the big crash of 1984

[raindog]

Over the last few months I've read a number of articles about the American videogame market crash in 1984, naming a variety of causes: the availability of cheap home computers, the glut of badly written games, the major players' miscalculation that people would want to convert their videogame systems into computers, the sale of Atari to the Tramiels, etc.

 

That's all well and good for the home side of things, but doesn't anyone else remember how almost overnight in the summer and fall of '84, the arcade industry also tanked? My biggest local mall went from having three arcades to one in the space of a few months, and that one closed for some time a year later (it's open again now, which is what brought this up in my mind.) Arcades in strip malls closed and reopened in '85 or '86 as video stores, pizza or Chinese food joints, etc. Bowling alleys converted their huge arcade rooms back to storage areas. People just stopped dropping quarters into arcade machines and did whatever else with their time.

 

So you can't just blame the home videogame industry's screwups for the crash; it was a pandemic. What caused Americans to just suddenly and collectively become sick of videogames for a couple years, only to go back to them with the NES and end up making them the single biggest segment of the American entertainment market? And (less relevant to this discussion board, but an interesting question) could it happen again?

 

Rob

[Ze_ro]

I think the arcade industry is tied more closely to the console industry than you think. Whatever happens to one has some effect on the other. Cheap, high-powered home systems are dooming the arcades currently.

 

--Zero

[Dr Galaga]

Think of it this way - Now everyone (or everyones neighbor) has an Atari. You can play Space Invaders all day in your pajamas, plus you don't need to bug mom and dad for a ride to the arcade (or some quarters).

OR

Mom: "No, I don't know why you want me to take you to the arcade. That's why we bought you that Atari. Go play Asteroids on IT."

[Witchfynde]

So you can't just blame the home videogame industry's screwups for the crash; it was a pandemic.  What caused Americans to just suddenly and collectively become sick of videogames for a couple years, only to go back to them with the NES and end up making them the single biggest segment of the American entertainment market?  

 

I don't think people got "sick" of games, but like how it's been pointed out before, the home consoles with decent arcade ports helped damage the arcade sector too. Yeah, I was an early teen when the crash hit, I also remember my local mall going from five arcades down to one as well.

 

And (less relevant to this discussion board, but an interesting question) could it happen again?

 

I personally think it's doubtful, since arcades aren't booming businesses anymore, so a crash is less likely to happen.

[joeybastard]

I think part of the arcade crash had to do with the cost of the games themselves to both the operater and the player. Many of the games were more expensive for the arcade owners so they raised the playing price to .50 and more for some games. Since the games probably all seemed the same to the parents they would be less likely to hand over more money for them.

I seem to remember reading also that many of the arcades switched to skee ball/skill games because they turned just as much profit and didn't need to be constantly updated. They could also run the tickets for crappy prize scam from skee ball machines that little kids love so much.

Let's not forget also that arcades were generally loud dark places filled with violent teenage boys. Parents weren't too thrilled to be there. Many store owners probably got tired of kids hanging around if the machines weren't making much profit. I know I got thrown out of many a pizza place in my youth

[+davidcalgary29]

Question: when was the last time anyone visited their local arcade and dropped a few quarters into their favourite machine? I recall that the last game I played in an arcade was "Arkanoid", back in 1987. Ack!

[AtariLeaf]

Oh its been years for me. A local place called Fast Eddies was the only one in Windsor that I remember. Maybe Lost Monkey knows of another, but Fast Eddies closed a few years back when Chryslers bought up the city block that it was a part of.

 

I went there a lot in the eighties though. I used to play Rampage constantly there. Plus they had a lot of cool Pinball machines from the 50's all the way to the 80's.

[joeybastard]

I actually go about 2 or 3 times a month top a bar near me that has a huge arcade attached to it. I blow about $20 on Atari Football (Xs & Os!), Area 51, Golden Tee, and Outrun. It's great because all of the machines have a beer holder attachment and ashtrays.

[atari_aaron]

What I remember is the types of video games available. Someone mentioned the advent of the skiiball arcade... I just remember becoming less and less interested in the arcades because there didn't seem to be much of a variety in the arcades anymore. In the later 80's everything seemed to me to be a variant of Xevious, Street Fighter, or Comando. I pretty much stopped going to the arcade once the Star Wars and Xenophobe games disappeared.

[AtariLeaf]

How about a new sub-thread to this:

 

Anyone remember their first arcade experience?

It was 1980 for me and my family and I were vacationing in Hawaii. The lobby had two Space Invader machines and a Sea Wolf. I think I spent more time playing those then outside on the beach. Pretty sad huh?

[joeybastard]

My first arcade game experience was at a little luncheonette near my house when I was 7. My friends and I would go there to buy candy and play pinball. Eventually they got a Space Invaders and Sprint 2 machine. I was hooked forever. I had to stand on a milk crate to play them because I was (and still am for that matter) short.

[Inky]

How about a new sub-thread to this:

 

Anyone remember their first arcade experience?

 

Easy...

 

Truck stop north of Nashville.. They had a pac-man machine, and two kids were playing it. They ran off and told me I could finish their game.. 15 seconds later they came back and wanted their game back....

[Witchfynde]

Question: when was the last time anyone visited their local arcade and dropped a few quarters into their favourite machine? I recall that the last game I played in an arcade was "Arkanoid", back in 1987. Ack!

 

I know what you mean, I hardly play any new games nowadays myself. The last time I spent some money on an arcade (or games in the lobby of a theatre) was a few months ago though, and I'd like to either find a retro arcade or a Ultracade machine myself.

