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The Last of Manhattan's Original Video Arcades (nytimes.com)
Video arcades -- those recreational arenas of illuminated screens and 8-bit soundtracks -- have been fading from the cultural landscape since the end of the Donkey Kong '80s. The advent of home video game consoles, hand-held gaming devices and smartphones has all but rendered them relics of a Gen X childhood. Yet somehow, Chinatown Fair Family Fun Center lives on.
From a report: The cramped downtown institution is among the last of the city's old-school arcades, often filled with gamers too young to remember Street Fighter IV a decade ago, let alone Missile Command in the Reagan years. "Chinatown Fair should have closed years ago, along with all the other arcades in the city, due to rising rent and the shift to online gaming," said Kurt Vincent, who directed "The Lost Arcade," a 2016 documentary about the arcade's enduring legacy in the city. "But it's still there on Mott Street after all these years because young people need a place to come together."
Say this about Chinatown Fair: It has been defying the odds for decades. The place opened in the 1940s as an "amusement arcade" in an era when Skee-Ball represented the apex of arcade fun. As youth tastes changed in the ensuing years, so too did Chinatown Fair. The arcade survived the rise and fall of pinball, the rise and fall of Pac-Man, the rise and fall of Super Nintendo, and perhaps most unimaginably, the rise, and rise some more, of Manhattan real estate prices.
Say this about Chinatown Fair: It has been defying the odds for decades. The place opened in the 1940s as an "amusement arcade" in an era when Skee-Ball represented the apex of arcade fun. As youth tastes changed in the ensuing years, so too did Chinatown Fair. The arcade survived the rise and fall of pinball, the rise and fall of Pac-Man, the rise and fall of Super Nintendo, and perhaps most unimaginably, the rise, and rise some more, of Manhattan real estate prices.
It reopened a few years ago under new ownership and is now basically a ticket-machine / DDR family arcade alla a boardwalk arcade or smething like that. It is definitely not the competitive fighting game haven that China Town Faire once was
While Consoles may have put a dent in the popularity of the Arcade, But the Arcade could always compete against the Console, because by the fact that they are so expensive to own, you can just have top of the line graphics and sound built in, always being a generation or two ahead of the Console.
However what really was the killer was Multi-player internet connectivity. Part of the fun of the Arcade is playing with multiple people. Many game had duel or I have seen up to 4 set of controllers so people would play against each other. Now with internet connectivity people never needed to go miles away to interact with real people.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Dear New York Slashdotters,
This question has bothered me for years. How do places like this along with the numerous I heart NY t-shirt shops make enough money to pay Manhattan rents? It seems like their margins would be so tight that just staying open would be a miracle.
load "linux",8,1
Children meet there and interact which as we all know leads them to grow into normal adults.
This is a horrible thing.
This isn't an "old school" arcade, judging by the pictures. I know of many arcades with modern video games of that style. Myrtle Beach has several arcades (including one with dozens of 1957 Williams baseball style pinball machines https://www.youtube.com/watch?... ). The closest mall to me has an arcade. Pigeon Forge has a number of arcades. Most any tourist destination type area have them and they're doing well.
I'm not sure how unique the one is in TFA, besides being in a vastly overpriced real estate market.
Better known as 318230.
Not sure the model they use in NY, but here in Denver a fourth one has just opened up. They're all full bars, some of them full kitchens, and they're definitely not expecting teens to keep them afloat. It's a nostalgia fest plus sports bar and it's thirty-somethings that are the main crowd so they're not necessarily trying to compete with consoles and kids whose minds can't comprehend 8-bit graphics and chiptunes.
Long signatures suck.
We have one opening in my town soon. You can pay for access to VR equipment, including VR rooms. There will probably be some traditional arcade games too, I imagine.
It used to be seen primarily as a place for kids, and it is now again seen as primarily a place for kids. Arcades with games for us "old folks" are all but extinct while we have Chuck E Cheese locations all over the place. You can find skee ball and other ticket games all over the place but good luck finding a beat 'em up anywhere. Various iterations of "Flappy Bird" / "Crossy Road" / "Choppy Wood" are ubiquitous but fighting games are pretty well extinct. You might find a multi-game machine that has 6 old Atari games in one tiny monitor but not much else from the 80s or 90s is around except for various weird "new" giant versions of PacMan and Galaga. And forget about finding Lethal Enforcers, Terminator, or the Aerosmith Revolution game - though you can count on finding some version of Big Buck Hunter.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I have fond memories of whiling away the hours (and quarters) in Station Break in Penn Station. Also there was a giant arcade on 1st Avenue around ~60th street, next-door to Rodney Dangerfield's comedy club. I loved that place too.
