Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
Speaker 1: text style from how stuff works dot com. Hello again, everyone,
Speaker 1: welcome to text stuff. My name is Chris Poelette and
Speaker 1: I am an editor at how stuff works dot com.
Speaker 1: Sitting across from me, as usual, is senior writer Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: The page came from your dad's office at the Arcade.
Speaker 1: That number has been disconnected for twenty years. Wow. Recent quote. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a quote from a movie that hasn't even come
Speaker 1: out yet. That's awesome. I'm tron legacy, but it actually
Speaker 1: pertains to what we're going to be talking about. Absolutely.
Speaker 1: For once, I actually told said what the name of
Speaker 1: the movie was. Usually, I don't do that. Do you
Speaker 1: all know that he's every time he does that, he's
Speaker 1: actually quoting from a movie or song or song. Yeah,
Speaker 1: sometimes it's a song, that's true, sorry, so yeah, but
Speaker 1: usually a movie. I'm waiting to get to the point
Speaker 1: where the listeners start to write in and tell me
Speaker 1: what I'm quoting from. What we did? Give that challenge once? Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I think he just did it. For the subsequent
Speaker 1: episodes is right, Yeah, you need to go back and
Speaker 1: listen to I don't know when I started doing that,
Speaker 1: but yeah, make a list after you were doing the
Speaker 1: greetings from the world, the world different. Hello. But moving
Speaker 1: on to our actual topic, which is arcades. That again
Speaker 1: pertains to the quote I chose. Um, the we wanted
Speaker 1: to talk about kind of the rise and fall of
Speaker 1: the video game arcade. Yes, indeed, I spent many many
Speaker 1: quarters growing up in video arcades. I started off spending
Speaker 1: many many quarters, and then I shifted to spending many
Speaker 1: dollars to get tokens. Yes, because that happened. Well, it
Speaker 1: was a great money making scheme. Well, I guess we
Speaker 1: can talk about that too, although that's kind of tertiary
Speaker 1: to the full discussion. So to to really discuss the
Speaker 1: history of video game arcades, I need to cut off
Speaker 1: Chris just before he's about to say something. What were
Speaker 1: you gonna say, Chris? Well, I was going to launch
Speaker 1: into a whole thing, But go ahead, please launch. Okay. So,
Speaker 1: of course many of you know that I am older
Speaker 1: than many of our listeners. Um, but I grew up
Speaker 1: in a skating ring. My brother was really in the
Speaker 1: roller skate when I was a kid. No, but I
Speaker 1: mean you spent a lot of time and as a kid,
Speaker 1: and I remember, going back to the research, I remember
Speaker 1: a lot of the things that I've seen as seminal
Speaker 1: moments in video gaming. I remember the tabletop space uh
Speaker 1: Space Invaders games and things like Gunfight and all these things,
Speaker 1: and just watching them go from you know, the he
Speaker 1: had the rack of video games are pinball machines. You
Speaker 1: have four or five of those and maybe a couple
Speaker 1: of video games. And then gradually they started squeezing out
Speaker 1: the pinball games and suddenly there were arcades in the
Speaker 1: neighborhood where you could play all kinds of stuff like
Speaker 1: Joust and Robotron and Defender Spy Hunter. I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: the kids growing up in the late seven these in
Speaker 1: early eighties, like like me, you know, that was a
Speaker 1: big thing we did. We'd go down the arcade at all.
