For twenty years the arcade had the better machines, and then it did not, and the whole thing collapsed in a decade
NQ64 holds a 4.4 from eighteen hundred and sixteen people, charges ten to twenty pounds, and it is a bar full of arcade cabinets and old consoles.
And the arcade, as an institution, is dead – and it died for a reason that is worth understanding.
Why arcades existed
Because the machines were better.
That is the entire explanation and everything else follows from it.
An arcade cabinet in 1985 contained hardware that no domestic computer could match – custom boards, dedicated graphics chips, and processing power that would have cost more than a car to put in a living room.
So if you wanted to play the good version, you had to leave the house, and you had to bring coins.
The design of a coin-op
Which is the thing that is easy to miss and which shaped a whole generation of games.
An arcade machine must take your money, repeatedly, at short intervals.
Which means the game must be short. It must be difficult. It must kill you – not unfairly, because that produces resentment, but reliably, and in a way that makes you feel it was your fault and that one more go would fix it.
The entire grammar of the arcade game – three lives, escalating difficulty, the high-score table with your initials – is engineered around the extraction of the next coin.
And it worked so well that when games moved into the home, where there were no coins, designers spent a decade unlearning it.
What killed it
The home console caught up, and then overtook, and it happened fast.
By the mid-1990s a domestic machine could do what an arcade cabinet did. By the early 2000s it could do considerably more, and it could do it while you sat down, in your own house, with your own friends, for no coins at all.
And the arcade had nothing left to sell.
The Prat’s technological desk regards this as one of the cleanest examples available of an entire industry losing its only advantage – and notes that it took about ten years from unassailable to extinct.
Which is what this bar is
A resurrection, and an honest one.
Because what has come back is not the technology, obviously – your phone is more powerful than every cabinet in the room combined.
What has come back is the room. Standing up. Next to strangers. Taking turns.
And we have found this in five postcodes: the activity bars work, consistently, and they work because they promise something small that can actually be delivered. Bat and Ball on 4.8. Clays Soho on 4.9.
Verdict
Good bar, cheap, and free play, which removes the one thing the original was built around.
The high score table
Which is the thing that has genuinely been lost, and which nobody has replaced.
An arcade cabinet held its scores locally, in the machine, in the room – and your three initials sat there, in that pub or that chip shop or that pier, and everybody who played it that week saw them.
It was a leaderboard for one building. A local reputation, in a local machine, among people who could see you.
The internet made every leaderboard global, and a global leaderboard is meaningless, because you are never going to be at the top of one and neither is anybody you have ever met.
The arcade knew something the internet forgot: a small pond is the entire point.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
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