Jeff Hoy, American

Kotaku once again asks that oft-asked question “Why do you think arcades failed in the USA?”

When arcades were king, the hardware required to drive them was expensive and well out of reach of most home consumers.  The typical arcade cabinet, in addition to having the custom computer hardware to drive the game, usually had better monitors than the TVs people had at homes, much better controller joysticks and buttons than your Atari 2600 wagglestick or SNES game pad, and great sound systems that drove the sound effects and music deep into your skull.  It was all great quality, and you had to pay for that quality, many thousands of dollars in most cases.  The only cheap way to get an arcade experience at home would be to buy a Neo Geo system, but that was only cheap in relative terms.  The system was quite a bit more expensive than other home consoles, and the games were upwards of $200 each.  So hardly cheap.

It used to be that when you read a review of an arcade game being released on a home console you would see comparisons of which console (Genesis vs. SNES, Saturn vs. Playstation) had the most “arcade perfect” translation.  But once the Dreamcast, PS2, and Xbox hit home, those kinds of comparisons disappeared.  The new breed of home consoles became just as powerful, if not more so, than the hardware most arcade games ran on.  In fact, in an attempt to reduce costs of arcade cabinets and game development, many cabinet makers turned to these consoles to replace all of the custom hardware they had to engineer.

Hardware and games aside, comfort is another factor keeping people at home.  Speaking for myself, I would much rather lounge around on my comfy couch or slouch in my leather office chair watching a big screen TV from across the room than spend hours on my feet in front of a cabinet, hunched over the controls, and huddled together with other players in way too close proximity.

All of this had it’s effect, but at the same time, it’s tradeoffs.  Some arcade games are an experience that just can’t be translated into the home.  Big arcade cabinets like Cruis’n USA had motion simulation, Hydro Thunder had body shaking transducers in the seats and full on surround sound right next to your head, and Silent Scope had it’s scoped rifle, a control scheme that has yet to be matched in any way.  None of that has really made it home, and likely never will.  So I think the only way for arcades to make a comeback, or survive at all really is to make their games more of an experience.  They need to offer something we can’t have at home.

There’s also a general assumption in the US that arcades elsewhere (Japan in particular) are thriving.  It’s unclear if that’s really the case though, with many major operators closing hundreds of arcades in Japan last year alone.  So while the arcade business may be doing better in Japan, it certainly doesn’t seem like it’s all gumdrops and roses either.