There seems to be a little bit of confusion and disagreement about this video, which is great! Because I love knowing if I'm wrong. I'd like to clarify that not every arcade had loitering, drinking, and smoking policies. These were more common in suburban or high traffic cities. Nonetheless they were a thing. I'd also like to clarify that this video is about arcades during the eighties, not the 90s. When referring to the myth of the stereotypical 80s arcade, I was referring to it using neon lighting, wall decor, and florescent carpet *together.* Many arcades, like Captain Video, which I show briefly, did use neon lighting on its own. Given that neon lighting was a thing in many places, not just arcades, since at least the 70s, it's not fair to even consider it an arcade-only thing. If you remember going to an arcade in the 80s that checks all three boxes, I would love to see a dated photo. Evidence is helpful. This video is about common arcades, not hole in the wall, local arcades (which I even do still touch on with Michael's Game Room) that were only around for a few years. There's certainly room for a future video rectifying any mistakes I may have made in this one along with discussing any information I left out. If you have some legitimate evidence for something I left out/got wrong or something that I might just be interested in, feel free to email me at ziggycashmere@gmail.com
unrelated but there's not a problem with your voice and i like the video, but i think you should try the following: position your mic slightly higher if possible, so that you have to speak upwards into it. unscrunch your vocal cords by looking up slightly and untucking your chin. this is something i was told a long time ago that's supposed to help you produce a clearer voice. also just speak loudly, clearly, and confidently. your voice has a lot of "vocal fry" on it, as if you're struggling to speak just loud enough to produce your voice and not whisper. you sound like you're trying not to invite suspicion on what you're doing or like you have someone on the other sides of your walls that you're trying not to wake. you're narrating. you gotta speak up man.
@@okso... All you had to do was google common arcades of the day like putt putt, Aladdin's castle and so on for pics. Or, like me, actually lived in the time period and went to them.
@@okso... Heck I'll add my first time in an arcade story for the heck of it. I believe I was six or seven and it was 1982. I remember it being dark and only very dim lights being used for lighting. It was also night. I remember gravitating towards centipede and robotron (berserker was a favorite Atari 2600 game). The floor was concrete. All arcades had concrete or basic grey carpeting back then until the mid 80s and the video game industry was revived. That's when we got crazy designed carpeting. Blue was a major one. Black lights started being used in a lot of places. Putt putt, as I recall, didn't use any odd lighting but had dimmer then normal lights. It wasn't so dark because by then arcade machines had a crap ton of lighting. In the 90s arcades started closing down a lot. Mall arcades where I lived were relegated to the walkway to the bathroom area. There was a time where a small revival was happening at the tail end of the ninties and I remember being surprised (at that time I was an adult and hadn't seen an arcade in years) when I moved to Florida and saw one in a mall there. Then they died off for a final time before coming back as either retro of huge mobile app style games.
Yeah, good point on rules not being universal. My father bought an arcade with a bar and kitchen attached, so food and drink were allowed, though people were encouraged to eat away from the machines. It was common for drinks to be placed on machines or nearby tables. Smoking was prevalent, with ashtrays actually mounted on the side of game cabinets. Later on, I worked for an arcade in a mall (Balley's), and there were strict rules on that. In fact, it was common for kids to place their Orange Julius on the floor outside the entrance in order to play video games. Two very different feels of arcades/amusement centers.
Nice video. Laws and ordinances varied widely around the USA. All I can say is being born in 1971 and growing up in Maine, pinball was not banned. We had pinball and arcade games like crazy in my home town of Lewiston from the mid 70s to late 90s. Cheers!
Seeing how diverse old arcade themes could be honestly hurts even more. I don't know how much of it is aesthetics changing and how much is just me being a bitter adult, but public businesses don't try to make themselves look like a straight-up adventure anymore.
Space Port's theme was cool, though in person (at least in our Space Port in King of Prussia PA) even as a kid, it was pretty cheap looking. You know the level of effort that Spirit Halloween / Halloween Adventure puts into its temporary stores? It was a step up from that. But not a big step.
I got to disagree. I went to a lot of arcades in the 80s and most all of them were the dark, neon walled, fluorescent carpeted. I think I maybe went in one or two that were well lit and one of those was part of a fun park / amusement center. Dont get the idea that the majority of 80s arcades were clean, well lit affairs. Arcades were kept dimly lit so you could see the screens. The Showbiz Pizza in Athens Georgia was so dark you practically needed a staff member with a flashlight to show you to a table.
Having grown up in the 80's and having spent a lot of time in arcades, most of them were dark, dingy and smoke filled. The clean and brightly lit ones were mostly chain arcades, restaurant arcades or mall arcades.