Speaker 1: As a matter of fact, I had a friend whose
Speaker 1: parents owned an arcade and a score yeah yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I mean they every once in a while they'd give
Speaker 1: me an extra dollars worth of of tokens. But but yeah,
Speaker 1: but that was the thing. It was like, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: we'd we'd spend quarters on them. And then of course
Speaker 1: the token thing was sort of a way to get
Speaker 1: more people involved, but I mean it was for a
Speaker 1: very long time. That was a great way to spend
Speaker 1: a summer afternoon when you're a kid. Yeah. Um, so
Speaker 1: I have a quick question for you. Okay, So when
Speaker 1: you were growing up in the skating rink, yes, uh,
Speaker 1: with the pterodactyls flying around outside and all that, had
Speaker 1: they actually invented the wheel or were you just kind
Speaker 1: of skidding along on shoes. I don't like you very much, so,
Speaker 1: uh my point here is Chris as Old. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the Yeah, the arcade was kind of a growth out
Speaker 1: of the whole video game uh popularity boom, because arcades
Speaker 1: didn't just pop up as soon as the arcade games
Speaker 1: popped up. It took a while. You know. They were
Speaker 1: in places like skating rinks and bars and restaurants. You'd
Speaker 1: see one or two games here and there, but there
Speaker 1: wasn't any arcade to put them in. A back when
Speaker 1: we talked about pinball machines before, but there weren't any
Speaker 1: you know, pinball machine arcades, at least not very many
Speaker 1: of them, right, I think there were there were kinds
Speaker 1: of well, the same kind of places now where you
Speaker 1: have you know, for example, ski ball and other kinds
Speaker 1: of things, but those are kinds of things you'd find
Speaker 1: and you know, amusement parks and things like that. They
Speaker 1: weren't really free standing like the video game arcade at
Speaker 1: the eighties was right, right, So the previous arcades would
Speaker 1: be things like a Coney Island. Go to Coney Island
Speaker 1: and you could they might have an arcade section as in,
Speaker 1: it's an area where there are games of skill or
Speaker 1: sometimes not skill um that you could play. And uh so,
Speaker 1: so as a combination of that old mode of business,
Speaker 1: this this idea of an area of entertainment and then
Speaker 1: the fact the video games that were popping up in
Speaker 1: places like bars and skating rinks and things like that,
Speaker 1: we're getting really popular. So it wasn't a huge lee
Speaker 1: for people to say, hey, what if I were to
Speaker 1: create a space, uh like you know, a storefront space
Speaker 1: and just fill it with these arcade games and then
Speaker 1: my business will just be having people come in to
Speaker 1: play the games. Yes, and the arcade was born, the
Speaker 1: video game arcade. We should say, I mean, I keep
Speaker 1: on having to specify because arcade, the word arcade has
Speaker 1: been around for much longer. Yeah, it's actually kind of funny. Um,
Speaker 1: any of you who have had the moment when you
Speaker 1: realize that a song that you really like is a
Speaker 1: cover of a song that is very old or you know,
Speaker 1: decades old and in fact um and you sort of
Speaker 1: had that feeling of regret and let down, you know, Man,
Speaker 1: I didn't realize that somebody else actually did this song.
Speaker 1: I had the same moment when I, you know, went
Speaker 1: to get my haircut in an arcade and I couldn't
Speaker 1: figure out why they the games were. I had that
Speaker 1: come on, I and where are the games? It's an arcade.
Speaker 1: It's like, no, actually that's not literally video game in
Speaker 1: arcade are not necessarily it's anonymous, right exactly. Yes, I
Speaker 1: had the same experience because I also grew up in
Speaker 1: the eighties. Um uh, both the Wheel and the Fire
Speaker 1: had been around for a while when I was a kid. U.
Speaker 1: So yeah, they started popping up in the seventies and
Speaker 1: the earliest days of arcade games. So we're talking about
Speaker 1: things like Pong and Space Invaders Galaxy and that kind
Speaker 1: of thing. Um, And they got more popular as more
Speaker 1: video games started coming out, and for a while there
Speaker 1: was a little worry among arcade owners that the video
Speaker 1: game home market could could make an impact on arcades.
Speaker 1: But the early video game home market was really limited. Uh.
Speaker 1: You normally, your graphics and your sound and everything that
Speaker 1: you got out of a home video game console, and
Speaker 1: we're talking about the late seventies early eighties here, just
Speaker 1: could not compare to what you could get in an arcade.
Speaker 1: Like a video game arcade, the games would be more
Speaker 1: sophisticated in the arcade than they were in the home market. Also, Uh,
Speaker 1: the style of games was totally different, and it it
Speaker 1: You have to think of this from a business standpoint
Speaker 1: for it to really make sense. Video game arcade video games.
Speaker 1: So the ones that you would actually find in these
Speaker 1: places were designed to be really intense and fun, but
Speaker 1: last for a relatively short time span, like any individual
Speaker 1: play session. You have hit on the crux of the problem. Yeah,
Speaker 1: yes you have. So if I go into an arcade
Speaker 1: and I want to play a video game, that game
Speaker 1: has been built, has been designed with the experience in
Speaker 1: mind that it should be fun and challenging, but it
Speaker 1: should also not last very long because otherwise you can't
Speaker 1: make money, right, Because I mean, it's a per play.
