As production winds down on Arcade Spirits — we’re aiming to be content complete by December, to allow some time for testing and implementation before our Q1 2019 release window — I’m finding I have less stuff to talk about in the dev blog. Fortunately, we’ve got a strong community, and they had a good idea for this week’s entry: What are some of the key differences between our alternate timeline and the real world?
Now, keep in mind Arcade Spirits is a lighthearted game and not a history textbook. I know the Internet worships at the altar of CinemaSins and loves to pick apart every single logic gap as a “plot hole” but we’re going for a loose and fun interpretation of history. It definitely wouldn’t totally work out this way… but it’s fun to make believe, right? Right. So, what if…
The Atari 2600 Never Failed
Atari took their time to make a proper port of Pac-Man, and a really good E.T. game, and didn’t overproduce either of them. As a result there is no mass grave in New Mexico of unsold 2600 carts and the system continued to thrive. Without the power vacuum left by Atari’s death, Nintendo didn’t muscle in in 1985 to utterly dominate the home arcade scene — and Atari’s strength kept their arcade division going strong, maintaining the arcade scene in tandem with rising home consoles.
The three major players in the console scene in 20XX are now Atari, Sega, and Nintendo. In this timeline, the proposed Nintendo-Sony co-developed PlayStation never fell through, because the Philips CD-I didn’t get in the way of the project. Nintendo were the first to optical media, but Atari’s long-standing emphasis on backwards compatibility (you could play 2600 games on an Atari XL, for instance) means that they remain a force to be reckoned with.
The Mainstream Accepts Video Games
Since the crash never happened and Nintendo wasn’t forced to push the NES as a children’s toy complete with a toy robot, the momentum of adults and young adults playing games back in the 70s and 80s kept going. eSports rise sooner than expected, with organized tournaments like EVO launching early and staying strong.
While arcades never surpass more long-standing pursuits like going out to the movies or grabbing a pizza, they aren’t quite as looked down on as being only for nerds or children. It’s still a trivial pursuit, since they are games and games are silly, but generally they stabilize in the cultural consciousness.
The Inevitable Rise of Kiddie Casinos Still Happens, But Slower
Have you been in a Dave & Busters or Chuck E. Cheese lately? Basically they’re just gambling palaces with no traditional video games whatsoever. But this was a survival tactic, a way to keep their businesses afloat while traditional joystick gaming was migrating to home consoles for enthusiasts only. If arcades never died, these chain franchises wouldn’t have to rely quite as hard on prize games… but prize games would still be a major factor.
Everybody likes the rush of winning, and early ticket games like Skeeball(tm) (or ‘Alley Rollers’ to use the non-trademarked name) would prove the model can work. So while there wouldn’t be a mid-90s rampaging push towards abandoning ship on the arcade model, those who cared more about raw profit than tradition would definitely still migrate in that directions.
Oh, Also We Have Holograms And Sentient A.I. For Reasons
And here’s where I take a left turn into fantasyland, because Iris — your adorable virtual assistant — not only is amazingly sophisticated beyond any 2018 level smartphone tech, but I have a few cute pics in game of her literally sitting on the edge of your phone and extending away from the screen. It’s similar to the scanlines you see on the spotlights over Teo’s dance stage, or how Gavin’s tablet was originally going to have some hovering holograms.
This was something I debated removing to keep things realistic, but… instead, I just don’t comment on it. I let Iris stay adorable even if she’s implausible, because it’s cute and makes a nice visual and again, we are not a history textbook.
…although there IS a bit more going on behind why she’s so very, very intelligent. And I’d say more, but… spoilers.
I think that’ll do for missives from the year 20XX. I don’t want to spoil all the surprises. Hope you enjoy our alternate timeline when the game releases early next year!
Your mileage may vary but I certainly enjoyed the two Dragon’s Lair games even if they were absolutely unforgiving. But the same could be said for a lot of coin eaters from the era. So I don’t see how they were less of a “game” than their peers. Not to mention Princess Daphne was a lot cuter than Princess Peach could be rendered as.