To be fair, I noticed much of your footage is from the 70s... myself having been born in '69, I was a kid in the 70s, teen in the 80s, and was in my 20s through the 90s. Showbiz was marketed for families, and was a brightly-lit restaurant/fun center with parents, young kids, and a few annoyed teens milling about... The games there were a mix of video/screen games and "physical" games. Goldmine and Tilt were in our local malls which open around '77. In the 80s, they were indeed dimly-lit places with neon lighting and eye-popping carpeting, and catered to teens and were exclusively video-game arcades. I don't have pics to prove it though... we generally didn't lug cameras around with us back then, and I only had one friend whose parents owned a cam-corder. You'd have to set the shutter-speed to slow in order to film in low lighting... and most people didn't know how to use them beyond "auto" settings - probably why there is very-little footage of these spaces.
I went to an actual 80s arcade in Florida about a month ago… it was a restoration project to, well, restore dozens of Pinball machines and Arcade Cabinets
I feel like skating rinks and movie theaters carving out small sections for "arcades" in the '00s and peppering them with beat up older 80s machines that were cheap to buy and fix is largely where those false memories came from. False equivalency. You play DigDug, notice the space carpet before your pirates of the carribean movie and it imprints, gradually forgetting it was a movie theater over time.
Not everyone had dedicated arcades in their area... for many the 'arcade' was just where someone had their corner of arcade games. Like you highlighted, the wall of games at the skate ring, or bowling alley WAS the 'arcade' for many... especially in more rural areas. It doesn't negate make the look a myth as the video claims, it was just that 'arcade' is something that really changed quickly. Very few lasted long.. and even fewer both pre-dated and survived the early 90s.
@@flynnibus It's true. Even growing up in the suburb of a top-5 US city (with the largest mall in the country) I don't remember any arcade lasting more than a few years. It was (unfortunately) kind of a fad. Once home consoles got "good enough" for many I think there was a lot less appetite for arcades. The Atari VCS (2600) was strikingly primitive compared to what was in the arcades. But once the SNES/Genesis era rolled around I think a lot of people were satisfied enough with what they were getting at home. I'm typing all of this as an arcade fan. Just spent many hours playing old arcade cabs last weekend. I'm just saying - I think this is why arcades had such a brief heyday with the general public.
@@yoteawhirl1987 in the 80s skating rinks were dark as well. I completely forgot about that. And they had the carpet. Ours had a side room with the games and food but it was a little more lit because of the food.
@@yoteawhirl1987 I'm also guessing you didn't grow up in the eighties. Arcades weren't easy to forget back then. It's funny how younger people who didn't have those experiences are telling us that we didn't either.
This isn't quite true. In the early 80s arcades were dark (think pool halls) and had concrete floors and weren't really as loaded but around the mid to late 80s arcades were very much black lit, had those star carpets that were mostly blue and jammed with machines. Especially those cool moving cabs like afterburner. They were also loud. So the accuracy lies not in the decade but what part of the decade. Also whether it was a chain/mall arcade or independently owned one that was in the back of a bar or a small section of an old downtown area
There definitely were a few really over-the-top aesthetic arcades back in the day in my hometown (Winnipeg). I’m 46 and back in the late 80s there was an arcade called “Laser Illusions” at Polo Park mall and it definitely had the aesthetic. Metal grate false floors with Bright neon colored lighting, glow in the dark everything and even smoke machines running! So it was a mix. There were basic arcades but there definitely was super over-top-top Synthwave looking places like Laser Illusions too!
6:30 honestly an aquarium arcade hybrid sounds like such a cool idea, since arcades are already dark you could have dimly lit tanks with low-light species of fish/invertebrates and plants. would be a lot of upkeep and there could be an issue of water leaking all over the machines but it would look so cool if done right.
I’m nostalgic for both the look of actual arcades (my childhood one looked like the real ones shown) and the “fake” ones. Idk, one is more direct while the other is an encapsulation of a dream and a vibe. It’s not always bad to represent a vibe if you know what it is.
Now that's the reality for most people that grew up going to arcades in the 80s. Most either went to barebones indie arcades or Aladdin's Castle, whose theming wasnt... all that unique.
True for me. The arcade that was in Berkeley, CA was called Silverball Gardens. It took up the entire second floor of a building and other than a cool mural on the side as you walk up, it was just a dark dingy space with game cabinets.
My suburban New England town of 40,000 had three arcades in the 80s heyday, and countless other places to play arcade video games: bars, restaurants, entryways of supermarkets and department stores, gas stations, convenience stores, laundromats. The arcades were mom and pop places, very plain (as you put it, barebones indie arcades). These types of places are where 90% of us played our games, not (for the most part) in the glossy “professional” looking arcades and chain arcades depicted in this video.
Yeah, most arcades did not last long and were not elaborate productions. I think (but do not know) that most arcades were probably operated by dudes in the vending machine business. These weren't like.... Disney imagineers coming into the arcade business with high-concept ideas. These were dudes who rented Pac-Man machines to supermarkets and bowling alleys, who had the idea of putting a bunch of these machines under one roof to generate some easy mostly-passive cash.