[Witchfynde]

How about a new sub-thread to this:

 

Anyone remember their first arcade experience?

 

It's funny, I've been asked that before myself, and you'd *THINK* with how important games are to me, that I'd remember, but I don't. I must've been pretty young, that's all I can say. It'd be something real old, like Stunt Cycle or something, in the days of black and white arcade games.

[AtariLeaf]

Well I don't think it counts as an arcade but during the past year I played a game or two of something at the local multiplex while waiting for a movie. I like that Star Wars Trilogy game but man that suckers hard. . .

[ubersaurus]

I remember going out to my aunt's summer cottage thingie, which was actually a trailor. Anyhow, they had an arcade about 5 minutes away, and I used to spend my time playing Simpsons, Ninja Turtles, and Street Fighter 1. Good times, those were.

[t.skid]

About my first arcade experience... it was in 1978, I think with Space Invaders and/or Sprint.

Last time I drop a coin in an arcade: I don't remember.... During the '90s, but I'm not sure what game was

[DanBoris]

Over the last few months I've read a number of articles about the American videogame market crash in 1984, naming a variety of causes: the availability of cheap home computers, the glut of badly written games, the major players' miscalculation that people would want to convert their videogame systems into computers, the sale of Atari to the Tramiels, etc.

 

That's all well and good for the home side of things, but doesn't anyone else remember how almost overnight in the summer and fall of '84, the arcade industry also tanked?  

Rob

 

I don't think the arcade industry tanked as quickly as the home game industry. Check out this thread:

 

http://www.atariage.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=15837

 

I did a graph that shows the number of new arcade games released each year, and you can see the the numbers leveled off after 1984, but they didn't start a sharp decline until the end of the 80's. I distinctly remeber arcade still going strong in my area for a few years after the crash.

 

Arcades used to be great because the technology of arcade games was so far beyond what you could get at home. Today with the power of home systems the only major things arcade have to offer from a technology standpoint are the big "interactive" type games, like the skiing, snowboard, jetski simulators, etc. I imagine that the cost of these machines makes it hard to make a profit from them.

 

I think one of the big factors contributing to the crash was the incredible speed at which the industry grew. It's hard for any industry to sustain that kind of growth and remain stable.

 

Dan

[NE146]

Yeah I remember although arcades tended to come and go, there always seemed to be one coming back to take it's place. Maybe I was a little luckier since where I grew up as we had a steady stream of Japanese arcade games show up throughout the 80's after the whole home console market seemed to dissapear. But I always remember at least one or two good arcades being around long after 84.... (The standard "post-84" arcade games that come to mind are things like Terra Cresta, Star Force, etc.)

 

So yeah, arcades never really went away the way the consoles did for sure. I could ALWAYS find an arcade.. But damn if I could ever find a home videogame for sale anywhere...

[BoOchan!]

I think where going throguh an Arcade Video Game Crash Now. With to many riduculous "Play For Tickets" games all over the place, the arcade spirit is now slowly dying.

[Nukey Shay]

I can remember back to when I was five or so. The neighborhood grocery stores were Jack & Jill and Poke'n Tote...and had a small pool parlor and a bar (The Buffalo House) which both had pinball machines. I'll always remember the pinball machine (a Friendship 7, I think) in the pool parlor, since my older brother who was slightly older than me could pick up the front. The tilt mechanism was messed up, so he could rack up a lot of free games and we'd play the hell out of it. But since my parents let us go with them to the bar occasionally, I can't really say when I first played one. First arcade "video"** game that I played was that tacky b&w vector death-star trench-like game in an even sleezier arcade in the next town that we moved to. Too lazy to look up the name.

 

**there's another argument over the validity of using "video" when describing vector games...in the 3D Rubik's thread. I use the word regardless...since I just don't give a plot.

[Witchfynde]

You probably mean Star Hawk as that vector game you're talking about.

[raindog]

The last time I played a game in an arcade was 3 or 4 months ago, when I discovered a local mall had reopened a "Just Fun" which happened to be the same chain I first visited back in 1977 or so (back at home 120 miles away in a mall which is now a Home Depot parking lot.)

 

I'm not exactly sure when my first arcade experience was, because I was going to arcades to play pinball from about age 7 and then these other things started showing up. More to the point though, my parents bought a Magnavox Odyssey when they first appeared (still boxed and in decent condition in their attic, IIRC) so my first videogame experiences extend back before my long term memory started kicking in.

 

That KLOV graph is interesting, and of course arcades did sputter along for a while in the mid to late 80's (at several points a mall here had two arcades open, but whenever that would happen they would have a token war and about the time they'd get up to "100 tokens for 5 bucks" one of them would always close) with a brief resurgence thanks to SF2 around 1990, but it was never like 1980-1983 where most games would have rows of quarters/tokens lined up on them and it was tough to walk around without bumping into people.

 

Still, I wasn't even wondering about the arcade crash per se so much as the arcade crash as an indicator of Americans' general disillusion with videogames that just seemed to happen in 1984. I was still playing games a lot, everyone my age that I knew was still playing games a lot, but our opportunities to play seemed to largely dry up all of a sudden. Yeah, a lot of us had Colecovisions and then got home computers which filled the gap and were probably better for some of us in the long run, but the crash kinda robbed us of a social outlet.

 

Now that I look back on "arcade culture" if there was such a thing, it seems like it might have also suffered from just being a fad. Lots of people who have probably never played videogames since were playing them then, just because it was the thing to do. For a while it was okay to have an Atari sitting on your living room floor even if there were no teenage boys in the house. These days, despite being such a huge moneymaker, videogames are much more of a vertical phenomenon.

 

Rob