Back to the Arcade

They used to take pocket change. But they've changed.

I recently found myself in a video arcade. That’s not something that happens very much these days. I was hooked on video arcades in my youth. I started out with a tepid interest in pinball machines, but at age ten I was transformed when I saw one of those new Pac-Man games that had just come out. I’d seen video games before, like Asteroids and Space Invaders, but never anything like this! I wanted part to be of it. I liked to play it, and I liked to watch other people play it. I drew strange Pac-Man cartoons in my spare time. (I am not a gifted artist, so I found a subject as easy to draw as Pac-Man an enticing one.) I was devoted to Pac-Man until Donkey Kong came along. And there was Scramble, Star Castle, Xevious, Zaxxon, Galaga, Pepper II, Food Fight, Crazy Climber… those are just the titles off the top of my head. High entertainment was riding my bike to the Space Port arcade in the Shenango Valley Mall, converting my five dollar allowance to quarters, and biking home broke. I was paying for an experience. Often I wished I had my money back, but I never regretted my choice.

So that’s why stepping into a video arcade on a Sunday afternoon, 45 years later, felt so strange. It felt like I was stepping into the future. I lost interest in video arcades when I was in college, back when the games were still mostly five-minute scrolling shoot-‘em-ups or mazes. I was aware that video arcades have changed—evolved—but I’ve never gotten used to it. Many of the games are large affairs, sometimes with a seating booth for two or more players. You’re driving or shooting or something, just like the old video games, but the graphics are more elaborate, more frantic. Even some of my old favorites have been updated. I’ve seen incredibly complex multiplayer versions of Space Invaders, Pac-Man, and Galaga, where the players compete on a massive screen that allows comfortable viewing for several dozen spectators, easily. There was a version of Pac-Man with physical, plastic parts that move around underneath a plastic bubble. There was a version of Pac-Man that allows up to eight different players to compete on the same maze simultaneously, with the players standing around a contraption the size and shape of a pool table. It’s very different from the old days of rows of single players standing at cabinets, half of the players with cigarettes dangling from their lips, filling the place up with a thick cloud of stale smoke. It’s a different world.

I’m feeling a little sensitive about my nostalgia right now, so I want to make it clear that I’m not complaining about how arcades are so different these days. I kind of feel like an old man grousing, “Why, when I was your age, we boys could head down to the nickelodeon, put a penny in the Mutoscope, and watch a moving picture of a man riding a bicycle! Why do you need all this noise and violence? And color?” If I found myself in an old 1980s-style arcade with a pocketful of quarters, I doubt I’d feel the same rush that I used to. Maybe I just miss being young. Lots of people do. But missing my youth is not what I’m writing about. Other people are young today. It’s their turn.

I was in the arcade on a Sunday afternoon because it was raining on and off, and my son wanted to go somewhere. He wanted to go to the mall. It was his idea. Everything was his idea. That’s how these recreational mall trips go: he chooses where he wants to go on whatever whim strikes him, and I follow. We might walk through Macy’s. We might walk up and down the levels of the parking garage. We will always spend time in the Apple Store, which he loves. The arcade, though, was a new thing.

I was kind of excited he wanted to go to the arcade. It’s not that I saw it as a shot of reliving the part of my youth that I spent quarter by quarter. Like I said: that’s over. The delight I felt was him taking an interest in something new. I’m not the kind of parent who pushes on his kid the things he’s into and expects him to embrace it with the same zeal, proffering me vicarious rapture. I’d rather he find his own joy. When he does, I like to encourage it.

It was loud in there, louder than I remember the old Space Port being. He didn’t seem to mind, though I expected he would. He’s never been a loud kid, and he doesn’t like loud noises. He just ran around, looking at games, sometimes pressing the buttons. I was wondering if that was all he was going to do. It would have been in character.

But no, he stopped at a Pop-a-Shot game. He looked at it a little longingly. He had played Pop-a-Shot at an arcade last summer when we were on vacation out of state. He enjoyed it. I asked him if he wanted to play, and he said yes.

This is where it got complicated. I looked down at where the coin slot would have been back in the old days. There wasn’t one, of course—no quarters, no tokens for these games. There was just a glowing white rectangle with neon pink trim, and a digital display next to it telling me that each play cost 6 credits. Obviously you need some sort of card to make this work. I looked around to see where one might get one. In the middle of the arcade were these tall, narrow machines with screens on them. Big signs above the narrow machines announced START HERE, making me feel like I was standing inside a video game, myself. There it is. I went over to start.