Sad to hear that the City is down to one...
I've done repair and upgrade work for Chinatown Fair, there's a lot of things keeping them afloat. For starters, CTF is not the only arcade Lonnie owns, a bad month at CTF doesn't call a death sentence for the whole arcade, and buying and selling games constantly to keep the lineup fresh is something Lonnie is somewhat good at. The location is a bit smaller than I would like if I was opening an arcade but in Manhattan that works to your advantage. You *CAN'T* keep deadweight games in CTF - it's too small. If a game stops making money in another arcade, many operators and owners will hedge on it and be like "Yeah well, we can wait a few months before we think about an upgrade or a replacement." At CTF if a game stops taking in cash, enough to defend it's existence, it's out, within days. Often to another location where it will do well for a while and cover the cost of buying it.
He also does private party rentals (Follow their Facebook page, probably once a week the place is closed to the public) and caters heavily to groups of players who can't get the same experience at home. Music Games, Fighting games, those are big parts of Lonnie's business model at CTF but not so much at his other locations.
And for what it's worth: He's not the only operator in the NYC Area doing this, and doing it well.
Looks like an arcade in a WWII submarine.
About 800 kilometers to the west . . further than NJ Transit will take you unfortunately . . we do have the 16 Bit Arcade which is a somewhat more alcohol-based, and therefore less child-friendly, take on the concept. These exist in a few other cities also, though unfortunately not New York. All in Ohio I think. They have special days when children are allowed (and I presume alcohol isn't) and I'm hoping to take mine one of those days. It's an experience that wasn't necessarily a huge part of my childhood, but it was a nice one, and I'd like them to have that same kind of experience at least once.
Nonaggression works!
Guys he said CTF so many times but I still can't figure out where to join this Capture The Flag match. Are the paintballs provided?
There are several projects that combine game emulators (arcade and consoles) with virtual arcades in VR. Or even virtual bedrooms. So you can walk around an arcade with all your fav games in their cabinet replicas.
You may say "but what about people?"- but is a modern arcade populated with the type of crowd that would have been seen in your arcade of memory? Of course not. So a modern arcade does not have that old school ambience anyway.
Next gen VR (the AMD/Sony project on the almost here PS5) will be a massive leap forward, but won't support the kind of open projects that give us VR game emulation. But it will have the power to bring the avatars of other gamers into your VR experience in a worthwhile way.
However, I must say that current VR fans have cared little for the above mentioned virtual arcade/bedroom projects- simply because despite the perfect game emulation, playing an emulated arcade game within a VR world is not compelling.
I'd say the same about modern arcades. They are used, if at all, simply by peeps desperate to get 'ouside' of their homes once in a while- and not cos of the intrinsic worth of the arcade itself. Just as peeps watch sh-t AAA movies in the cinema as the simplest no-brainer way to 'go out'.
The original arcades had a meaning. Modern ones do not. The love they get from' hipsters' is pathetic. For the kids, they are like museums of what old people used to do in the sad distant past.
But the Arcade could always compete against the Console, because by the fact that they are so expensive to own, you can just have top of the line graphics and sound built in, always being a generation or two ahead of the Console.
That used to be the case a long time ago. (And even back then with a few exceptions, like NeoGeo MVS and AES being virtually the same hardware, and SEGA being very often inspired by their arcade hardware (System16, various Models, Noami) to make their home consoles (MegaDrive, Saturn, DreamCast) through with some cost to manufacturing vs. performance compromises).
Nowadays, if you look at the actual hardware: console, arcades and PCs have all more or less converged (look at the later iteration of SEGA arcade hardware) with a rather narrow spectrum of hardware, with consoles on the cheaper side, and high-end ehtousiasts PCs on the more expensive side.
Nowaday these platforms only differiates by the use case they want to target :
- consoles are for the ease of use (just put the disk in the tray and don't care about compatibility)
- home PCs are for the customisability and extreme hardware (you can fork multiple thousands of bucks and have the latest graphic card on which the game was just demoed at the last gameshow).
