Arcade Gauntlet

OGN has recently reported on the closing of several classic arcades and has also featured a few that are struggling. These aren’t the nouveau arcades found inside your local Wal-Mart stores. These are golden oldies, filled with pinball machines, racing games, and archaic multi-player goodies like Gauntlet and Pole Position.

Watching these arcades slowly die is like pounding the final nail in the coffin of our childhood. Sure, retro gamers love, love, loved their consoles. But nothing could really replace the feel of heading out to the arcade with a pocketful of quarters in hopes of kicking the snot out of some stranger in Fatal Fury. It was part of socialization…a way to interact with other people with similar interests, or possibly develop some new ones.

It is no wonder, then, that gaming websites all over the Internet pick up stories of tiny little retro arcades going under. It is also no big surprise that many of these arcade experiences are now being memorialized in other ways, such as on Flickr in photo sharing tributes.

The Flickr group, Growing Up in Arcades: 1979 – 1989 is a global collection of pictures of people playing their old school favorites. Check it out. There are few arcades to patronize to relive these experiences, but at least we can make sure that they are not forgotten.

Tags: Arcade Games

This entry was posted on Monday, May 30th, 2011 at 08:00 and is filed under Other Retrogames News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.