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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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!
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.
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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).
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 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?
In case you wander back to read this post, I own a dozen machines, and you sound about my age. If you buy the original machines, know that they are aged, and hence they break. The more of them that you own, the more you'll have to deal with that annoying issue (expensive too, if you don't fix them yourself). ...Just a tip.