However what really was the killer was Multi-player internet connectivity. Part of the fun of the Arcade is playing with multiple people. Many game had duel or I have seen up to 4 set of controllers so people would play against each other. Now with internet connectivity people never needed to go miles away to interact with real people.
That on the other hand, I agree.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Barcades have the non ticket games / pinballs
VR pinball is still off a bit from real other then it's does not brake down.
As somebody who owns and rents commercial buildings myself, I can tell you that in most cases, when you see a business like this, it's because they own their own building.
I don't respond to AC's.
In Chicagoland, there are a scant few arcades left that one can Google, but one that claims to be the largest in the country is "Galloping Ghost Arcade" (it's main website is down right now, oops). I am not affiliated with this place, but I'll mention them in the spirit of keeping such places alive. I visited it ~ 1.5 years ago and found: hundreds of historic machines crowded into a small, spartan, warehouse-like space, a rather warm ambient temperature, a cheap entry fee for unlimited play, and, I'd guess, about 10 - 20% of the games in need of repair (which doesn't surprise me since I've owned many such machines).
Mentioned in TFA, a couple of years ago there was a documentary about this arcade called the Lost Arcade. It covered the history of arcades in the city and the transformation of Chinatown Fair under new management. It also covered a former employee's quest to maintain the NYC competitive fighting game scene by opening an arcade out in Brooklyn.
http://www.arcademovie.com/
I saw this in the Metrograph theater in Chinatown, pretty close to the arcade itself.
I stopped going to arcades years ago because all of the arcades near me are owned and staffed by bad-tempered arseholes who hated their customers and never made us feel welcome.
when I finally was old enough to just go to an arcade. My mom was a bit of a nut job and super strict so I could never go as a kid (I was a nerd who listened to his parents, go figure). By the time I was an adult they were gone.
Funny thing, the final nail in the coffin for coin op was smart phones. Apparently they were still bringing in hundreds of millions at laundromats and restaurants and the like right up until smart phones got cheap. I remember all of the sudden you could pick up a Neo-Geo cabinet for $0-$200 bucks depending on condition (sadly I didn't have a place for one at the time and they've since become collectable again and are pushing $600+).
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If you programmed it re-entrantly, one of the games could be "Video Arcade Simulation".
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I've heard real good things about https://www.pinballpa.com/ in Pittsburgh.
too young to remember Street Fighter IV a decade ago, let alone Missile Command in the Reagan years.
I have to wonder how old the author is. I'm too old to remember Street Fighter IV, but I do remember Missile Command. I like to think I grew up in the golden age of arcade games. My father liked pinball and used to take us out to the pinball parlor somewhere until the police busted it because people were dealing drugs there. My father wasn't into drugs and that was basically the last I got to play pinball except for the odd quarter I managed to beg off my parents here and there.
But then came the video games. By then I earned a whole dollar for a chore like washing the family car and that was 4 games of Asteroids or Space Invaders. I'm not sure when I last saw Space Invaders, but I think I remember being frustrated by it. WHY do I miss so often?
I prefer Galaga. I just bought a Galaga/Galaxian machine about a month ago ($299 + $49 for the base - that was sneaky of them. Oh sure, $299 sounds fair, but wait there's more. You HAVE to buy this stand for another $50. And you really do have to buy the base if you want it at a reasonable height.
One thing I really dig about Galaga is it tells you your hit percentage after you lose. You can take comfort in your 70% hit percentage even though you only lasted 15 waves or whatever. Conversely if you have a really bad game you can see how terrible your hit percentage is.
I've been tempted to try to put together a MAME cabinet for years, but I never did.
I have visions of filling my basement up with video games and maybe a few pinball machines as well, but would I really play them enough to be worth it? Probably not. I sort of wish the Galaga machine I bought had a coin slot just so I'd be able to keep track of how many times I've played it. So I spent $350 (plus tax). That's about 1400 quarters. Galaga was a good investment, but I think I have to draw the line somewhere.
I still might buy a Centipede, but I don't think I have room for Missile Command or Joust or Dragon's Lair. I could maybe see getting Phoenix or Spy Hunter though. And Pole Position and Stargate or at least Defender too.
Damn, I'm showing my age.
My interest in games peaked with Missile Command. I still run it on mame and probably have the top score; 10,000,000+. Takes days to get that high.