Arcade Culture is Weird

Wait, I’m not trying to rip you apart or anything but how are these games not child gambling? A ton of them work virtually identically to slot machines or various machines you’d find in an actual casino. I mean hell like there are endless variations thrown at kids either on app stores or their favorite video game. The question of at what point gambling becomes to bad for kids is closer to the truth imo and i don’t have an answer myself but I definitely know they are gambling

i remember when i was 7 i was playing deal or no deal and i got to a pretty high number of tickets and there was an entire audience behind me screaming "take the deal!" or "no dont take the deal!" needless to say it was one of my most traumatizing events

I work at an arcade, and for a few hours of my day I’m that employee who has to sit and wait for little Johnny to pick out what he wants to spend his tickets on, and honestly it’s not that bad. You only have as many tickets as the attendant says you have, and for a lot of kids they get really excited hearing me round up their tickets to the nearest hundred. It’s fun to give bigger prizes the kids can’t afford, their faces light up (and also I steal candy from the prize counter daily but don’t tell anybody that)

Fun fact: Pinball machines were actually outlawed for a hot minute since they were considered a form of gambling. They had to bring an absolute wizard in to prove that you could get a high score with enough skill, and thus prove it's not gambling.

I definitely miss having a cup of tokens and carrying around a cup of tickets, even if I get the same amount of tickets digitally. Used to walk around Chuck E. Cheese looking for any tickets some typically younger kid than I left behind

I work at a bowling alley/laser tag center. Our top prize for a few months was an Xbox One S for 30,000. However I noticed one oversight the arcade staff made - getting enough points in crossy road will automatically win you around 500 tickets. The price to play was 1.25. If you constantly kept getting this, you could get a brand new Xbox One S for less than $75 in theory, which is a steal. Someone eventually did win it!

Theres a place in my city called Cidercade where you pay like $12 and you can play all the old arcade machines UNLIMITED, including Skeeball, basketball, and SO many pinball machines. Its honestly my favorite place to go with friends or for a date night, it gives the old arcade vibes without the pressure/knowledge of feeling the importance of every quarter you spend.

Rhythm games are where it’s at. I went to Round 1 today to play DDR and any other cool looking Japanese rhythm games I saw. The games were insanely fun and almost all of them let you do three songs for one play. So I would get a good at least 10 minutes after every card swipe. I wish they gave out tickets so that I could get something for playing but I would still go back to play more anyways.

surprised that rhythm games and fighting games are glossed over in this vid, since they are the most popular arcade games in all the arcades i frequently go to

The biggest reason why arcades are in a wired spot in NA in my mind: 1: No new games: Japan has a big arcade scene still with new games coming out all the time. Shooting, Fighting games where you can play against the person next/across to you, rhythm games, and puzzle games. Sadly these aren't imported to NA because the cost is a CRAP ton. It's why conversion kits were sold in the 80s-90s. It was (still is) way cheaper to ship/buy the boards buttons and such and just use a old cabinet that had a game no one was playing anymore. In Japan arcade machines are just PCs that just get updated via internet now. So a Street Fighter machine gets all the updates for free, instead of buying a new board/game cart. -Just to note that Street Fighter and Tekken normally see a arcade version before it's ported to the Playstation/X-BONE/PC The arcade owner(s) at times also doesn't have to pay for new games at times, and instead pays a percentage of the money a game makes (20 to 30%). So if the game doesn't get played they don't pay for it and can just put a new game on the machine. Getting just the hardware is on the expensive side and if it does have any games on it, they're cracked so they don't call home to check the DRM. Sadly there isn't a company in NA that I know of that does this. So we killed our own market, because we didn't keep up. 2: Ticket Redemption/Prize winning machines: Little jr.Casinos. Play games with little to no chance a good amount of tickets, so you can trade them in for prizes that would have been cheaper for you just to buy. Sadly these games make a ton of money. On average a person will spend $40-$50 for something that cost the arcade $5. (You covered this pretty good) The prize games like Stacker are also rigged so it will only "let" someone win once every 200-300 plays. At which the person on the "winning" play can still lose. There was a lawsuit against the maker, at which they lost. So they had to update the game so it was a game of actual chance. The update was offered to owners, but it was upto them to update the game. Part of the court order from the lawsuit also forced the maker to have new machines sold with the actual update. Hench why new ones aren't seen that much. 3: PC/Console Gaming: They caught up in graphics and sound/music and have online play when it comes to fighting games for the most part. 4: Mobile/Cellphones: The Vita, DS, Switch are little power houses and can play most games with little to no issue. And games are easily switched out.

