowds back to a machine consistently. These days, the console market has been making more steps towards having those same advantages, so I'm not sure where arcades can turn once those advantages are gone. Perhaps it is time to move on, and admit arcades just aren't something than can stick around anymore.

Jam it back in, in the dark.