The More Things Change

[TheMann]

Great job. Wow, I guess things have really come full circle now. Nice observation.

 

[mindfaQ]

Poor young Erin. I am glad gaming isn't that expensive anymore if you chose the right games.

 

[WhiteTigerShiro]

The key difference in yesterday's model to today's model is that today you need to pay more money to keep playing no matter how good you are at the game. In yesterday's model, you only needed to pay to keep playing if you were bad at the game. Or in other words, the more money you sunk into a game back in the day, the less money you would have to pay to keep playing because you would get good enough to not die as often; where today you almost have to pay MORE money as you get better at the game because you progress through the content faster and thus need to pay more money to get more "energy" (or whatever the game chooses to call it) in order to keep playing.

 

[sageoftruth]

Hey, there's always the Wii U...

Such a simple comment, and yet I think you're right. When I get tired of my current past-gen games, I think I'll give that a try. Nintendo's the only company right now that seems to have the foresight not to bankrupt itself with overly-costly products. It'll still be awhile until then. I've got lots of old games that I haven't played yet.

 

[PunkRex]

Well the difference between today's paywalls and the arcade is that the arcades did not charge a $30 entrance fee.

No, they charged you a quid and then cheated you out of it with undodgable attacks and rubble banding.

My brother and me lost alot of time/money playing the Simpsons arcade game...

Shit was hard as balls.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I never did the quarter thing - I went to this arcade where you loaded your card with money and then swiped away through the game's scanner every time you got killed. Favorite games with me were Time Crisis and Metal Slug - at least until I got a PS. I go about once a year to the arcade these days.

 

[RaikuFA]

Today's generation wouldn't get this, they have no idea what an arcade is.

I was born in '87 and I've only been in one arcade my whole life. Was not fun at all.

 

[rembrandtqeinstein]

Punisher & Nick Fury was my lunchtime crack. But was pretty good at beatemups so I rarely spent more than $2 a day. By the end of the summer I was good enough to get to Kingpin on one quarter.

Also I am so going to make Wallet Quest!

 

[Someone Depressing]

My local arcade growing up charged £20 pound at the entrace and all the games were free to play. Y'see, in Scotland, arcade games aren't 20p, which is aprox. 25 cents. Instead, they were 1£. That was a douche move on the part of the developers.

Like, you could play them all day. And nobody's stop you. From 7 am to 11 pm. Little 8 year old me didn't need friends; I had Light Gun Games.

 

[Objectable]

We all know that the best arcade game is Ninja Baseball Batman.
http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/nbbbm/nbbbm-18.png

 

[04whim]

You ever get amazed by the continuity of this series? Just the amount of thought that goes into it. Case in point: Child Erin's hair having the more jagged pattern on the loose bits down the side, like her design at the start of the series.

 

[SonOfVoorhees]

Remember as a kid finding £20 and first thing i did was went straight down the arcade and spent it all. Though i did regret it after wards as £20 is alot when your 10, i didnt buy any sweets or anything. :-(

 

[The Enquirer]

At least those arcade games didn't charge you $60 up front.

 

[Darth_Payn]

Oh, all the dollars I spent getting my ass kicked in every arcade Mortal Kombat. I've only seen 1, ONE!, person beat one of those games. Who else can say that nowadays?

although, the only arcade game I beat was that one from SEGA, with the machine guns in the helicopter. And I think I beat one of the House of the Dead's.

captcha: tall story
Yeah, it is when you hear someone play a whole game start to finish ON THE MONEY THAY STARTED WITH.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

Today's generation wouldn't get this, they have no idea what an arcade is.

I'm left wondering how long it'll be before we have a generation that doesn't know what a quarter is.

I still have all my fond arcade-rat memories. For now, anyway.

 

[ace_of_something]

Say what you will about Arcades but I met my wife at one in high school playing Mortal Kombat 3. Arcades forced you to have some modicum of human interaction.
People didn't trash talk like they do now because you could, if so inclined, reach over and punch their goddamn face for being a jackass.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Something somewhere went horribly wrong.

 

[Grape_Nuts]

I nominate this for the best Critical Miss of 2013.

 

[mysecondlife]

Despite all its hunger for quarters, I love its atmosphere sometimes. Playing tetris in the arcade definitely beats playing on smartphone.

 

[Aardvaarkman]

You owned the arcade cabinet? Didn't it have a DIP switch to enable free play mode? Or were the quarters just to add to the experience?

P.S. Thanks

Not really. It was just like the strip implies. Whenever you went into an arcade, you had to buy one of the consoles before you could play it (by shoveling in quarters).

And just like today's home consoles, you didn't really own the arcade system either. They remained the property of the manufacturer because of the EULA you agreed too by walking through the front door of the arcade.

That still doesn't make sense. You wrote that you paid "thousands" for the arcade cabinet, and then had to keep putting quarters in it.

If you paid thousands of dollars for the cabinet - then you owned it, and wouldn't have to put any quarters in to play it, or if you did, you would get them back because you owned the key to the cash box. You may have even been making money from it by taking other people's quarters if you owned an arcade.

If you did not own the machine, then you did not have to pay thousands of dollars up-front - you just paid the quarters for each game.