"what were arcades like, granpa?"

  Quote

In this RPGNet forum, a youngster asks, "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."

 

Well, let me tell you Billy, when I was a boy, there was an arcade at the Sheppard Centre, and we would sneak off there at lunch and after school and during spare periods and when we should have been in class. There were older teenagers, 18 or 19, who more or less lived there. One of them sold hash on the side, but mostly they just seemed to be bums. Really, really cool bums. One of them was amazingly good at Gauntlet. He'd play it all day long, spending an hour carefully honing a character to an incredibly buff state, and then he'd sell you his game for a couple bucks (the proto-goldfarmer of suburban Toronto!). We'd all crowd around and shout encouragement. The guy behind the counter, George, in his 20s, treated us like lovable scum, like you see bartenders treating the barflys in a sitcom from the era. We all knew whose initials were on the leaderboards. We were allowed to smoke in the arcade and we smoked like chimneys. All the games had volcano-crater burns from our butts. The worst offense in our universe was to pull the plug during someone's game. That always meant fights.

 

Downtown, on the Yonge Street sleaze strip, we had giant arcades, with pinball rooms at the back. These places moved a lot of hash, and no one seemed to know anyone else except for the hustlers, and theoretically they wouldn't let you in during school hours, but they also always had the latest games. Walking into one of those places was like attending Comdex -- a tour through the gimmicky universe of faster-than-light technological innovation, only we didn't have hucksters, we had to pay 25 cents for our demos (or lurk over someone's shoulder while they played).

 

There weren't many girls around the arcades -- later, a standard ironic/nostalgic boyfriend-girlfriend joke in my social circle was "Let's go to the arcade and you can hold my skateboard" -- but they were often very, very good. And tough. You had to swear like a sailor at the arcade.

 

  Quote

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.

wish i had an arcade in my town still... :cry2:

we have one left. it also does pool, poker and network gaming.

i pass it every day on the way home from work, but i reckon the last time i was in there i was playing shinobi and moonwalker :cry2:

my arcade was in the back of a pizza joint. it was mostly pool tables now that i think about it. they had a deer hunting game and 2 snowmobile games, nothing good. it was a really seedy place, a lot of drug deals went down there, so the owner decided to clean up the place and make it all nice. they got rid of the arcade. that place burned down last year, ironically the name of the restaurant was All Fired Up.

  JohnTqs said:

my arcade was in the back of a pizza joint. it was mostly pool tables now that i think about it. they had a deer hunting game and 2 snowmobile games, nothing good. it was a really seedy place, a lot of drug deals went down there, so the owner decided to clean up the place and make it all nice. they got rid of the arcade. that place burned down last year, ironically the name of the restaurant was All Fired Up.

lol thats not an arcade thats just a couple of shitty new cabinets at a pizza hut, how old are you?

the arcade from my youth was called Tilt, and it was below the food court of the mall near the apartment I grew up in. I used to spend all my weekends and time after school there, watching people play samurai showdown and other neo geo games when I couldn't afford quarters to play. I would save my lunch money to play after school but .50 didn't last very long and I would quickly be back to watching. This forced you to get good really fast, so that you could keep playing.

fun factory, plano tx. home of the street fighter console i was conceived, born, and raised on

THE FUTURE IS NOW

my college had a half-decent arcade. i was the god of tekken tag tournament. i went 16-0 one day at lunch. i would beat people playing one handed, just to piss them off :)

emulators are a wonderful thing

  beneboi said:

  JohnTqs said:

my arcade was in the back of a pizza joint. it was mostly pool tables now that i think about it. they had a deer hunting game and 2 snowmobile games, nothing good. it was a really seedy place, a lot of drug deals went down there, so the owner decided to clean up the place and make it all nice. they got rid of the arcade. that place burned down last year, ironically the name of the restaurant was All Fired Up.

 

lol thats not an arcade thats just a couple of shitty new cabinets at a pizza hut, how old are you?

 

 

lol true

  viscosity said:

 

emulators are a wonderful thing

YES, i love that game

Magic Mountain, also there's a Cinemark theatre in my home town that has an arcade in it.

I was always glued to Area 51, X-Men, or Street Fighter II. I have an older brother, and when we were kids living in Ironton, Ohio, my parents took us to a couple, I think. Back then it was all Centipede, Mrs. Pacman, and Frogger, though.

all of the arcades i've seen here in melbourne are populated by asian kids who completely pwn everyone at any game, but mostly ddr and the 'rock band' style games.

my memories were good but after watching the king of kong you know what, fuck arcades and the assholes who frequent them.

  viscosity said:

emulators are a wonderful thing

line up here for a guided tour to my childhood

  Space Coyote said:

Arcade Ambience Project

great idea. could be really something cool if done with proper spatial effects (ie: reverb, frequency dampening, etc.. not just panning)

  kaini said:

  viscosity said:

emulators are a wonderful thing

 

line up here for a guided tour to my childhood

what skin are you using on your windows/taskbar? it's beautiful.

a modified version of the eminence theme for windowblinds

the wallpaper is from the amazing MRS