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.