[Necro] What were arcades like?

[durecellrabbit]

I was reading about arcades and how you'd have to queue to play popular games as well as follow rules like no throwing in fighting game or the others wouldn't let you play. This seems rather strange. The money cost must have gotten expensive pretty quickly as well. I'm not old enough to have been to them when they were around so I'm curious about what they were like.

[Black Isis]

Damn kids. GET OFFA MY LAWN!

*hobbles away with her cane*

[nonsense]

I feel old! OLD!

Arcades were just places with lots of games to play. House rules and stuff didn't really happen except between friends. Some people would get pissed and talk shit a bit when they got beat, but mostly you just went, challenged someone, and played. Loser tries for the rematch or moves on (or is replaced by the next guy in line if there's a lot of interest). Winner stays on and plays that quarter for all it's worth until he gets knocked off.

They were fun.

[b4d0m3n]

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF... GHHHHHHFFFFF...

[ROMzombie]

There are still arcades, they just aren't quite as common, and the focus has shifted to more "prize" based, rather than "game" based.

In my area, we have a Gameworks (owned by Sega) and a Dave & Busters, both with lots of games.

[Ziven of Nine]

The Roller Disco I used to go to, the local Skatetown USA franchise, has the arcade area in the center set up with rules and rules monitors like that. But the other arcades in the area were mostly no different than slot machine banks in Las Vegas or Atlantic City. Lots of machines, not many lines.

[Zemi]

Oh, holy shit, I'm old. I'm not old enough to be old yet, but I'm old if you're too young to remember arcades. Okay, let me see if I can brush the Alzheimers cobwebs off of my steam-powered brain and remember what Arcades were like.

In arcades, you queued up for popular or new games, usually. You set down a quarter or a button or something on the machine (quarters were the popular choice), and you watched, and when the next round came up (in fighting games, this was when someone lost, but in other games, it was when they ran out of quarters), you jumped in. This usually meant you were playing against someone else, so you got to know everyone who was a regular quick.

The 'no throwing' rule was kind of a house-rule for a lot of places. See, the older fighting games had really wonky response and collision detection, and in some of 'em (Mortal Kombat, for one), a throw did pretty decent damage and couldn't be interrupted in a lot of cases. If you wanted to, you could just drain down the other guy's health like that, and since everyone was paying to play, it was a dick move to do so. I know in our arcade, there was a little sticky on the Street Fighter machine, reading, "M.Bison is an automatic forfeit of next turn", which meant that, if someone chose Bison (who, in the older Street Fighters, was dangerous as hell in an experienced player's hands), they got to play one round with him, and, win or lose, they had to hand the controls over to the next player in line.

As for the cost? I once dumped twenty-five bucks worth of quarters into Golden Axe: Revenge of Death Adder so that my buddy and I could beat it. If you were going for a High Score, you better bring a roll along, or know exactly what you were doing. On the plus side, if it got around that you were going for a high score, people would usually stop putting markers down for next play and stand by and watch (and cheer you on, if you got a good crowd) until you got the score you were shooting for or ran out of money. Hell, I once had people paying for me because I was going for High Score on a game and wound up running out of coins just a few thousand points short.

[KoboldLord]

Originally Posted by durecellrabbit

I was reading about arcades and how you'd have to queue to play popular games as well as follow rules like no throwing in fighting game or the others wouldn't let you play.

In my experience, this is a recent development. In ye olde arcadee gamee days, you played to get your initials (which were surprisingly likely to spell out a bad word) on the score charts, and also to humiliate outsiders who want to play. A player who can do well will be able to assemble a small crowd of hangers-on who would smack down any attempt to forbid a game-breaker, much less scrub a legitimate tactic.

Originally Posted by durecellrabbit

This seems rather strange. The money cost must have gotten expensive pretty quickly as well. I'm not old enough to have been to them when they were around so I'm curious about what they were like.

This part is true. In my old days as one of the hangers-on who couldn't play, I saw some of the skilled players dump multiple twenties in a single day into one of these machines, and I also knew that they went to that arcade quite often. Some of them skipped school to feed the machine often enough to get held back a grade.

And it's not like you'll have the crowd of hangers-on every day you're there. Heck, they're probably at school. If you looked around in an arcade, there's usually one guy with groupies who is beating all comers and a dozen or more other players who are obsessively playing some other game. I assume those other players get their turn with the groupies some other day, or maybe the groupies just flock to whichever skilled player is getting the challenge at the moment.

[Cthulhu-chan]

And as for the money... you just didn't play quiet as often as you do now that the big exciting games are fixtures in our homes. I usually went with a friend and $10, got a roll of quarters, and we played until we'd either burned through our money or were just ready to leave.

[Plaid_Dragon]

Who besides me put WAY too many quarters into Gauntlet II machines????