Speaker 1: A pay per play model, so that means that every
Speaker 1: time you you play the game, you're paying some money.
Speaker 1: It's not like it's a time based model. Like if
Speaker 1: our kids were more of a you pay a certain
Speaker 1: amount of money and then you get unlimited plays for
Speaker 1: an hour, it would be a totally different story right now.
Speaker 1: But because it was a pay per play system and
Speaker 1: meant that you had to keep the plays at a
Speaker 1: short uh time span, or else you lost money because
Speaker 1: you had a kid plunk one quarter into a game
Speaker 1: and then stand there all day playing. That's right, Yes,
Speaker 1: that was the ideal video game customer because I came
Speaker 1: in and dropped, you know, six dollars with the quarters
Speaker 1: in there, and about ten minutes. Yeah, it doesn't take
Speaker 1: long if you are not particularly adept, or if the
Speaker 1: game is designed to be really really hard, or in
Speaker 1: some cases the game's just playing unfair. Oh yeah, and
Speaker 1: it's there's you can And there were some that would
Speaker 1: allow you to allow the the game owner to set
Speaker 1: the complexity of the game. Yeah, you could make it
Speaker 1: where the you could set the difficulty level for some games.
Speaker 1: And of course the once game started to include the
Speaker 1: continue feature, that was a real boon as well, because
Speaker 1: it meant that you could uh coax the player into
Speaker 1: spending more money to keep the experience going without losing
Speaker 1: all the progress that he or she had made. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's uh, it's kind of funny though, but yeah, that's
Speaker 1: exactly the point. I mean, if you've got an arcade
Speaker 1: full of video games, um, and you've got a steady
Speaker 1: stream of people coming in to plump quarters down or
Speaker 1: uh you know, even more for some games, depending on
Speaker 1: the situation, then you basically have a semi captive audience.
Speaker 1: And anything uh you know, you have the the video
Speaker 1: game level set maddeningly difficult, um you know, where people
Speaker 1: will just go, I'm gonna try it again and drop
Speaker 1: another quarter in there. Or the continue game feature, well
Speaker 1: then uh you certainly do that. And and the multiplayer
Speaker 1: games where you had you know, two, three, four people
Speaker 1: getting involved in a game. Yeah, that's where you get
Speaker 1: the social aspect, which was something else that home video
Speaker 1: game systems were not terribly good at. I mean, you
Speaker 1: had a lot of the early home video game systems
Speaker 1: were designed for two players, but that was as much
Speaker 1: as you could get. And and it's difficult to have
Speaker 1: a group of people over to play games where only
Speaker 1: two people can play at the same time, because people
Speaker 1: are always waiting for the next turn. And in arcade
Speaker 1: you had variety, so people could go and play other games,
Speaker 1: while if if their favorite game was occupied, they could
Speaker 1: either wait or they could play something else. Home video
Speaker 1: games not so much. Um. In fact, early home video games,
Speaker 1: and we'll probably talk about this in another podcast, UM,
Speaker 1: some of the early consoles were limited to four games
Speaker 1: hard coded on the console itself. This was before the
Speaker 1: cartridge four, before the yeah four games, Yeah I have one.
Speaker 1: They only had three, right, right, Some of the earlier
Speaker 1: ones had even fewer, but at any rate, so the
Speaker 1: arcade had the advantage over there in the social aspect
Speaker 1: for a really long time, right, And it had the
Speaker 1: advantage of graphics and sound for a really long time.
Speaker 1: But eventually the home market started to catch up, and
Speaker 1: on top of that, players began to divide up into
Speaker 1: two camps. You had the people who really like the
Speaker 1: arcade experience in the sense of the kind of games
Speaker 1: that have that really intense but short time frame. The
Speaker 1: video game market at home, you could create games that
Speaker 1: lasted a really long time, had a really extended experience,
Speaker 1: and because you've already paid for the game, right, I
Speaker 1: mean you you went out and you plug down fifty
Speaker 1: dollars for a video game. Uh, whether you play it
Speaker 1: once or whether you play it forever, that you've already
Speaker 1: poured all the money you're going to into that game,
Speaker 1: at least until we get to downloadable content, which was
Speaker 1: much further down the road. So at that stage, you
Speaker 1: could go ahead and design a game for players that
Speaker 1: would be very you know, an extended experience. It's something
Speaker 1: that you can't get in our arcade without sacrificing profit. Yes, uh.