Wow, I just noticed you used the jail theme from the lost classic "The Fantastic Adventures of Sexdick"! That's such a good underrated track; I'm surprised you even know about that game. Great video. It's interesting to see how arcades developed from feared seedy places to family oriented spaces like today. The few retro arcades I've been to had a lot of families in them. My favorite nearest video game and pinball focused arcade is like that. I'd be interested in how ticket redemption (aka child legal gambling haha) came to be the main type of arcade today.
In my city between 1980 and 1983, there were five arcades that look like the ones that you say never existed. Only one of them had a brightly-patterned carpet (although not as bright a pattern as in your examples). The usual thing for arcades to do was to paint the walls black, kill the lights, and run a thin strip of neon along the top corners of the arcade. Of the ten total arcades in that city, eight out of ten of them were very dark and lit almost entirely by the arcade machine screens. It wasn't until later that arcades started to be brighter looking as a response to parent concerns. However, from 1979 through 1983 in my part of the world, there were none of the restrictions that you outline in the video. I guess we had it pretty good.
To add to this, nostalgia comes in 20 year waves. Our vision of the 1950s was colored by media in the 1970s where we think everyone was either a greaser or preppy and train car diners were ubiquitous but the height of their popularity was actually in the 1960s when the highway system was implemented. It makes sense that people who came into adulthood in the early aughts have this ideal vision of their early childhood filtered through their teen years in the late 90s when the "arcade" as an establishment was being transformed into the more generic "fun center."
My absolute favorite arcade I used to frequent would have to be the western themed Nickel Ranch back in the late 90s, which you could only find in the Lakewood area of Dallas, Texas. I miss it so dearly.
Great video. I really enjoyed it. I think one of the things unmentioned here with 'video games in other places' is that you did cover some Pizza spots and Restaurants, but you didn't really touch upon convenience stores, gas stations and laundromats. These machines were everywhere back then. Not just in the places you'd expect. Practically every convenience store had them, for example. They had small areas of the stores reserved for them and some of them actually installed tables and chairs close by to get people to hang out. (Mostly teenagers, for sure.) They even advertised on the outside of these stores. I remember reading an advertising sign posted in a window back then: "Play Video Games at Quiktrip." This was a profitable revenue stream for these places in those days. Thanks for the video.
The Aladdin's Castle in my hometown mall circa 1994 was absolutely the stereotype complete with movie theater lighting, loud purple carpeting, and no windows. I'm positive the branding was an attempt to compete with a local venue called Fun Land. Look up images of Fun Land in Fredericksburg VA, they haven't updated the look in 30 years right down to its black lighting and glow-in-the-dark carpet.
Bally's Great Escape in So. Cal as well. As well as many others minus the patterned carpet. It's just too bad we didn't have digital cameras back then. I just keep seeing the same old pictures of 80's arcades online when there should be thousands.
This is why I find Vaporwave and the movements that spawned from it so fascinating. It's interesting to see an aesthetic based intentionally on a hyper-reality that never existed, something that's so divorced from the things that it was cribbing from it that it circles back around to being a timeless thing.
As someone who lived through the era of 90s arcades, I never felt a dissonance with media presentations of arcades. In fact, the carpet you mentioned was exactly the kind of carpet at the arcade room in a movie theater at my old hometown, and was the look that a laser tag place cultivated. I appreciate the hyperreality because it feels like a bunch of memories melding together to form an archetype, rather than das ding an Sich. Of course, I also really appreciate photos of actual arcades in operation! It's good to have both realistic and real-world depictions as well as the abstract recreations born of fuzzy memories.
I will say, as someone aspiring to be an architect since early childhood, the theming/designs for a majority of amusement centers from the 80's/90's (most notably Time Out, Station Break, Space Port, Atari Video Adventure at Marriott’s Great America, and even Chuck E. Cheese early on), hell, I would go as far as to note other entertainment venues like movie theaters where those influences were apparent, are really eye-poppingly expressive and imaginative in terms of aesthetic that I'd definitely strive for if there are plans to open any new facilities, just to put my own twists onto them for a fresher look that would require some careful planning. On top of that, this is a pretty informative video regarding the history of arcades/amusement centers, from how they've evolved over time, the spiking popularity, right down to the aesthetic influences in the entertainment world, to the point where the dark neon lighting/galactic design (known as Arcadecore) would become the common interpretation of a typical arcade among many people and various media. But a funny thing to point about this is at a small city where I used to reside as a kid, there was a local amusement center (which is no longer in business, sadly) inside a shopping mall attached to a nightclub that consisted of retro arcade machines and billiards. It was a loud place, but unlike what many describes a typical retro arcade with all those bright neon lights everywhere, it felt like a dungeon with very few lights aside from the machines, due to the fact it was in the downstairs underground.
I really enjoyed this documentary. Very nicely researched and put together! I lived through mid 80's Arcades, and still play a lot of these classic Arcade games to this day. Good times!
We used to go to Dream Machine in Massachusetts in the early 80s. Very dark and black lit in sections. Neon carpet. I remember my mother bringing me to see a new game that came out called “Pac-Man”. Also in our area, we had The Silver Ball arcade which didn’t have much of the neon stuff going on. It was pretty industrial looking, actually. I think the takeaway here is the neon lit arcades are the ones that stood out as the ultimate in 80s arcade look and feel, so it became the preferred style to go with for nostalgia.