The touchscreens explained that to play, you need a card with credits on it, which are sold at this self-serve kiosk. Tapping buttons, I got to a screen that listed all the different tiers that a new card might carry. The cheapest one carried 125 credits, and cost $25. What! No. I canceled the transaction and walked off.

I went over and told my son, who was still waiting diligently next to the Pop-a-Shot machine, that we didn’t have the money. “Why?” he asked. I started to feel like a miser, a heel. This is entertainment, after all. Anyway, what’s $25 in 2025 money converted to 1980 money? I guessed it wasn’t that exorbitant, comparatively. (Later I looked it up: $25 in 2025 is the equivalent of $8.25 in 1980. I remember at least one time when I pumped ten bucks in quarters into the sit-down Star Wars arcade game, blasting away at X-wing fighters. Is that really that different?)

“Hold on,” I said, and went back to the kiosk. We were going to play video games! This time I got my credit card out and went through the whole process. I chose the cheapest one, but it didn’t really matter, because the machine assures you that you can always come back and add more credits to your card. The transaction came to $28, because those little plastic cards apparently are made of $3 worth of material.

Then I hit a snag. It asked me for my phone number so I could sign up for an account and get all kinds of alerts from the arcade in my email, on my phone... “Oh, hell no,” I said. I tapped the “Skip” option for this. It then asked me for my credit card. I tapped the reader and… my card failed. I tapped it again, and it failed again. Then a third time, and got a message telling me to start the process over again. Each time things turned out exactly the same. Each time I skipped the phone number bit. I started to suspect that the phone number bit is not really optional. I still don’t know for sure, but I know that credit card was fine. I just didn’t want to hand my data over to the corporation that owned the arcade, so they could sell it to one of their corporate customers to spam me with a flood of unwanted phone calls, emails, and whatever else could overburden my psyche.

I let my son know that I couldn’t get us any credits. Gone are the days when you could pop your own loose change into a video game cabinet and play once or twice, and find out whether you like it or not. There’s no need to lure in more customers who don’t know whether they like video games. Video games have been a cultural force for over four decades. Video game companies know that the market is out there. If you don’t want to show your commitment by selling a little personal data to the information merchants, fine. There’s others will, or something o’ that.

My son accepted this and just looked at the banquet of bright electronics some more. He was enjoying himself this time, but next time we’re in an arcade, I’m sure a repeat of this trip will not do. It’s not that I’m worried about my son not playing enough video games—what parent worries about that? I do like to encourage his interests, though. Moreover, knowing a thing or two about video games will help you with making friends. I think. I wouldn’t say it’s essential. Thinking back, when I was in middle school and high school, my trips to the arcade were almost always solo. Most of my friends weren’t interested in video games.

The idea behind the credit card membership is not really a new one. It wasn’t long after the rise of video games that a number of arcades stopped using coins and switched to tokens. I remember reading an article in my coin collecting magazine about this. The author speculated that perhaps a new branch of numismatism might grow as tokens circulated from arcade to arcade. As a coin collector and video game enthusiast, I thought this was exciting! But it never came to be. Arcade owners would design their own tokens so that the size and weight of the coins would only work in their own machines. If you had tokens from one arcade, you couldn’t go to another one and spend them. Each dollar you pumped into the change machine would get you four tokens that could only be used there. Even someone with self-control (not me) would be able to walk out with their leftover quarters and spend them elsewhere, but tokens were loyalty to that arcade and that arcade only. It’s like the MPC has taken over. (If you don’t get my reference, turn in your nerd card now and go rent the 1982 video game adventure movie Tron.)

The modern arcade card works the same way. It’s kind of like a membership, casual gamers need not apply. Plus it’s easier to fail to notice your arcade card’s charge diminishing. If you have a handful of quarters—or even tokens—you can tell when your pocket’s getting lighter.

We’ll go back to the arcade, I suppose. Or maybe some other arcade, if there’s one out there that lets me get an arcade card without making me cough up my name, address, phone number, email, birthdate, height, weight, blood type (okay, maybe I’m starting to exaggerate a little). I’d like to let my son play a video game or Pop-a-Shot or what have you, even if it doesn’t feel like the dark, smoky video game cave of my own youth.