Speaker 1: And then as players began to value that experience, they
Speaker 1: stopped going to arcades as much, um, and so the
Speaker 1: arcade attendance began to suffer. And that's when you say
Speaker 1: it's also really expensive actually to maintain in arcade. Well,
Speaker 1: talk about talk about the costs, the relative costs a
Speaker 1: enemy you uh you have. Let's say I'm making up
Speaker 1: a generic console home console game. You you spend say
Speaker 1: three dollars for the console and about fifty dollars sixty
Speaker 1: dollars for a game, and that's expensive. I mean to
Speaker 1: get started when you're first getting buying a new console.
Speaker 1: I mean if it's something like you know, a brand
Speaker 1: new Xbox or or PlayStation. Um, you know, when it
Speaker 1: first comes out, it could be six seven hundred dollars
Speaker 1: from the machine. Still one uh one stand up coin
Speaker 1: operated arcade game much more expensive than that, especially if
Speaker 1: it's new, yes, or paradoxically some of the older ones
Speaker 1: as well, because they become collectors items. Indeed. So I mean,
Speaker 1: and that's just one game. If you're trying to you know,
Speaker 1: pay rent on an arcade space every month, pay employees,
Speaker 1: which is going to be one of your largest items
Speaker 1: on the budget anyway, I mean staffing, uh, and then
Speaker 1: you have to pay for the electricity to run all
Speaker 1: these electronics in your your establishment. You have to get
Speaker 1: people in and they're they're dropping in a quarter at
Speaker 1: a time. I mean, that's why, you know, the the
Speaker 1: economics of it are just so are just so bad
Speaker 1: unless you have people thronging through the doors. And that's
Speaker 1: why I think, Um, that's a big thing that had
Speaker 1: a lot to do with the rise and cost of
Speaker 1: the video games. I remember going back into an arcade
Speaker 1: and in the nineties, you know, after dropping quarter after
Speaker 1: quarter in the games before and then finding that a
Speaker 1: lot of them were at least fifty cents to play,
Speaker 1: if not a dollar, and you're going, you know, I
Speaker 1: can't afford to, you know, play more than four or
Speaker 1: five games of time. Yeah, and and so it's expensive.
Speaker 1: And you can see that reflected in the way arcades
Speaker 1: started to change strategies and how to charge customers. When
Speaker 1: we talked about the tokens thing, Really, the tokens come
Speaker 1: down to you spending more money than you normally would
Speaker 1: because if you put a dollar in a change machine,
Speaker 1: you get four quarters out. There's no guarantee that you're
Speaker 1: gonna spend those four quarters at the arcade. You may
Speaker 1: just be using that change machine. You might play one
Speaker 1: game and then you walk away with seventy five cents.
Speaker 1: If you get tokens, you can only use it in
Speaker 1: the arcade. And a lot of times they would use
Speaker 1: a little techniques like you know, if you buy, you
Speaker 1: put in a dollar, you get four tokens, but if
Speaker 1: you put in five dollars, you know, maybe they'll throw
Speaker 1: in an extra dollar's worth of tokens, so you get tokens,
Speaker 1: you know, So it entices you to spend even more
Speaker 1: cash at the arcade itself. Yeah, because they're just selling
Speaker 1: time on machines. They're not. There's no loss for them
Speaker 1: to throw in some free tokens. And then then you
Speaker 1: have establishments like David Busters that uses a hard based
Speaker 1: system where you're buying credit and the credit is put
Speaker 1: on a card and then you slide the card in
Speaker 1: the games. This is brilliant because now you've reached the
Speaker 1: point where you've you've removed the value from the game itself. Like,
Speaker 1: unless you're really good at doing math in your head,
Speaker 1: it's really hard to establish how much money each per
Speaker 1: play is costing you, because you know, you put in
Speaker 1: twenty bucks, you get twenty bucks worth of credit on
Speaker 1: your on your card, and it's it's transferred into points,
Speaker 1: and then each game is worth a certain amount of points.
Speaker 1: Unless you're like doing that conversion in your head, you're
Speaker 1: not thinking, hey, this has cost to be a buck
Speaker 1: twenty five per play or something like that. Um, and
Speaker 1: I just pulled that number of thin air, so sure, yeah,
Speaker 1: that was just an example. Um yeah, as I always do.
