Arcade classics

The Boardwalk amusement park in downtown Santa Cruz, California, by the beach has a great arcade. In it is a Classics section. I suddenly felt like I was 15 again. :) I only wish I had had a full day to play just there. Games in the video, in order:

- Stargate
- Space Invaders
- Robotron 2084
- Frogger
- Kung Fu Master
- Tron (the original)
- Ms. PacMan
- Donkey Kong (introducing Mario)
...and the Wall O Wireframe Graphix:
- BattleZone
- Star Wars
- Space Duel
- TEMPEST!!!

Also outside the little enclave, which I didn't see until after the video was taken:
- Gorf
- Jr PacMan (as a ROM, not original cabinet)
- Track & Field (!! original Japanese cabinet with P1 on the right, not the left)
- ROM cabinet with trackball games: Centipede, Millipede and Missile Command

If you're in the area, drop by, the rest of the arcade is not bad either :)

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• arcade
• video
• game
• classics

[parasiticproductions]

WTF? All those amazing machines and nobody on 'em? God, I thought this would be a fun video to watch but it's just depressing.

[NiallOT]

@parasiticproductions: Admittedly, it was a late Tuesday evening in January, so the whole arcade was empty. And hey, if they had been full, I wouldn't have been able to get such great shots of them! :) I do hope they get their share of action on weekends though!

[meplayvgalot]

i think arcade games started to slowly decrease because of handheld gaming. I admit handheld gaming is great but nothing compared to the excitment of playing with your friend in an arcade. idk but when i played soul caliber in an arcade it just felt better then playing it on console.

[NiallOT]

Just gaming in general away from the arcade, but definitely when gaming consoles started to rival in power and visuals with the arcade machines, taking away their last technical advantage. Even some social advantages, as you only played with people you liked, not bullies or people so better than you that you had no chance to play. But as you said, the experience simply is not the same, and the control mechanisms are rarely matched either.

[NiallOT]

Absolutely correct, hootyhaha - 80s was arcades' peak.  A large number of different things made their decline, from home consoles to bad reputations to rising costs and rent closing many places in the mid-90s. Now they can only survive with something else paying the rent, like a restaurant or cinema.

[hootyhaha]

Oh OK. Well no offense, but I'm not sure that's what did Arcades in. I think it would be more of the Consoles after Genesis when they started getting so close to the real thing. Again, me and my friends were frequenting several arcades in my area in 1996. People get stuck saying they went away in the 80s, but the accurate thing to say is that in the 80s it's when they were at their peak.

[meplayvgalot]

i mean like handhelds such as gameboys ds and psp

[hootyhaha]

When you say handheld you mean console right?

[hootyhaha]

Well . . sort of. Even after consoles arrived up to Sega Genesis days, arcades were still pretty big. I'm probably younger than yall and possibly remember the 90s to mid 90s a little better. Up to 1996 me and my friends were frequenting 3 different HUGE arcades in the Metroplex Texas. (Dallas, Ft. Worth, Arlington). And 2 of them are still here at Splash Water Falls , and at a Putt Putt in North Richland Hills. Haven't been in them since then so not sure what they offer.

[hootyhaha]

There were more classics than that there. There was that classic room, but then on the other side of the acade down a hall, there were even more classics. I was there this past August, and I played a ton of them. I was surprised that there were other arcades around California too.

[meplayvgalot]

a lot of people these days are actually making there own arcade cabinets. Which can cost way less. I decided to make an arcade control deck connected to my gamecube controller so i could play games on my wii with there virtual console.

[meplayvgalot]

oh, well actually i never grew up when arcades were big lol. im 14. but my experience with playing the ones that are left was excellent. Also a lot of arcade cabinet versions of consoles are like the sega mega tech is known to have better graphics then the mega drive/genesis, s-tv had better graphics then the saturn , and the sega naomi had better graphics then the dreamcast. I guess because arcade cabinets are expensive as no one wants them these days unless they already owned them.