So I notice Millennials and Generation Z (or younger folk, if you’re sick and tired of these arbitrary generation definitions that nobody agrees on) seem to wax nostalgic for the arcade times. This, even though they may have been born long after the arcade heyday. There’s ever a word for it: anemoia, nostalgia for a time you’ve never known.
So I figured to either sharpen or alleviate some of that with an IMGUR gallery time capsule of 1980s-era video game arcades. Not so much focused on the games as on the arcades themselves, the chains and one-offs that we encountered in malls and boardwalks across the land. Then one of my freelance clients clamored for their own arcade nostalgia experience, so I posted a far more elaborate arcade rat memoir there.
If you want to experience the classics, there’s plenty of those on the Internet Archive’s arcade page. These are hosted courtesy of MAME emulation, which is sadly all but purged from the modern desktop.
But let’s not get too misty-eyed romanticizing the arcade empire – it declined for a reason. Paying a quarter (or four) at a time per play that lasted a few minutes tops was highway robbery even by today’s standards. We complain about loot crates and costly DLC on games now, forgetting there was a time when you had to go somewhere else and stand there with a machine milking cash out of your pocket. For every classic that can be mastered, there were tons of games that were just plain unfair and impossible to play for more than a minute off a quarter.
There was still a magical ambiance to arcades of the day, but mainly just because of the novelty, social aspect, and the fact that none of us could foresee a day when superior games could fit on a device in your pocket, and infinitely playable for free at that.
While we’re at it, meet one of my favorites of this era. Strider was very hard to find, and a fantastically well-done action-platformer. It just rocked!