Speaker 1: We have to do that sometimes to set up an example.
Speaker 1: So right, So, so those were some some ways of
Speaker 1: arcades trying to extend their their lifespan and some of
Speaker 1: them are still around, like Damon Busters. Of course you
Speaker 1: can find those locations around the United States. Excuse me,
Speaker 1: had a little hiccup there. Um. And of course those
Speaker 1: cards are reloadable, so you could bring it back next
Speaker 1: time you come. Yeah, you can actually use them in
Speaker 1: different locations to see. That's another enticement there, because back
Speaker 1: as as opposed to the tokens, which might only work
Speaker 1: in one arcade, if you if you go to a franchise,
Speaker 1: you might be able to transfer those those credits towards
Speaker 1: another game system, although that's not necessarily seamless. I had.
Speaker 1: I experienced a problem when I visited Philadelphia and went
Speaker 1: to a David Busters and tried to use my Atlanta
Speaker 1: David Buster's card, and the person behind the counter, because
Speaker 1: I was actually going up to the counter at that point,
Speaker 1: the automated systems were full, uh look and said, something's
Speaker 1: weird here. It's telling me that you're from Atlanta. That's
Speaker 1: not weird. That is where I'm from. Are you calling
Speaker 1: Atlanta weird? I mean, I'm not gonna be mad. I'm
Speaker 1: just wondering what you're basing that on. And we got
Speaker 1: into this big philosophical discussion, and I didn't get to
Speaker 1: play my ski ball, but that's a story for another
Speaker 1: podcast ski Ball. That's actually a good point, oh about
Speaker 1: how arcades would try and differentiate themselves from the home market. Yes.
Speaker 1: One of the things that I read that uh, that
Speaker 1: may also have played a smaller role in the decline
Speaker 1: of the popularity of video games, or at least the
Speaker 1: video game arcade, is that a lot of the organizations
Speaker 1: now that still maintain a lot of video games and
Speaker 1: other kinds of amusements like that they switched to a
Speaker 1: ticket reward system, so and a lot of video games
Speaker 1: didn't offer that, and you didn't see you know, frog
Speaker 1: pumping out tickets. It's hard to it's hard to compete
Speaker 1: with the home video game market today because home video
Speaker 1: games are so sophisticated. Yes, right, So if you go
Speaker 1: and get the PlayStation three and Xbox three sixty we
Speaker 1: or a really you know, a decent gaming computer, you
Speaker 1: can run games that that are phenomenal, that are really deep,
Speaker 1: rich experiences, that have amazing graphics, you know, and and
Speaker 1: can have hours and hours of gameplay to them, whereas, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, our kids just can't compete with that experience.
Speaker 1: So One of the ways that they get around that
Speaker 1: is by offering these amusements, these these games of skill
Speaker 1: or chance or whatever that that rewards you for playing
Speaker 1: with tickets. And then of course eventually you can trade
Speaker 1: the tickets in to get something. For example, a friend
Speaker 1: of mine who I will not name, uh, played these
Speaker 1: enough at a Dave and Busters to get an Xbox. Yeah.
