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'Old School' Arcade Still Popular In NYC
pickens writes "In 2005, there were 44 licensed video game arcades in New York, according to the Department of Consumer Affairs; today, 23 survive. With the expansion of interactive online gaming, video game action has largely shifted to the home. 'Arcades are an anachronism now,' says Danny Frank, a spokesman for the Amusement and Music Owners Association of New York. 'They exist only in shopping malls.' But Chinatown Fair has become a center for all the outcasts in the city to bond over their shared love for a good 20-punch combo and 'old school' games that more popular arcades don't stock anymore — the classic Street Fighter II from 1991 and King of Fighters 1996, for example, as well as Ms Pac-Man and Time Crisis. 'Now, you can play a million people from all around the world,' says one player. 'For me, it's not the same as playing face-to-face. The young'uns may not care, but I do.'"
Joystix in Houston is pretty damn popular as well. Every first and last Friday of the month, the bar next door sells $15 wristbands that get you in to the showroom, where everything working is on free play aaaaallllll niiiiight (well, until last call...). They've got an arcade machine that pre-dates pong (they don't turn that one on...) all the way to up games that are almost kinect-like (seriously, they had a rail-shooter that, instead of stepping on a pedal, it watched which way you dodged out of the way and did that). It's freakin' awesome. And because it's a repair/resell shop, the stock is constantly rotating, so there's always something new. It's an arcade gamer's paradise. Except when some stupid singles group sets up an outing.
Sorry if that sounds like an advertisement... I'm there every chance I get, and I think I've dragged every one of my friends along at some point. I needed somewhere new to proselytize.
If you want really "old school", check out the Pacific Pinball Museum in Alameda, CA (near Oakland) - http://pacificpinball.org/. They have pinball machines from the 1930's to 2000's, with a big collection of "woodrail" and "wedgehead" games. No video games. Only pinball (and an odd electromechanical rifle game here and there).
The Only place for Pinball. Over three hundred games on site, over a thousand in the worlds largest collection. The proprietor has been in the biz for almost 40 years and can tell you anything you want to know about any game you can name. http://www.pinballmuseum.org/ And for you youngsters he has twenty or so classic videos.
I arrived in '75 for my freshman year at NYU, and I was one of a group of students who hung around the pinball machines at the dorm. Steve was a fellow student, known as a wheeler-dealer and an elite scalper who could get you front row at Madison Square Garden for anything, the Who, the Stones, sections A and R, front orchestra. We would serve as his ticket-buying crew, often lining up all night behind the metal barricades of the MSG box office. Anyway, Steve somehow wrested the dorm pinball concession away from the existing operator. I got the job of pinball repairman. The pinball machines of '75 were strictly electromechanical Gottliebs and Willamses which, of course, used lots of relays, solenoids and stepping motors. In '76 the first solid state (TTL) machine came out, Spirit of '76. No more relays and stepping motors, only the solenoids and contact sensors (e.g. rollovers and bumpers) remained. What an interesting challenge to go from troubleshooting electromechanical logic to TTL! We had a Pong, but the first real arcade vidgame was Atari Starship One followed by some submarine-hunt game with a periscope. Next came Breakout, Clean Sweep, and Lunar Lander, followed closely by Asteroids, Pac-Man and Galaxians. These last were huge moneymakers; Steve decided to expand. He set himself up as vidgame and pin purveyor to various candy stores and bodegas. One of these was out in Flushing, Queens, it was called Space Age Amusements. One day I get a service call that all of the machines have gone haywire. I observe that it is a hot summer day. I remember the National Semiconductor TTL Handbook and that the operating temperature range for commercial grade TTL ICs is 0-100 degrees F. I tell Steve I have to go and get some boxer fans from one of the (former) electronics surplus stores on Canal Street. He thinks I'm nuts, but after I put the fans in the back of the machines they suddenly started working again (and the game OEMs started building fans into their products). Now Steve thinks I'm a genius. He calls me "the fan man." The mob owned the machine distributors, probably still do, and occasionally we would go out to Jersey or Pennsylvania to buy the equipment. One time I'm driving this van Steve borrowed from this mob guy. I stop for some cannoli on 11th street and park the van on the street. Unfortunately the wiseguy never paid his NYC parking tickets and the van got towed. Steve and I had to go and explain to the mob guy what happened to his van. That was an experience I won't soon forget.