Editorial: What Killed the Arcade?

A visit to my local mall's excuse of an arcade this week got me thinking about what actually killed the arcades. To give you some perspective: our local mall's arcade was never much of a "destination," but after a recent relocation in the mall it's become a pathetic shadow of what an arcade should be: two DDR machines, three or four shooting games, a pinball machine, and an air hockey table.

That's it. No other games, but an awful lot of empty nothing. It's a wonder it's even open — I've never seen any kids in there, and my kids and I are almost always the only people in the place when I visit.

I've always wondered what was the true cause of the demise of arcade gaming, and I've got a few "prime suspects" in mind:

• The Home Console
• Online Gaming
• Fighters
• The "Continue" Option

Home Consoles obviously brought electronic gaming into your home, removing some of the need of having separate gaming machines and a central location to share them. With a console you could suddenly play a large number of games from the comfort of your living room. You could play with friends, although the joy of competing against a skilled stranger for a high score was gone, as was the bragging rights of having your initials on a high score table for all to see.

Online gaming brought back the social aspect of arcade gaming, once again in convenient "at home" form: you could compete with skilled opponents from all over the country (or world!). This took away one of the arcade's last advantages, although it didn't completely remove the thrill of face-to-face competition against another human being.

"Fighter"-style games may be a controversial choice as an "arcade killer", but I remember well the influx of fighting games and the damage they did to the arcade ecosystem. Fighters, when they were introduced, were enormously popular. So much so, in fact, that nearly ever other type of game vanished from the arcades as operators rushed to cash in on the frenzy. I can still remember visiting an arcade looking for a good shooter to play, and finding nothing but rows of Mortal Kombat-style machines. This drove out everyone but the hard-core fighter fans, and I don't think the arcades ever really recovered.

The "Continue" option deserves a special place in arcade gaming hell, simply because it took the skill out of beating a game. When you can finish a game just by pushing in more quarters, reaching the end is no longer a test of skill but rather a testament to how much spare change you had on hand. Once you've pumped in enough quarters to reach the end of a game, what's the point of going back and playing it again? You've beaten it, seen all there is to see. The continue option was a short-term windfall for operators, but in the end it ruined the replayability of games and any sense of accomplishment for the player.

So, which of these killed the arcade? Like the "grassy knoll conspiracies", there may never be a clear and obvious single killer. It's probably a combination of the above factors, plus some I haven't even considered.

The bottom line, unfortunately, is still the same: the arcades are dead, and I don't think they're ever coming back. The best that we can do is to preserve some of that magic in our own homes, keeping alive the memory of the days of a crowded, blinking, noisy magic land known as the neighborhood arcade.