Holy Crap! Remember… Video Arcades!?
Apr 26th, 2009 | By PoP! Contributors | Category: Holy Crap! Remember...
Yeah, you remember the classic video arcades, don’t you? More than likely, it was located in your local smoke-filled mall (hey, we didn’t smarten up with those smoking bans until years later) or at a “shopping plaza” or maybe you hit up a classy pizza & gaming restaurant like Chuck E. Cheese or Showbiz Pizza (R.I.P.) to get your fix. Wherever you found it, you loved it and so did I.
No.
WHOLE WEEKENDS would be planned around going to the arcade! ANY trip to the mall would have to include a stop by the arcade to play “just one game”, which would be begrudgingly financed by my parents. My allowance was blown at such arcades like The Mind Boggler, The Dream Machine, Diamond Jim’s and Aladdin’s Castle. Geez, can you believe there was actually a time when malls could support TWO arcades? Consoles killed the video (arcade) star.
Man, there was NO greater feeling to be had or sound to be heard (pre-dating age) than popping a crisp $5 bill into the coin machine and listening to it convert into 24 shiny quarters/tokens.
How about those games? Pac-Man. Rampage. Arch Rivals. Double Dragon. Virtua Racing. Rolling Thunder. OutRunners. Street Fighter II. Final Fight. Mortal Kombat. The Simpsons. Ikari Warriors. Gauntlet. Final Lap. Virtua Fighter. Time Crisis. N.A.R.C. Hard Drivin’. X-Men. WWF WrestleFest. House of the Dead. Is any of this ringing a bell? Classic stuff.
Yes.
The video arcade still exists to this very day, albeit in a mutilated form. One the rare occasion you might run across one, it’ll probably be tucked away in some desolate corner of the mall in your town that no one shops at anymore (the number of those are increasing by the day). Just look for the tumbleweed rollin’ by.
Today’s mainstream arcade is nothing more than the stomping grounds for a never-ending parade of kiddies’ birthday parties. You’ll see broken down driving & shooter games from the late-90s filling up the snagged carpeted floor, but of course, they’ll be outnumbered by goofy-voiced brightly flashing ticket games that you haven’t a hooker’s chance of getting away from clean. Even if you do manage to score some tickets, it’ll take you about 2 years of winning every single day to earn enough tickets to get more than a damned glow-in-the-dark spider ring or lizard finger puppet. At least some things never change at the arcade.
The Simpsons -- Greatest Arcade Game... EVER???
Ah, but our story does not end so sadly. Seek and you shall find retro arcades filled with all the hits you remember from the 80s & 90s. It’s a small movement, and one that I cannot see keeping in business long-term, but the sentiment is appreciated. We may never have our youth back or that same wide-eyed sense of wonderment, but at least it’s good to know that somewhere out there we can still play Q*Bert for a quarter.
Eff any game that costs fifty cents.
Dude… your math sucks. How do you get 24 quarters for a fiver?
Anyhow… fun story. Lee and I have met. Once. We and out respective wives connected over Memorial Day weekend last year, in Old Orchard Beach, Maine. Their boardwalk and fairway have suffered over the years, but their arcade remains intact. What did we play? Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the X-Men game that headlined this review. Good times indeed, though I’ll never figure out Wolverine’s crazy fullscreen claw slash attack.
Whatever. Good call man, good call.
I was ready to sell my soul every time I’ve been around arcade games.
There was an old, pretty decent one in our local mall I used to play in whenever my father could afford. Once we were to the big city, Tel-Aviv and there was a much better, giant arcades place. My brother and I spent the whole afternoon there and didn’t want to go home, even when it was dark.
Years later the local arcades closed and either couple of months or few years later a newer place opened in the same mall. I’ve been there many times, but I was already in my late teens and PS was in, computer games became better and the graphics improved, so until I finished high-school I lost complete interest in them. Couple of years ago that place was closed too.
Oh, and I remember in the glory days an arcade machine almost in every corner. There was an old man running a pizza place, and he had a fighting arcade machine all the kids played in.
My favorites will always be X-Men (the one above), Willow and some shooting game (I loved those built-in plastic guns, in this case Uzis!)
Dude - any good arcade gave you 4 extra free tokens when you dropped a five in the change machine.
gods how many twenty pence pieces did I waste on that awesome simpsons arcade game?
Hehehehe… you and your fake money…
Man, my parents met in college, and my Dad used to work at the hottest arcade at the biggest mall in South Texas (at the time). Shortly before they got married, when my Mom was pregnant (with me), he used to take her to work with him… bribe various food stand vendors with 10 bucks in free games and she’d spend his entire shift eating free food and playing Missle Command and Tron.
I”ve been parting at Arcades since the womb, brotha!
My local mall still has a pretty sizeable arcade, although it removed a few broken cabinets a couple years back to make room for a pool table and air hocket table. Otherwise its stocked up with Gauntlet cabinets, Street Fighter II-Marvel Superheros-Marvel vs SF-Marvel vs Capcom-Marvel vs Capcom II, and ALL my favorite light gun games.
Lucky bastard.
I think a lot of my resentment of the last couple generations of console gaming stems directly from the death of arcades, which were one of my favorite stomping grounds. There was something about walking in and just hearing all those noises and seeing all those flashes of light that got me pumped. I miss it.
Thats just how I roll Lee.
Also note: I suggest PoP! in the future reviews local arcades in their respective parts of the world in order to bring attention to them. If you review it they will come.
There’s actually an arcade on the way to my LCS that serves beer, “Rocky’s Replay”.
Esbat - See my first comment. Sadly, no can do.
We still have a few arcades in my neck of the woods although most of them only have those stupid claw machine things where you end up putting 30 quid in to try to get a knock off toy thats worth much less than that…..
saying that the bowling near my place has a four person mario kart arcade game which is pretty awesome
and streetfighter iv (which is the only way I’ve got to play that awesome game sadly)