Fyi, there’s an arcade in Hanover Pa called “Timeline Arcade” and they styled a fair amount of the place after Time out, even down to the whole tunnel being present.
@ I went there a bit ago, a lot of the pinball machines had issues but apparently they’ve really come around. A whole bunch of new machines and they’ve fixed quite a bit of stuff. Hopefully I’ll be able to make a trip out again.
Maybe it’s a matter of region, but what’s being said here isn’t true for at least part of the country. Post-85, local, independent arcades did absolutely look like that, at least in the regions I had access to as a kid. This is talking entirely about mall and chain arcades, which weren’t really considered the cool arcades, at least not around here. The “real” arcades were shady and seedy and pitch black inside most of the time, except for the largely muddled black light carpets and wall paper. The idea anyone enforced any kind of smoking policy is laughable. There were three in or around my area in the Midwest, with others I had seen in other states. There’s no way any mall run by a sane person would have allowed one of those independent arcades be attached to it. They were always in junky old buildings or run-down plazas. Two had “video parlor” as part of their name, which added to the carney seediness of the experience. Part of the appeal of going to the independent, seedier arcades was the fact that you were utterly unsupervised. If you had older brothers or sisters, you just didn’t go to the family/chain arcades when you could help it. I remember having to leave the one just called “Arcade” once because some older people were going around demanding quarters from younger kids. My older brother decided it was best just to leave. Granted, the period of time I’m talking about was the mid to late 80’s, not during the boom period, and I only had experience with a few regions in the US, but to say the depiction is “inaccurate” is at least in part not itself accurate. I would compare this take to someone from the future claiming that towny bars never existed because bars looked like “this,” which is a series of images of TGIFridays and Harry Buffalo. Dark, gross, neon arcades definitely existed, at least in a few areas, and they were often the ones you actually wanted to go to as a kid. You only settled for mall arcades out of necessity.
Great Video but I do disagree with you and your definition of what a Arcade was in the 80's. Having grown in those years and having worked at several arcades I can tell you that what you claim to not be real, actually really was and awesome!
I used to work at a Time Out in the 90s, and all of the familiar names (Space Port, Aladdin's Castle) were all owned by the same company (Edison Brothers). Then Namco (who owned the Cybertainment arcades) bought all of the Edison Brothers owned stores, and then they all went out of business in the very late 90s.
Great video. When I was a kid in the late 80s/early 90s I remember the existence of arcade like places where you could “rent” NES games and play them on special TVs they had set up. When you got game over the game turned off. Does anyone remember this?
I used to love going to arcades ( and still do) in general but I used to really love going to space port arcades in the 70s and 80s because of the way they looked, I spent a majority of my time ( and money) in arcades back then and they were some of the happiest times of my life
There were many arcades in the Northeast US anyway that looked exactly like you are trying to disprove. Dream Machine, Aladdin’s Castle, Fun and Games all had the neon/blacklight decor and in fact competed to outdo each other in that regard. I think it depends strongly where you lived during those times. This video does not fully represent how all arcades looked back then.
Nice exploration into the popular chain arcades and some rare photographs I have never seen before. Great to see the years the arcades where around too as I was not aware of much of this info and that some had survived as long as they did.
a couple things I remember from the 80's, i was born in 78, so our "technology" was arcades, atari, colecovision, and then Nintendo/Sega, these were our "iPhone" equivelents. Every person I knew was obsessed with NES at some point, it was an epidemic. Also, Spaceport did have that neon carpet that reacted to blacklight, Aladdins castle was more well lit, and there were "funzone's" that were brightly lit and featured miniture golf alongside arcade machines. But every resturant also had a "mini arcade". Even 7 eleven had at a bare minimum 1 or 2 stand up arcade games, while some would have a tiny room with half a dozen games, and I remember spending a lot of time at the 7 eleven playing street fighter 2 and the first time I played SMB3 was at the 7 eleven 2 blocks from my house on a "playchoice" machine. The fuddruckers had a dedicated arcade, Pizza hut always had a sit down pole position game, every time I hear the music it reminds me of the smell and taste of pizza hut panned pizzas! Everywere was an arcade for a while, it was very profitiable, the same way payphones were everywere and profitable.
I remember 2 arcades I went to in the late 80s and one in the 90s. My home town arcade in a strip mall. It had black carpeted floors and tons of cabinets against the walls and a middle section filled with cabinets. The bigger games like Afterburner were in the front so they could be seen through the window. There was a huge arcade in Old Orchard Beach in Maine they I got to go to once a year. It was kind of brightly lit for an arcade and had white tile floor. It had all the ticket games that my home town one didn’t have. I looked forward to going there every year. The one from the 90s was in a mall. It was smaller than the other two but was packed with games. I remember getting beaten in Mortal Kombat 2 there a lot. It did exist in the 80s as well but I remember it better in the 90s. It was brightly lit with white tile floors. I also have random arcade memories of attendants with change belts on. You’d give them your dollar and they press their button and give you your 4 quarters.
