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What year would you pick as the quintessential arcade year?
RayB:
hey Kenobi, check your facts. ;-)
I'd also vote for 81/82.
DaveMMR:
--- Quote from: bkenobi on June 14, 2009, 03:10:47 pm ---Are you kidding?! The reason arcades died in 1983 or so was because the NES came out and you could play any game you wanted and you didn't have to bum a ride. Of course, you had to convince your parents to buy you the game at $40-70 or rent it for $5. Course, I was never allowed to go to the arcade as a kid on a regular basis, so my opinion is as a console gamer...
--- End quote ---
If you're referring to the US NES, that came out in 1985. Even then, bonafide arcade classics came out during the early years of the NES, such as Gauntlet, Ghost 'N Goblins, and Paperboy. Home consoles did slow down arcades but games such as Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat revitalized them for a short time. It wasn't until home technology caught up with the arcade hardware (and soon exceeded it) that the arcades we all know was dealt the death blow in the late 90's. Now it only survives for the more specialized typed of games that can't be recreated at home inexpensively (yet) and redemption games (save for the occasional arcade that caters to the nostalgic and obtains income though other product, e.g. BARCADE in Brooklyn).
The Japanese NES (Famicom) did come out in 1983, but arcades (game centers) are still popular in Japan. ;)
CheffoJeffo:
If I had to pick a single year, it would be 1982 as that was the year when most of the best games were actually in the arcades that I was going to. A lot of them had come out earlier, but were still in active service in 1982.
1983 saw some cool vectors (Star Wars and Star Trek) and a plethora of laserdisc games (Dragon's Lair, Space Ace, MACH 3, Cliff Hanger and others that I can't remember), but by then some really good, but older, games were being rotated out and the inventory just kept churning.
1987/88 was not bad for me personally as I oversaw the game room in our residence. I picked good games that I happened to like playing and earned enough for the op to justify leaving them in place for a reasonable length of time. Rygar, Gauntlet and Double Dragon were staple machine.
C'mon Ray -- it's not like he was out by two years ! ;) Or maybe he was in Japan. Or maybe he is the one who is kidding.
I was reading ArcadeHeroes.com today and there are still some interesting things happening in the world of arcade gaming. I couldn't afford either the cash or space to have the new games in my gameroom, but damn, some of them are pretty cool.
dmckean:
My memory is every year I can remember until 1998 had great arcade games and then overnight they turned into barren wastelands.
Turnarcades:
For me the year of gaming was 1988. At this point most of the games I consider worthwhile were out and mixed in the arcades with the classics. England has a very different arcade scene though and being an inner-city lad it was rare to get to an arcade except with a visit to the coast.
The home scene really gathered momentum with the advent of the 16-bit era too about a year later, then the arcades once again had a resurgence locally around 1991 when SF2 came out and for the next 5 years every arcade I visited had some version of it, a hack or one of the clones like Fatal Fury, KOF etc.
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