Speaker 1: If you've ever yeah, if you've ever looked at the
Speaker 1: points needed to get some of these big ticket items,
Speaker 1: they're astronomical. So you sit there and you start doing
Speaker 1: the bath, like, all right, how many plays of various
Speaker 1: ticket winning games did he have to did he have
Speaker 1: to go through in order to buy essentially, you know,
Speaker 1: to trade the tickets in to get an Xbox? And
Speaker 1: I wonder how many actual consoles he could have purchased
Speaker 1: with the money that he's spent, you know, buying it
Speaker 1: so that he could play those games. We know people
Speaker 1: were uh to do that. I wasn't going to say
Speaker 1: that he's stupid, he doesn't listen to this show. I'm alright, alright, yeah, um,
Speaker 1: but uh but yeah, I mean that they were trying
Speaker 1: all kinds of things at one point. I mean, hey,
Speaker 1: there was this game that you could dance on and
Speaker 1: there were different colored pads on the floor and you
Speaker 1: could you know, match this stuff on the thing, and
Speaker 1: you couldn't do that at home except when they brought
Speaker 1: it home. Yeah, so you know, and see, that's those
Speaker 1: are the kind of games you're going to see at
Speaker 1: arcades now. They are the games that tend to be bigger,
Speaker 1: immersive experiences than things that you typically will see at
Speaker 1: home until the next big innovation, like until Connect comes
Speaker 1: out or or the next generation of consoles come out
Speaker 1: where you can kind of simulate the arcade experience even
Speaker 1: further in your own home. The way that arcides differentiate
Speaker 1: themselves is through these games like the dance dance games
Speaker 1: and the racing games where it's actual it yeah, and
Speaker 1: you're usually racing against other players. Or there are a
Speaker 1: lot of light gun games, lots and lots of those,
Speaker 1: because these are experiences that are not as easily replicable
Speaker 1: at home. So clearly that helps differentiate them from the
Speaker 1: home video game market and gives you a reason to
Speaker 1: go in there and play these games. Uh. But as
Speaker 1: the market gets the home market gets more sophisticated, that
Speaker 1: spells more trouble for these arcade systems. That also is
Speaker 1: what makes old fogies like me and Chris cry when
Speaker 1: we walk into an actual arcade establishment that still exists,
Speaker 1: because while most of them died out, not all of
Speaker 1: them did. Some of them are still around. But when
Speaker 1: you walk into one and you're an old timer, you
Speaker 1: kind of get upset because you look around and you're like, well,
Speaker 1: all the games here are the same. They're all either
Speaker 1: racing games, dance games, or gun games. Where where's the rampage,
Speaker 1: where's the elevator action? Where's the pack land? Yeah? Uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I want to play that new pac Man game that
Speaker 1: you saw at CES. Oh, the four the Four Persons
Speaker 1: simultaneous pac Man game, which is only available in an
Speaker 1: arcade version. Right. Yeah. But if you are an old
Speaker 1: fogy like us, uh and you're interested in catching up
Speaker 1: on something, you might check out this one place I
Speaker 1: read about in an article on the Christian Science Monitor
Speaker 1: by Ethan Gilsdorf. Um Up in New Hampshire there is
Speaker 1: the American Classic Arcade Museum, and there's nothing and there
Speaker 1: it's it's over an arcade, but no machine in there
Speaker 1: is newer. So it sounds like a lot of fun
Speaker 1: for those of us who are into that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: There were some good games made after that too, but sure,
Speaker 1: this is the classic. Really, the arcade didn't truly start
Speaker 1: suffering until about the mid nineties, which is which is
Speaker 1: when you started seeing some of the more advanced home
Speaker 1: consoles start to come out of that point, the ne
Speaker 1: S and super A nes UH didn't take a huge
Speaker 1: chunk out of the Arcade AIDS until until much later,
Speaker 1: and like I said, until the mid nineties. So but yeah,
Speaker 1: there there plenty of great games that were made eight
Speaker 1: or earlier discs of tron Um Elevator Actions by Hunter
Speaker 1: Fantastic Games. So yeah, that's that's kind of the story
Speaker 1: between about the rise and fall of arcades. I mean,
Speaker 1: like I said, we could still find a few of
Speaker 1: them scattered here and there, but they aren't they aren't
Speaker 1: as omnipresent as they seem to be in the early eighties.
Speaker 1: I mean, it used to be that there you couldn't
Speaker 1: walk into a shopping mall without finding at least one arcade.
Speaker 1: There are some malls I went into that were big
Speaker 1: enough to have to remember that, and they were always
Speaker 1: packed with people too. Yeah, and and you know there's
Speaker 1: certain experiences that you just can't get like you can
Speaker 1: play on Xbox Live. You can play against other players,
Speaker 1: which is fantastic, and other other game systems supports similar
Speaker 1: uh competitive or cooperative game play online, and that's fantastic.
Speaker 1: It's still not quite the same as lining up to
Speaker 1: a an arcade console and or arcade cabinet rather and
Speaker 1: plunking a quarter down on the screen to mark that
Speaker 1: you have the next game as two people are battling
Speaker 1: it out in Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter or or
Speaker 1: something like that. I remember when people used to put
Speaker 1: a quarter up on the screen glass to let you
Speaker 1: know next game. Yeah, I remember. So, So let's let's
Speaker 1: wrap this up with do you have any like favorite
Speaker 1: arcade stories at all? I have one I can tell
Speaker 1: if you want to think of one. Okay, go ahead, okay.
