Arcade

So its safe to say that the US Videogame Arcade market is dead, if not close to it. After games like Hydro Thunder, Dance Dance Revolution and Cruisin' the World I cant seem to name any good arcade game that I would go out of my way to throw 5 bucks into coin machine. In Japan however, things are different, VERY different. Arcades all over Japan strive to the point where they have mini amusement parks in some malls with High-End Arcade machines you would never dream of. They even have carnival rides inside some of these arcades which are also games. As someone who has visited Japan before, I think I can reinforce this point by saying that while in Tokyo I wound up in at least three different Sega Arcades which had some of the coolest arcade machines I have ever seen. (8 player Mario Kart anyone?)

Just recently Kojima Productions (the creators of the Metal Gear games) announced that they were making Metal Gear Online arcade cabinets. What this means is non PS3/Metal Gear Solid 4 owners can have a taste of the MGO experience. It makes me wonder how arcades lost so much popularity in America while in Japan, they don't need to just make a new game, they can also rerelease the online portion of a game and ride the cash cow to the bank. What made arcades in America so “out of touch”? Was it marketing? Was it time? Was it variety? Or was it simply because American arcade machines simply didn't have the same appeal? Ms.Pacman, Donkey Kong, Dance Dance Revolution, and Time Crisis all originated in Japan and took the US by storm, now you don't see many new arcade games that would make you go “WOW!!!” to. It might have been that, here in the US the variety of different types of games were dry. You had your shooter, driving, and simulator....thats about it. Nothing was all that innovative compared to the next. I think that's what caused the decline of American Arcades. It wasn't the people, it was the variety.

Now that American Arcades are dead the chances of revival seem slim. Japan has a bunch of innovative arcade games that you would never imagine being seen in an arcade and these games won't see the light of day State side because the demand is next to none, which is a shame. I kinda wish a company like Sega would take a risk and internationalize their arcades and export some theres arcade games. Face it, if Donkey Kong could revive arcades then I'm sure that there are plenty of games like it that could rekindle the dead flame that is the American Arcade Indusrty.