In the 90s the Tilt arcade at the Meadowbrook mall had those carpets (with rocket ships) with a black light at some point so its not entirely inaccurate to say some arcades did look like that to a degree, just not in the 80s.
Of the 80's arcades I grew up going to, 2 were called Starcade and did have a neon space theme. The other 2 were Golf N Stuff and Gold Mine. I really value growing up in that time and having access to a lot of the best arcade machine throughout the 80's, 90's and 2000's. Having to venture out of the house to play the video games was half the fun as well. Not only that liquor stores, bowling alleys, pizza places and laundry mats all had games too. What a time to be alive.
It’s not just the skating rinks and movie theaters that had the neon and spacy type of aesthetic, i distinctly remember my local bowling alley in the ‘00s and early ‘10s still having it’s space themed walls and neon bowling pin carpet. The arcade there was wicked small with most games being ticket redemptions, the billiards room next to it definitely took up more real estate. If anything, the bowling alley was the hangout spot when i was growing up
Fantastic video as ever! As someone born in the mid 90s, a lot of my arcade nostalgia comes from heavily themed restaurants and local bowling alleys that just so happen to have arcade games alongside those blacklight "popping" carpets. Although I wasn't a child of the 70s/80s, and my view of arcade games comes from a much later time, to me, an arcade is exactly what a stereotypical falsified memory of an arcade nowadays looks like. Part of me hopes the youth begins to find enjoyment in heavily themed areas and arcades again. In this age of minimalism across every corporate entity, it's nice to see some oversized props, bright colors, and interestingly designed carpets. One can only hope the age of maximalism returns, and life can look lively again!
Another great video, legit feel a little gaslit by some of the films and sows that depecited arcades the way they do when they had so many unique and interesting designs and theming.
Thank you for this! This reminded me of my hometown arcade called Fun & Games in MA which had a Spaceport theme in the 80s. I looked them up and they’re still in business going strong 👾
No way, this video goes up after I coincidentally do a google search for 80s arcades hours earlier for a thread I was writing? Wooow, lol. Cool video once more!
I don't remember arcades being themed at all in my country, just sparsely decorated with the brand's colors if they were part of a larger chain. They were either targeted to kids and as a consequence brightly lit places or dingy dark spaces aimed at teens, I can clearly remember these two arcades downtown in my city and how their vibe was drastically different because of their target audience despite the fact that they mostly had the same type of games. BTW the arcade I usually went to as a child in the 90's ended up closing before the turn of the millennium and a few years later got turned into a casino, the irony wasn't lost on most people.
What's even stupider is seeing arcades in modern cartoons and TV Shows that characters walk a few blocks to reach, when they basically don't exist locally anymore.
Wow someone did their research very well done. Seeing this really brings back the moments the memories of being and seeing a lot of these environments. Thnx 4 posting 👍 and thnx 4 reminding me how old I am 😂
Um it really did depend. My area did not have a big corporate arcade like Time Out. Mine was a crusty hole in the wall that smelled like stale cigarette smoke, did have some neon signs and black lighting, no fun pattern carpet, very dim overhead lighting. It was kinda scummy but us 7 year olds were dropped off there for hours at a time anyway. We put money directly in the machines, which was not allowed in the big chain arcades. This would’ve been an indie arcade from the 70s; was gone by 1996. If you look up Fun Spot in Laconia NH their third floor arcade, while bigger than any I knew as a child, retains a bit of the scummy casino vibe of many smaller locations from the arcade game boom. I was born in 1985 btw.
@ understood my point was that this arcade was from the late 70s arcade boom era. The mall it was in opened in 1973 and the arcade as best I can tell opened a few years later (I’ve done my best to pinpoint it through local newspapers/business filings). Your video focuses on the big well documented chain arcades that dominated the West Coast. I just wanted to point out that plenty of us played in unsavory shitholes that we’re not as well documented. It wasn’t uncommon for game arcades to still be split between pool tables and video games. There’s a reason people didn’t like these places. I’m a cultural historian and why it’s important for me to split this hair is because the “80s arcade” we depict in modernity is a composite of the entirety of the arcade era, and to me that’s way more interesting. In the same way that no 50s diner had all in one place greasers and turquoise Formica and chrome and a juke box, we choose to remember these places as a Disneyland “best version” of themselves.
@Foxxy999 You make a lot of great points! I tried to showcase a little of the hole in the wall arcades by showing off Michael's Game Room and The Boardwalk but it's hard to talk much about them and have something to back you up when, as you said, they're undocumented. Your analogy with diners works pretty well. Both are just kinds of places, and those places come in small and cheap or big and expensive sizes.
I was born in 85 so I barley caught the tail end of Arcades but damn I remember it being magical to be a lil kid with some quarters. The older kids smoking out front and the dark lit interior where kids could go and hang out.