Speaker 1: So I attended a science fiction convention in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Speaker 1: Uh in, oh gosh. It probably would been in the
Speaker 1: early nineties maybe, And sadly, one of the biggest attractions
Speaker 1: at this tiny, tiny convention was a copy of gaunt
Speaker 1: Let Too that was in their little game area for
Speaker 1: for the hotel. It was the hotel's arcade machine and
Speaker 1: one of the convention guys decided that it would be
Speaker 1: fun to go ahead and invest and get tons and
Speaker 1: tons and tons of quarters. I know that some people
Speaker 1: hate me using the phrase tons of stuff, but anyway,
Speaker 1: lots of quarters and allow people to play this game
Speaker 1: as long as they wanted to. So I got in
Speaker 1: on level one and played Gauntlet too with three other
Speaker 1: people until we got to some ridiculous level like in
Speaker 1: the hundreds and uh and that was one of the
Speaker 1: most fun experiences because it was just, again, you've got
Speaker 1: four people working together. They're cooperating trying to to play
Speaker 1: through this game. And uh and you know the the
Speaker 1: jokes that come up as people accidentally do things like
Speaker 1: shoot the food. If you've ever played the Gauntlet games,
Speaker 1: it has some very uh distinctive phrases that come out
Speaker 1: as you play, like, you know, warriors shop the food elf,
Speaker 1: your life force is running out, Wizard needs food badly.
Speaker 1: So uh yeah, that just ended up becoming a great
Speaker 1: community experience. Yeah, I um, I don't really have a
Speaker 1: story like that so much, but I do. I do
Speaker 1: remember going to my friend's parents arcade, and you know
Speaker 1: that I was pretty much guaranteed to see somebody I
Speaker 1: knew there, which was really really cool. And then I
Speaker 1: used to go to this one pizza place all the
Speaker 1: time when I was a kid, and my parents would
Speaker 1: just you know, give me five bucks to play until
Speaker 1: the pizza showed up, and you know, there was always
Speaker 1: something good. Marble Madness, Spy Hunter Tapper, Marble Madness. Wow, yeah,
Speaker 1: that was That was the first time I encountered Dragon's
Speaker 1: Layer and uh, you know, trying to figure out the
Speaker 1: sequence of moves that would get you to the next level.
Speaker 1: And yeah, I finally got to see a laser disc
Speaker 1: of Dragon's Layer which showed how to go through the
Speaker 1: whole game and win at the end. And then after
Speaker 1: it ran through that, it showed all the ways you
Speaker 1: can die. Yeah, though the different ways you could die
Speaker 1: part was about three times longer than the actual gameplay part. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's definitely one of those experiences. It's kind
Speaker 1: of sad to see it go away. But at the
Speaker 1: same time, financially, it's hard to justify operating an arcade.
Speaker 1: It's just really challenging to do it in a way
Speaker 1: that that will make enough money to pay all the bills,
Speaker 1: much less turn a profit. So it's challenging. I'd still
Speaker 1: like to find that cow milking video game that you
Speaker 1: were talking about. Go to Japan, dude. We should also
Speaker 1: add that this is really only true necessarily in North America.
Speaker 1: There are other places where arcades are still going strong,
Speaker 1: and Japan is one of those places. You can go
Speaker 1: to Japan and there are plenty of different arcades, and
Speaker 1: they have really innovative games, and sometimes they're really crazy,
Speaker 1: like a a Milk the Cow arcade game where you
Speaker 1: actually milk the electronic utters of a plastic cow. But
Speaker 1: it was basically like Simon, right, Yeah, that's what That's
Speaker 1: what it looked like to me. I didn't work up
Speaker 1: the courage to actually play it because I was certain
Speaker 1: that video of me playing it would show up online later.
Speaker 1: And sadly, that particular arcade no longer exists. International Bowl
Speaker 1: and Arcade off Bufford Highway. I miss you. Just goes
Speaker 1: to show you if you get the opportunity to play
Speaker 1: an unusual coin operated video game, sees that opportunity. Dude.
Speaker 1: Did you ever play any of the arcade arm wrestling games? Okay,
Speaker 1: we'll get into that later. Okay, any of you guys
Speaker 1: have any questions, comments, topic suggestions, or anything like that.
Speaker 1: You can write us our email. I just is text
Speaker 1: stuff at how stuff works dot com and Chris and
Speaker 1: I will arm wrestle you again really soon if you're
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