Anybody have any ideas?
My idea would be for game manufacturers to have tournaments with their games.
Like EA did with Madden 2004, they travelled to every city and crowned a local champion, that local champion will play in a national tournament to decide a national winner and also get $50,000.
Yes, Madden is a console game. But this plan could work with some arcade games.
For example, Sega could have an official Virtua Fighter 4 tournament, SNK/Playmore could have an official King of Fighters tournament, Namco could have an official Soul Caliber 2 or Tekken 4 tournament, Konami could have an official DDR tournament. These companies could travel to various arcades around the USA to have local and regional tournaments, then have a big championship tournament somewhere.
Japan already has these type of tournaments and the best players in some of the games are treated as cult heroes or some shit.
The problems I see with this are:
1. The majority of new arcade games are fighting games. A lot of people might not like that.
2. Most arcade games are already on home consoles anyway. So some kid could just buy an arcade stick to practice at home instead of going to an arcade.
I know my idea is flawed, but I think the manufactures should do something like this. If not with arcade games, then with console games or something.
The future of arcades is virtual reality. That is a technology that is too expensive for home use, as was the technology in arcade machine years ago. I would spend hours (edit: and lots of money) at an arcade for VR
There's a national league starting up for gaming, the MLG, but it's for console games. I went to one of their recent competitions for Halo, GT3, Soul Calibur 2, and Madden. I think Halo had a $3000 grand prize. SC2 was $1000.
It boils down to the fact that you need to have something in the arcade that you can't get at home.
And that's getting harder and harder to do.
spg, I agree.
That's why more physical games are doing decently in arcades. The boxing sim with the gloves you wear, DDR*, paddle boat, sit-down racers, skiing, boarding, Pod Racing.. Stuff the requires a machine you could never have at home.
A joystick or lightgun is just too easy to recreate at home.
In NYC they have what I consider to be a new kind of arcade. It's a lounge with lots of XBoxes and PS2s hooked up to sweet monitors. You pay to hang out and play with other people.
While you can play online at home, it's not possible with every kind of game and there's something about being in the same room with your opponent that I like. Mostly the ability to talk shit and intimidate them with my aura.
Everyone is correct.
I guess I'm just trying to live in the past with my fond memories of the arcade scene.BTW, I'm not that old, I'm 24.
Spg is right that the arcades need to have better, more expensive technology in order to survive.
That MLG league is kind of what I what talking about. Something like that but with manufacturer involvement of some sort like EA did with Madden 04.
Kind of like those old Nintendo World Championships from years back.
Everyone checkout coinopexpress.com
Look at all the cool arcade games that are out under the full machines section.
Check out the dedicated machines, driving games, and shooting games.
Cool shit.