The gaming press often rolls out the odd nostalgic piece about arcades and how they were the prototype for gaming as a social activity and introduced hundreds and thousands of people to the hobby.  I often read these with a certain amount of awe as the gaming landscape they describe might as well be from Mars for all the sense it makes to me as I’ve never had an arcade experience in this way.

An arcade is a large, normally noisy, room full of game cabinets that eat your money in exchange for a goes on any particular game.  In my experience spanning the 90s to today, the games situated within tend to be punishingly difficult side scrolling beat-em-ups or shoot-em-ups, fighting games along the lines of Street Fighter, racing games often complete with a steering wheel, pedals and gear stick, or shooting games with their own gun peripherals.  In the early days of video gaming and technically before my time, things like Pac man or Donkey Kong started off in cabinet sized machines and the arcade was in actual fact where you had to go to do your gaming before the advent of home consoles.  Until relatively recently, the actual computing power of an arcade machine was vastly superior to anything you were likely to have at home.  The early console versions of arcade games in the 80s were often mere shadows of their technically superior cabinet dwelling cousins.

I recently watched something by the highly articulate and ever insightful Bob Chipman about the death of the arcade and unusually, nothing really resonated in the episode for me because I have no fond memories of arcades.  This is partly because I suspect they were never quite such a massive thing in the UK, partly because I’ve lived in a very rural area for most of my life, and partly because whenever I was confronted with an arcade machine, they tended to be far too expensive.  I vaguely remember being confronted with the occasional arcade machine in pubs when I was growing up and being fascinated by the flashing lights and how exciting they looked, but even at a young age being knocked back by how much money you had to continually feed into the things.

Arcades are a bit of a throwback today.  The draw of big gaming cabinets is understandably weakened by the fact that home gaming machines are incredibly accessible today (you are in fact reading this on a gaming machine) and even the draw of fancy peripherals such as the light gun is deadened by the prevalence and success of things like the Wii, or relatively cheap home versions of the same peripherals for other consoles.  I’ve heard someone complaining that House of the Dead isn’t the same at home as it is in the arcade and they’re right, it’s not.  For me however that just means you don’t have to pay £1 every third time you get shot in order to carry on.

Despite being a throwback to an era where gaming was less of a home entertainment option and to an era where socialising with other gamers was not possible over the internet, I still think arcades have the potential to draw crowds.  It’s difficult to say with a straight face that arcades will never pull in a profit any more if you ever have a wander down to London’s Trocadero in Piccadilly Circus as that is full of customers and has a huge range of games throughout the complex.  I suspect for an arcade to be successful outside the epicentre of one of the world’s biggest capital cities it is more an issue of pricing.  £1 for three lives in House of the Dead, a game that started to look dated about a decade ago, is difficult to justify and I am fairly sure that even just taking it down to 50p would see the cabinets getting a lot more attention.

House of the Dead is actually probably a bad example as it is obviously still an incredibly successful game with arcades in general, but making the titles cheaper to play might see arcades getting a lot more traffic.  Over the weekend I had a bizarre experience in Derbyshire whereby we visited Matlock Bath.  This is a seaside town in the midlands without the sea and has the same sort of vibe as anywhere on the south coast that used to have a pier.  Along the high street are at least three arcades that are packed with people feeding the seaside arcade 2p machines with pounds and pounds worth of money.  I even threw a couple of pounds worth into one through some form of weird hypnosis as the trays shifted piles of the coins tantalisingly close to the edge.

 

What I’m trying to get to here is that these machines are ludicrously cheap to play, there’s actually no real game behind it, but there’s still something inherently satisfying about the experience.  I suppose you can argue that as there is the impression that you can get your coins back there is an element of gambling to it that could be what makes it compelling, but really, if you did win all of the coins inside one of those machines you’d be instantly annoyed that you had all those coppers to get rid of.  What I really think though is that its low bar for entry in terms of cost means people spend much more in playing them.  Some of the more up-market cabinets that were the more usual £1 per play were decidedly less popular with the arcade patrons.

I’ll never be sorry to see that arcades are disappearing because I just don’t have the nostalgia attached to them and really, if they are disappearing it will be because nobody is going to them, including many of the people who are sorry to see them disappearing.  If there is less demand for something, then that thing has to adapt to survive, which they have done to a point with fancy peripherals, but now they will need to do something else.

My prediction is that we will see the arcade move elsewhere in a disguised form.  As the gaming population is getting increasingly older and games are being aimed more and more to the 20 and 30-somethings, I reckon that the arcades will start moving back into the pubs and bars that they started in and we will start to see some gaming focussed bars, a sort of arcade and alcohol selling hybrid.  Zero Punctuation’s Ben ‘Yahtzee’ Croshaw has actually already proved it can work with his Mana Bar in Australia, which has been successful enough for him to open up a second one.

Arcades aren’t dead, but there are less of them and if they are to survive they need to do something clever.  It’s a daft idea to try and persuade people to use arcades like they’re a charity case that needs supporting, as there are plenty of actual charity cases that could use that disposable income.  Instead, the arcades need to start providing something new and innovative to retain their customers if they don’t want to fade out into the night.  I don’t understand the appeal of the arcade, but if so many people that I read and respect think they were a wonderful thing, then it would be a shame if future generations didn’t have the opportunity to experience something similar.