Home

 › 

Articles

 › 

Top 5 Reasons We Miss the Arcade

Top 5 Reasons We Miss the Arcade

In a majority of places in the United States, the days of malls and arcades are basically gone. While walking the halls of a crowded mall isn’t something I particularly miss as an adult, I do remember the days of hanging out in the arcade fondly. The more I think about it, the more I think arcades were a good thing, and it’s sad that they don’t have the viability that they once did. Here are five reasons, in particular, that make arcades such a great thing.

Affordable, Powerful Machines

Affordable, Powerful Machines

For most console owners, arcades offered something particularly appealing. They offered machines that were strong and affordable, especially when compared to the options most people had at home. Quarters were also easier to coax from a parent than the price of a console so, in a lot of ways, arcades were a bastion of video game accessibility.

Community

Community

I remember when I was younger, I was playing a game of Dance Dance Revolution . I wasn’t particularly capable, nor was I super familiar with the language of the community. At one point, a dude who was probably a couple years older than me, but ancient in the eyes of a 9 year old, put a couple quarters up on the machine. I was busy in a pseudo-rhythmic flurry, but the look of confusion must’ve read clearly on my face, because he said, “It means I got next.” He then continued, “Unless you want to play together.” As I continued to hang out in arcades, I experienced more and more examples of organic, local multiplayer rife with the potential to build friendships.

Fighting Games and eSports

Fighting Games and eSports

It was likely this community that lead to the rise of fighting games. At the very least, it encouraged friendly rivalries. Even in my small town, reputations were built around games like Marvel vs. Capcom 2 . In larger cities, a good arcade became a training ground for many of the pros we see today. Steady online connections mean that a lot of people can easily find competition online and ranked matches certainly help people find worthy opponents, but it feels like there’s less of an opportunity for great players to teach new players. It honestly feels like the arcade era helped launch e-sports.

A Place to Hang Out

A Place to Hang Out

Kids need something to do after school. An arcade is a great place to be after school or, at the very least, they were. They were fun, safe, and hosted a wide array of regulars. There were often places to get food around them as well. Prizes and tickets kept some people goal oriented and gave them things to look forward to. There were certainly worse things people could get up to than hanging around an arcade, anyway.

Spectate and Sample

Spectate and Sample

There’s a lot going on in almost any arcade. A lot of franchises and genres rose to prominence in them and, because everybody was exposed to new cabinets on the regular, people would encounter new sorts of things that they may not have known they were into on a regular basis. At the very least, that was the case for me. I’d often watch people get excited playing games that I didn’t think would appeal to me, a Nintendo fanboy. It was also cheap to try new things. Because of arcades, I am a longtime fan of SoulCalibur and the bullet hell genre. Neither of these are things I was likely to discover on my own. Well, not until they threw Link into SoulCalibur II , anyway.

To top