Sunday, January 13, 2013

"Williams' Arcade's Greatest Hits", 1996.

In retrospect, this ad is tragic, without knowing why at the time.
FUNTOWN
ARCADE

Sorry... we're
CLOSED

Open All Night. No Quarters Needed.

Williams began as one of the big pinball companies in the '40s, consolidating its electromechanical domination when bought by a jukebox (!) company in the '60s then eventually, briefly, introducing a handful of classic early arcade games (see the box art for details) before ditching the sinking ships in favour of an industry with some serious profit potential for their gaming specialists -- video gambling terminals! So while it is dead to us, it did what it had to in order to evolve and surprise in a mercurial market. Still, it's a perhaps ironic fate for a company which saw its pinball business declared illegal in the US for decades due to its association with gambling.

Of course, the shift in gaming from arcades to homes was a big upheaval, but at the time of this ad the arcade industry wasn't as effectively defunct as it is now, 15 years later. How could they have known... the Funtime arcade wouldn't be re-opening, ever?

6 comments:

  1. I can't remember the last time I was in a video arcade. When I have seen them, they had a few driving games, some expansion on Street Fighter maybe, and them some claw-and-hook games.

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    1. There are arcades around, in places like ferries and bus terminals, but they're almost a slap in the face to someone who can remember weekly introduction of new machines, often featuring something only a decade old as the newest game. Arcades today aren't places of contemporary gaming, they're museums. Imagine if radio stations didn't play any music made since 2002, or libraries didn't stock books printed since then? What's in the theatres this week? Death to Smoochy?

      (And this cultural stasis is a strange thing, since gaming is just about the only cultural medium where an old work becomes significantly problematic to access years later -- their only cohorts still standing in game stores are the Starcraft boxed sets, while hardware changes have made just about every product of that era impossible to get to work today.)

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  2. I came across the 'Gaming Zone' in Edmonton airport ('the yeg'). The only game was Guitar Hero.
    The Japanese arcades still keep the faith. Where else can you play Dark Escape 4D, I presume the 4th dimension being the wind machine and heart rate monitor?

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    1. I don't know what Guitar Hero in 2008 thought it could achieve that Guitar Freaks didn't already achieve in 1998. I have seen some newer electronic diversions in gaming holdouts like the nickel arcade at Portland's Avalon theatre, like what appears to be a giant Dyson fan ringed by LEDs that you spar with a virtual jumprope inside. Sadly the only new machines I see names like "Namco" on are claw machines.

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  4. Holy spit, http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/16/3740422/the-life-and-death-of-the-american-arcade-for-amusement-only is a good new article on this very topic!

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