I would say it was more a flood of shoddy imitators and the novelty wearing off that brought the craze to an end. Which is a problem whether we’re talking laserdics or VR. The Arcade doesn’t nullify the cost, at best just spreads it around, with the added hurdles of the fickle nature of a boom or bust industry and Arcades prioritizing profit over a nebulous idea of enjoyment.
Speculation is fine. But Jeffery Mewtamer didn’t really address the difficulties. He basically said he didn’t know and assumed variables would align favorably.
Doing a quick search, http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=105219.0 suggests a run of mill cabinet went from between 2500 to 3000 which would likely take months to pay off and a cutting edge machine using the very latest in technology would likely cost even more.
I just don’t see Mom and Pop arcades pulling down enough cabinets to warrant massive tech jumps as he suggested.
As for “Arcade Spirits”, YMMV again. But as I said before I’m not the target audience so your not trying to appeal to my tastes.
I was born in 1986 and my first experience with video games was Super Mario Bros. 1/3 and Duck Hunt on my much older sister’s NES around the age of 4 or 5, and it was the christmas after I turned 10 that I got an SNES and my life as a gamer really started, so the hayday of American Arcades was already past when I started caring about video games, and while I got to visit places like Chuck E. Cheeses and Adventure Landing with some regularity during my teen years, back when they had actual video games, I confess to being more interested in earning tickets sense I had a SNES and N64 at home, a GBC/A in my pocket, and access to a Genesis and PS1 in my School’s rec center(most of my K-12 education took place at my state’s school for the blind, which was a boarding school by necessity).
Still, from what I understand of the history, I think an Americentric prospective has a tendency to exaggerate the Crash of 83. For one, as I understand it, Europe and Japan were completely unaffected, and even pre-crash, the Atari 2600 was the only home console with multiple games anyone really cared about here in the states. Hell, the Atari is pretty much the only pre-NES console I’ve ever heard of outside of internet articles on the history of home gaming consoles, and I get the impression the original home version of Pong did better than the Magnavox Odyssey.
Though, all this talk of alternative gaming history has got me curious about actual gaming history. Anyone know of any good books on the subject? Preferably available as an audiobook-on-CD or failing that as digital text in either .txt or .html format? Ideally covering covering not just Arcades and Consoles, but also PC and Handhelds and providing a decent comparison between the American, European, and Japanese markets. I mean, as it stands, all I really know about US vs Japan v Europe is that lots of games never get exported from Japan, the Japanese have a long standing habit of shafting Europeans even more than Americans, and that Japanese Arcades outlived their American counterparts.
I’ll admit to being far from an expert on the history of real-life arcades and their technology, but as I understand it, during the late 80s and most of the 90s, home ports of arcade games were generally watered down from their arcade versions, and its my understanding that the Sega Genesis/Megadrive was even a weaker version of the hardware found in Sega’s cabinets at the time. Admittedly, some of the differences between home and arcade releases of the same game are due to the Arcade version being able to optimize hardware to the needs of the game while home versions have to fit code to hardware unless they add a chip to the cartridge that might double the game’s retail price, but I suspect much of it comes down to their simply being more raw power in the average arcade cabinet than a game console from the same year.
I’m sure there’s a limit to how expensive an arcade cabinet can get before your average small town arcade owner will refuse the risk, but a $1000 arcade cabinet to an arcade with dozens of regular customers sounds like an easier sell than a $300 home console to the parents of an only child who’ll mostly be playing alone(and a few bucks worth of quarters for the arcade certainly seems the easier sell than a home game that costs $50 to those same hypothetical parents). Granted, I might be underestimating the time it takes to recoup that $1000 at a quarter a game session even if the machine is occupied from opening until closing every day or how much idle time and good players hogging machines cut into revenues.
Of course, the convenience of playing in one’s own living room eventually won out over any advantage arcades once held(and even if they survived to the modern day, there are entire genres that would really only work on a time rental model as opposed to the classic pay per play model of arcades).
Telling someone not to criticize your alternate timeline is like saying not to think about pink elephants. Can’t be helped.