In the arcade Tilt, which was in the Governor’s Square Mall in Tallahassee, I can guarantee that in the 1980s and 1990s, it looked like the pictures you pulled up for 1980s arcade (neon lights, carpet, black lights). However it’s not the default baseline for how arcades looked (as I’ve been to multiple arcades over the years including in my youth).
There were even Timeout arcade locations opened in Australia in the 1980s with one located on Station Street in Box Hill’s central shopping district near the shopping centre and train station which is a suburb in Melbourne! That location continued to exist as a privately owned arcade after Timeout’s bankruptcy only to then permanently close in 2016-2017 and by 2018 it had been subdivided into two smaller shop units which are both Chinese businesses as Box Hill’s current dominant demographic is Chinese! The arcade also had a cool painted mural sign that covered the whole first floor wall above the arcade but that was most recently painted over with red paint.
The Starcade in Disneyland also was renovated multiple times over its existence with games regularly being replaced with newer ones until it permanently closed in the late 2000s! It remained abandoned for quite some time while being used for storing pieces of old closed down attractions until it reopened more recently as a gift shop.
Great video🎉 I love seeing this stuff . I was born in 81 so most of my time in arcades was in the 90’s but growing up in Silicon Valley CA I was lucky to be around the “original” chunky cheese. I also had an Aladdin’s and a Tilt. But my main arcade was a place called Golfland .
My suburban New England town of 40,000 had three arcades in the 80s heyday, and countless other places to play arcade video games: bars, restaurants, entryways of supermarkets and department stores, gas stations, convenience stores, laundromats. The arcades were all mom and pop places, very plain (as you put it in one comment, barebones indie arcades). These types of places are where 90% of us played our games, not (for the most part) in the glossy “professional” looking arcades and chain arcades depicted in this very good but slightly misleading video.
Damn, I didn't realize anybody actually, honestly believed arcades looked like that... I mean, the whole neon light nightclub look is, like, a cartoonishly stereotypical late 80s, 90s look. It's like imagining every single car and piece of furniture in the 70s having wood paneling... I guess I underestimated the power of stereotypes, especially for people who just don't know much about history...
It's always been like this. You say twenties, fourties, fifties, sixties, seventies, etc, and 80's/90's kids absolutely had stereotypes about what those looked like.
The 2 malls near me in the 80s had Aladdin Castles. They were dark, dirty, crammed full of machines and earlier in the 80s didn’t have neon colored carpet but did have busy patterned carpet. They were also full of kids loitering around. By the time I was leaving high school which would have been 87 they were already dying. One was remodeled around this time I assume in an attempt to revive it. By remodeled I mean the walls got a dash of paint, the carpet was replaced with more brightly colored patterned carpet as seen in what you classify as inauthentic representations of 80s arcades and the lights were turned up.
Aw, I always love when someone can find some old pics of Disneyland arcade--I grew up in the country, so we didn't have many options for playing arcade games outside of our local pizza parlor, so the first time I went with my school to Disneyland, I kind of overdid it at Starcade (back when it was on two floors, and the People Mover went through it--it got progressively smaller and more sad over the years until finally closing (though the sign is still there)). Pretty amazing to be reminded that the issue of kids not having places to hang out isn't a modern issue, but has been going on pretty much since child labor laws were put into effect!
I remember this neon arcade theme being super popular in 00s at least when I was a kid… I can tell you that much. My mall had an arcade that fit this aesthetic. I tried looking around the internet to see if it was archived by anyone but I’ve yet to find it…
Ground Kontrol is an amazing arcade in Portland, OR that deliberately went with this faux-retro 80s aesthetic. But yes, my memories of arcades and "fun centers" in the 90s (wasn't around in the 80s) was certainly more of what you've got here. Rainbow paint jobs, sports theming, lots of earth tones.
When I think of the dominant aesthetic of what I saw and visited - which admittedly is more 90's than 80's - it tends to be the arcades attached to minigolf, go-karts, amusement parks, etc. eg. the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk or Golfland in CA. The Boardwalk is a bit exceptional(family business that is upwards of a century old now) but many of those locations were developed in the 70's within that particular amusement boom. The interiors often got updated some time into the 90's, but the exteriors would remain the same till demolition. And the pinball machines were always a major part of the look of those places, which tends to be overlooked in the modern treatments that are all video. Another aesthetic from outside the amusement center business was the colleges that had an arcade business on campus. Those would be somewhere between cafeteria and pool hall aesthetics - usually wedged somewhere in the innards of a brutalist concrete slab like the SFSU student union building, which to this day has "Rack 'n Cue", a pool hall arcade that keeps the games in full sight of everyone eating lunch, behind glass windows. I may have stepped foot in a CEC or Time Out a few times but it just wasn't what I saw, where I was. Something else that comes to mind is that the dark moody aesthetic was big within restaurants generally in the early 80's. Places like Round Table Pizza really owned that aesthetic. The big shift in location-based aesthetics follows with the fashion trends going from dark and earth tones to pastel and neon midway through the decade(as evidenced in, e.g., Miami Vice in its different seasons or the look of music videos). The later part of the 80's had the Memphis-Milano influences, the early CGI, all of that: it presented exuberance and a family-friendly image rather than a restrained, adult one. By the early 90's that fashion went into an over-the-top phase before the more characteristically 90's trends took hold, and the synthwave look tends to use that last phase as the jumping off point.
