Chris Pollette

Hello again everyone. Welcome to TechStuff. My name is Chris Pollette. I am an editor at howstuffworks.com. Sitting across from me as usual is senior writer, Jonathan Strickland.

Jonathan Strickland

The page came from your dad’s office at the arcade. That number’s been disconnected for 20 years.

Chris Pollette

Recent quote.

Jonathan Strickland

That’s a quote from a movie that hasn’t even come out yet.

Chris Pollette

That’s awesome.

Jonathan Strickland

Tron Legacy. It actually pertains to what we’re going to be talking about.

Chris Pollette

Absolutely, it does.

Jonathan Strickland

For once, I actually said what the name of the movie was. Usually, I don’t do that.

Chris Pollette

Do you all know that every time he does that, he’s actually quoting from a movie?

Jonathan Strickland

Or a song.

Chris Pollette

Or a song.

Jonathan Strickland

Yeah, sometimes it’s a song.

Chris Pollette

That’s true, sorry. Usually a movie.

Jonathan Strickland

I’m waiting to get to the point where the listeners start to write in and tell me what I’m quoting from. We did give that challenge once.

Chris Pollette

I think he just did it for those subsequent episodes as well.

Jonathan Strickland

Right, you need to go back and listen to – I don’t know when I started doing that. Make a list.

Chris Pollette

After you were doing the greetings from the world different hello.

Jonathan Strickland

Moving onto our actual topic, which is arcades that again, pertains to the quote I chose. We wanted to talk about kind of the rise and fall of the video game arcade.

Chris Pollette

Yes, indeed. I spent many, many quarters growing up in video arcades.

Jonathan Strickland

I started off spending many, many quarters. Then I shifted to spending many dollars to get tokens because that happened. It was a great money making scheme. I guess we can talk about that too. Although, that’s kind of tertiary to the full discussion to really discuss the history of video game arcades, I need to cut off Chris just before he’s about to say something. What were you going to say Chris?

Chris Pollette

I was gonna launch into a whole thing. Go ahead.

Jonathan Strickland

No, please launch.

Chris Pollette

Of course, many of you know that I am older than many of our listeners. I grew up in a skating rink. My brother was really into roller-skating when I was a kid. No, but you spend a lot of time in roller rinks as a kid. Going back to the research, I remembered a lot of the things that I’ve seen as seminal moments in video gaming. I remember the tabletop space invaders games and things like gunfight and
all these things and just watching them go from the pinball machines. You’d have four or five of those and maybe a couple video games.

Then gradually they started squeezing out the pinball games. Suddenly, there were arcades in the neighborhood where you could play all kinds of stuff like Joust and Robotron and Defender, Spy Hunter. The kids growing up in the late 70s and early 80s like me that was a big thing. We’d go down to the arcade [inaudible]. As a matter of fact, I had a friend whose parents owned an arcade.