Re: What were arcades like?



Oh, holy shit, I'm old. I'm not old enough to be old yet, but I'm old if you're too young to remember arcades. Okay, let me see if I can brush the Alzheimers cobwebs off of my steam-powered brain and remember what Arcades were like.



In arcades, you queued up for popular or new games, usually. You set down a quarter or a button or something on the machine (quarters were the popular choice), and you watched, and when the next round came up (in fighting games, this was when someone lost, but in other games, it was when they ran out of quarters), you jumped in. This usually meant you were playing against someone else, so you got to know everyone who was a regular quick.



The 'no throwing' rule was kind of a house-rule for a lot of places. See, the older fighting games had really wonky response and collision detection, and in some of 'em (Mortal Kombat, for one), a throw did pretty decent damage and couldn't be interrupted in a lot of cases. If you wanted to, you could just drain down the other guy's health like that, and since everyone was paying to play, it was a dick move to do so. I know in our arcade, there was a little sticky on the Street Fighter machine, reading, "M.Bison is an automatic forfeit of next turn", which meant that, if someone chose Bison (who, in the older Street Fighters, was dangerous as hell in an experienced player's hands), they got to play one round with him, and, win or lose, they had to hand the controls over to the next player in line.



As for the cost? I once dumped twenty-five bucks worth of quarters into Golden Axe: Revenge of Death Adder so that my buddy and I could beat it. If you were going for a High Score, you better bring a roll along, or know exactly what you were doing. On the plus side, if it got around that you were going for a high score, people would usually stop putting markers down for next play and stand by and watch (and cheer you on, if you got a good crowd) until you got the score you were shooting for or ran out of money. Hell, I once had people paying for me because I was going for High Score on a game and wound up running out of coins just a few thousand points short.