Question: Where have all the arcades gone?

[Angel of Death]

As a product of the 80's, as a kid I remember going to the mall with my parents and heading straight to the arcade, $20 in hand, and spending the better part of 4 hours gaming my heart away.

Since those days, the arcades of my youth have gone and never returned.

With the rise of console gaming, are arcade boxes a viable source of entertainment? Unfortunately, the case for them doesn't look promising.

Typically, in the past, arcade machines boasted better graphics than what consoles could produce, but in today's world of giga and teraflops of processing power out of a GPU, would it be cheaper just to slap an arcade stick on a Playstation 3 and enclose it in wood? Probably.

Does anyone else have any fond memories to share of this dying business model?

[heineken]

yes, they have disappeared in my area too...

i feel bad for the kids...

but there is chucky cheese

[rockchick]

They are all in Rhyl

http://www.palacefuncentre.co.uk/text/arcade.htm

[Zar]

I loved the arcade, and back then there were games in grocery stores, news stands, and many other locations. Always a spot were we could play pac man, missle command or some other game while my parents shopped.

One of my favorites was missle command, I could get to the point where you got 55 (I think it was 55) free cities and from there it was a challenge to get the score as high as you could without rolling it back around to 0. So frustrating to play for 2+ hours and have the score roll around to 0

[Pip]

When I was a kid, they used to have them in the motorway services, in little dark side rooms.

On trips out, my Dad would stop at the services to give the family a bathroom break. I would often disappear after saying I was visiting the bathroom.

Eventually he got wise to where I would be and I would get hauled back to the car, pleading for 'just one more go' when I was discovered furiously shoving 10p coins into the machines

[Dee]

Here in Stockhom we have a few arcades still. But I think the future of the arcade will change into a more specialized and bigger experience. Like RaceRoom from Swedish developer Simbin.

http://www.race-room.com/

http://www.simbin.se

[Fail Whale]

I actually went to the arcade the other day but just found out that they no longer have Game Machines, it is just Fruit Machines and the 2p pusher things.

[Skam]

There was only 1 arcade in my city and it was 18 yrs to enter for some reason. I guess some silly gambling laws or something that Norway is so famous for.
I remember it well,it was in a basement of a building, in the back of a cafè. Me and some friends used to look down the basement window and look at the flashy colors and wish we were there.

Either way when we travelled to Orlando there was a small arcade near the laundromats at the hotel we used to stay at. So then I actually WANTED to go cleaning with my mom

Now mostly you see it in those halls combined wit bowlinghalls and such?
I saw quite a few when I was roaming England. There's no arcades where I live, I only know of a few machines in a place thats 2 hours drive away from where I live..
Which is a shame, arcades is a great place to spend some time outdoors and at the same time not abandon your mission to become teh awesomest gamer on earth

[warpath]

gone in my home town too. The only refuge I have is the mortal kombat machine at the bowling alley and the Terminator 2 shoot em game my friend has in his garage from a tourist park which closed down.

[Mega]

Arcades used to thrive because they had games with technology far ahead of what was available / affordable at home.

If you compare spectrum/c64 versions of popular arcade conversions in the 80s and 90s to the arcade, you can see why people fed them 10p/20p coins.

I think when the Dreamcast came out in 1999, the arcade was redundant as you could buy the same game as existed in the arcade (now risen to 50p / £1 a go) and examples of this I would cite would be playing Crazy Taxi and House of the Dead 2 in Sega World arcade.

I still put £1 in if I see a racing game in an arcade because it has a nice steering wheel / vs mode against a friend and sit down experience - but the cost of these cabinets are prohibitive for the owner - and no longer cost effective. Fruit/slot machines are a MUCH bigger revenue earner sadly.