I’m still a little fuzzy on why there not being a video game crash in 1983 is going to “save” Arcades since they more or less scraped by and continued. Their downfall into a relic of a bygone age or gloried “gambling palaces” happened later than ’83 and was more about changing social cues, the latch key kids grew up and were less likely to dump their kids off unattended at a dark, dank Arcade, and advances in technology rendering them moot. There’s little need for me to go to the trouble of physically going to an arcade if I can just download Galaga on my phone after all. Issues which should be just as important for 20xx as it is for our timeline. Assuming 20xx technology hasn’t regressed in comparison to ours of course.
Not to mention without the market falling from under them and competition from the Japanese forcing them to innovate its just as likely video games experienced a slow, withering more permanent death which would lead to gaming being less mainstream not more.
And I’m not sure one company selling one product could totally alter an entire country’s perceptions as you seem to imply. Marketing usually follows human behavior instead of creating it after all. If any switch occurred its far more likely it was because kids are far more easily entice/entertained than adults. Having a far more impulse-driven mentality and a far more disconnected idea of money/value. This ad from 1982 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfEn1aHldfA shows Atari was aiming its marketing at kids already at least as far as Pac-Man was concerned. Even this one from the same year https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eJe4tTMZOE seems more about Atari games being family fun you have with your kids than something explicitly “adult”.
Considering that 2018 is on the verge of seeing the release of a holographic display by The Looking Glass(kickstarter can be found at: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lookingglass/the-looking-glass-a-holographic-display-for-3d-cre/comments), I’m not sure 20XX having holographic smartphone screens is that much of a stretch, especially with Arcades still around to act as a testing ground for new tech that doesn’t require hardware devs to get the cost down to something the masses can afford. If your cutting edge piece of hardware costs 2K to manufacture there might not be enough hardcore geeks and nerds with deep enough pockets to form a viable customer base, but in a world where every small town arcade is willing to take a risk on your machine, and might buy a dozen more if it does well, you might actually have enough sales at such a price point to fund refining the technology to get the cost and size down to the point of producing a consumer-grade model quickly.
I’ve never owned a Nintendo VirtualBoy, but as I understand it, its failure was due to a combination of a price tag too high for the home market and rather severe technical limitations, some of which were probably due to compromises to get the price as low as it was. If Arcades had never lost the momentum from the 70s and 80s and Nintendo hadn’t single-handedly revived the US home market, they might have tried pushing a much mor sophisticated version of the VirtualBoy to the arcade market and VR might’ve gotten the attention its gotten in recent years 20 years earlier, and there’s no telling what other technologies could’ve taken off sooner/had more time to be refined/would’ve gotten pass being pitched to management with Arcades sticking around as a viable market for tech too expensive for the home market but not practical enough for the business market.
Didn’t something like what you proposed happen with the laserdisc craze back in the 80’s? Brand new style of gameplay, state of the art technology. And yet it failed miserably to make an impression in part, if I remember my history, because the game was bloody expensive to play on account of how pricey the cabinet was. Which is the problem. The basic dynamic doesn’t change and in many ways become worse. Every cabinet is an investment by the Arcade that they want to recoup around as quickly as possible. That would make them more sensitive to the VirtualBoy type problems than the consumers not less.
The difficulty with LaserDisc is that it was very flashy, but ultimately not conducive to good game mechanics and overly expensive. It wowed people who were just watching the video roll as a bystander and encouraged players to give it a try, but the actual game experience wasn’t good enough to justify return visits and as a result, they couldn’t pay for themselves.
However, consider the boom of VR in the 90s. It was crude as hell, but arcades were one of the only places you could sample it. They could afford a showy and physically difficult to maintain attraction, in the same way you don’t have home roller coasters. If arcades had been stronger rather than on a rapid decline throughout the 90s, we might’ve ended up with Oculus and Vive sooner rather than later.
It’s all just speculation, of course. And certainly not perfect. But Arcade Spirits isn’t trying to be perfect. It’s just trying to be fun. A pleasant little daydream, a what-if. What would it be like to live in that world? That’s what we wanted to explore.