Oh, queso! I really enjoy visiting "pinball museums", I think the oldest pinball machine I've gotten to personally play was one from around the 50's, the scoreboard was a physical mechanism as opposed to an electronic/LED display
I think we also need to consider the impact of Synthwave. It's caused us to look back at the 80s as one singular, neon aesthetic. It's almost impossible to google actual 80s aesthetics as a result. Another name for Synthwave is Outrun and that's no coincidence. It was only natural that 80s synths would be equated to chiptunes.
Such a scam genre, full of “retro aesthetic” dweebs trying to imitate something that never happened, producing all the music on ableton plugins, while thumbing through Netflix rather than watching VHS . For shame.
Believe me, I understand the need to combat revisionist history, but as a frequent habitué of video-game arcades in the 1980s I can attest that most of them did indeed have the glowing fluorescent carpeting and neon squiggle art and the rest of these trappings. Not all places, but way more common than what's inferred here. The region I was in [So. California] may have had something to do with my experience.
I grew up in Indianapolis and remember Aladdin's Castle at several malls, Times Square at Glendale Center, Porky's Place on 116th Street in Carmel, and Jungle Jim's at Keystone Square Mall, also on 116th Street in Carmel. Union Station had an upper mezzanine full of video games, as did Circle Center Mall. Space Port reminds me of the McDonald's at Greenwood Park Mall, which at one point showed various eras with 200s in the front long before 2000 had occurred. they had old-time cash registers as you moved to the back, with the idea that you were traveling backward in time. I didn't get a very good look at it because I was there only once. Later on it was modified to look like a typical McDonald's.
Central Park in Los Altos, California. I went there all the time. It expanded twice. In fact it was big for something that wasn’t Time Zone/Aladdin’s Castle. One aspect of Central Park was that they got a lot of obscure games in addition to the big hits. It was even a testing ground for Atari games before they got officially released, if at all. The arcade closed around 1984/85. Apparently there was a drug bust there, but it could have been a rumor.
The stereotypical '80s arcade that we see now certainly wasn't the norm back then, but it wasn't unheard of. Arcades were like holy sites to me growing up in the late '70s and '80s, and while most of them didn't have the neon, blacklight, and fluorescent carpet look that's almost universally portrayed today, it wasn't unheard of and I still love that look. It somehow captures the "feel" of the places back then. As an aside, I'd never heard of Space Port before, but as a kid I dreamed of arcades looking like that. I would've lived at a place like that!
It might have been different in the US, But here in the UK most Arcades would smell of Cigarette Smoke. I even remember some Arcade Machines having Ash Trays attached to them. A lot people Smoked back then! We didn't really get Arcades in Malls, But We often get a Arcades in Seaside Towns, Usally Along the Seafront.
Our bowling alley and skating rink arcades that were usually tucked off to the side or in the back smelled like cigarettes back in the day. I vaguely remember the ashtrays on the cabinets
My arcade was space port. We had 2 of them near me. It was dark with no neon carpet. I appreciate this video for calling this out. I have also noticed that if you search for 80s arcade, the pictures of that neon carpet come up. I never saw that until the 90s. By then the arcades had changed . They seemed aimed toward young kids. I would go to chuck e cheese in 83-84 and it was great. It was dark and they had all the latest games and tons of them. It had a night club feel. It was exciting . By around 87-88 chuck e cheese is what it is today , bright , not too many games , ball pits , ticket redemption etc.. The magic was gone. For those that weren't there, this video corrects the falsification of history . Look at the pics in the video thats how it was .
My local arcade in high school (Aladdin’s Castle), back in the 80’s, was a dark place. Brown or orange carpet, black walls with some wood paneling and games wall to wall with the change machines. Nothing else, no posters, no neon, nothing, just games and it was great!
Our skating rink had that fun time space carpet and a arcade in the back. But when i think arcade i think of that white tile floor with red, blue and yellow blocks.
excellent video! yeah the carpet thing seemed to always be more associated with the combo arcade/bowling alleys to me. my all time favorite arcade had to have been sam's town out here in california! and it definitely did NOT feature the neon carpet. it was more themed after a wild west town like you'd see in those old spaghetti westerns, sawdust and straw all over the floors, even extending into the massive arcade! just rows of arcade and pinball games (including 50'' big screen versions of SF2 turbo, something I don't think I've ever seen since then!) and so many pinball machines, too. plus a small gift shop where you could get al kinds of fun penny candy, and a separate area with big screen tvs where you could eat food and drink beer, and watch all kinds of sports. so definitely not the stereotypical 'arcade' like you'd see in popular media these days.