There's a game I picked up a while back called The Coin Game. It's an arcade simulator type of game where you can play various arcade games and machines and get silly little prizes like lava lamps or plush rasta bananas. It's a crunchy looking early access game that with an aesthetic that screams 2010's Unity asset flip but it's a genuine labor of love by a single guy who just loves his arcades. This video reminded me of it :) another great vid! Keep it up!

I remember going to Chuck E Cheese as a kid and the entire experience was perfect. This was in the mid to late 2000s and i’ll always have the memories.

I still love arcades, and my favorites are ones that just let you play the classics after a fee, one near me that still has physical tickets, and Round1 Arcades (they’re really cool are a Japanese based company, and have Japanese games and prizes. Only place I can play vocoloid arcade games)

I think my favorite "seat shooter" arcade game has to be the luigi's mansion arcade game, easy. Though i've seen the jurassic park one around a lot. Rail shooters are fun, even if they don't give you tickets.

There used to be an underground arcade (actually located beneath an indoor swapmeet) near my house I'd go to often growing up ('00s-early 2010s) , you just had to pay the $3 entrance and all the games inside were free to play. The owner/man at the entrance would stamp your hand to be able to come back in if you left, and they had mostly 80s/90s game cabinets like Street Fighter, Metal Slug, Mortal Kombat, Galaga, House of the Dead, Initial D etc. plus billiards tables, ping pong, and air hockey. Sadly, it closed down in early 2019 due to the owner retiring. Not gonna lie the arcade was ghetto, musty, and tagged up but for sure an experience I'll never forget and something you can't replicate nowadays especially the free to play cabinets and no bullshit prizes just having fun all day for $3.

I remember when my family were playing the SpongeBob SquarePants coin-drop machine at Dave & Buster's, and my dad found that dropping the coins at the time the spinning bridges pass a certain letter on the display text(I believe it was the glyph of one of the E's) gave you a perfect drop every time. We won 2 whole sets of the special character cards(which were like that game's "jackpot" equivalents). I admit, we smuggled 1 of the sets home while submitting the other, so we could use that set the next time we came to ensure we had more money to spend each time.

I'll never forget the one afternoon that my mom and I stopped by the arcade in the mall while on a shopping trip. We played some of the ticket games and managed to win me a Charmander plush. This was when Pokemon was at its height of popularity here and I'll never forget that. I still have it :)

i used to go to the local arcade with my dad every friday as a kid. we would spend hours playing skee-ball in the back of this un-air conditioned, gaudily carpeted, and entirely windowless beachfront shack. somewhere around the age of eight i became so good at skee-ball that i was regularly scoring in the (possibly several if my memory serves) thousand-range. my dad had been going to this arcade since the eighties and had saved up tickets from his childhood, teenage years, twenties, dates he went on with my mom, and fatherhood, and, since i swore to myself that one day i’d spend all of them, i too saved mine. i remember watching the arcade slowly modernize, bright digital tablet-esque podiums replacing the cold war-era arcade megaliths i had so loved. in my early teens, my relationship with my father started to deteriorate as we stopped biking down to that arcade, instead engaging in endless yelling matches in the kitchen. they phased out paper tickets last year. i never did get that big prize i saved up for.

I still love arcades, particularly retro ones that still focus on video games. There's something about going to a place that's all about fun that playing alone in your living room will never quite replicate.

If I gotta be honest, the rhythm games is the best part of the arcades. I always love playing WACCA, maimai, Groove coaster and more. They are really the only thing in arcades that are really worth going to.