As someone who was a gamer in the 1980s, it certainly made me go "wtf?.." when I realized how younger people these days thought it was like back then. I'm not saying that whole "synthwave/retrowave" neon look is bad or anything... on the contrary... it looks cool. Although it definitely was not like that in most places back in the 80s, or even the 90s for that matter.
I have MatPatify (which overlays Game Theory-style text over YT video thumbnails for those unaware) and it can't be a coincidence it overlaid "OUT OF TIME" onto the thumbnail
I guess I was one of the unlucky ones. Every arcade I ever went to was smoky, dingy, usually reeked of beer. Some were well lit, with florescent lights overhead, but I don't remember any "black light and neon carpets" anytime before the late 90s/early 2000s.
This is almost complete bullshit, yes some of the images of the 80s arcade is romanticized due to false memories, but I can tell you I've been in hundreds of arcades over my entire 48 year life, and in the late 80s to mid 90s they looked exactly like you're trying to prove they didn't
“But it isn’t real” 42 year old me: “Uh…yeah it is” Maybe it was a regional thing, idk, but in Los Angeles, the two biggest arcades I went to, Sherman Oaks Castle and all the way to the UCLA arcade in the mid to late 90s had that aesthetic
Back in the 80s, our local arcade was called Galaxy. It was in the food court at the Christiana Mall, and I remember it just being an empty shop that had been painted totally black inside then stuffed with machines. I don't remember any theming or wall art or anything like that at all.
Yup - and it's because of the boom people were putting cabinets everywhere. Your 7-11, your kmart, your old bookstore, etc. Decor was usually minimal except for the big corporate chains. But blacked out windows, dark, the sound... very common
During arcade booms, one could just add cabinets anyehere as an extra source of money, so the theme - most often none - would depend on where they would add those machines. First, the Space Invaders boom, followed by the Pacman one. Then fast-forward a few years, Double Dragon-Final Fight, followed by Street Fighter II.
There is always conflict between what we remember and what was commonplace, because it is human nature to remember what stands out and what makes the strongest emotional impression. But it doesn't mean those memories are false, just that they might not represent the full picture.
I loved the vibe of 80s-90s and even 2000s aah arcades. I grew up with the 90s ver. of Chuck E. Cheese's which is known as phase 3 and I have fond memories about it.
This is a great video. Very well researched. I do think it's important to stress that some of these arcades did end up looking like their movie incarnations eventually. Back in the early 90's, we had an Aladdin's Castle at our mall. It was just a dark room with neon and colorful carpet. It retained that look when it became a Time Out, but with an added Namco theme. The influence from movie theaters and skating rinks had bled over. Also, what is the homebrew arcade that you show at the 10:00 mark? I used to follow the guy that made that one, but I've forgotten what it's called.
*Many supermarkets and 7-11s and Wawas had 1-4 arcade machines right next to the entrance door (at least in New York/New Jersey)* Many times a plain clothes police officers was station next to the door to keep the kids inline. Some kids smoked! They would place their cigarettes on the 1u/2up buttons as they played, so if you see melted plastic there, its because of that!
There seems to be a little bit of confusion and disagreement about this video, which is great! Because I love knowing if I'm wrong. I'd like to clarify that not every arcade had loitering, drinking, and smoking policies. These were more common in suburban or high traffic cities. Nonetheless they were a thing. I'd also like to clarify that this video is about arcades during the eighties, not the 90s. When referring to the myth of the stereotypical 80s arcade, I was referring to it using neon lighting, wall decor, and florescent carpet *together.* Many arcades, like Captain Video, which I show briefly, did use neon lighting on its own. Given that neon lighting was a thing in many places, not just arcades, since at least the 70s, it's not fair to even consider it an arcade-only thing. If you remember going to an arcade in the 80s that checks all three boxes, I would love to see a dated photo. Evidence is helpful. This video is about common arcades, not hole in the wall, local arcades (which I even do still touch on with Michael's Game Room) that were only around for a few years. There's certainly room for a future video rectifying any mistakes I may have made in this one along with discussing any information I left out.
If you have some legitimate evidence for something I left out/got wrong or something that I might just be interested in, feel free to email me at ziggycashmere@gmail.com
unrelated but there's not a problem with your voice and i like the video, but i think you should try the following:
position your mic slightly higher if possible, so that you have to speak upwards into it. unscrunch your vocal cords by looking up slightly and untucking your chin. this is something i was told a long time ago that's supposed to help you produce a clearer voice.
also just speak loudly, clearly, and confidently. your voice has a lot of "vocal fry" on it, as if you're struggling to speak just loud enough to produce your voice and not whisper. you sound like you're trying not to invite suspicion on what you're doing or like you have someone on the other sides of your walls that you're trying not to wake. you're narrating. you gotta speak up man.
@@okso... All you had to do was google common arcades of the day like putt putt, Aladdin's castle and so on for pics. Or, like me, actually lived in the time period and went to them.
@@okso... Heck I'll add my first time in an arcade story for the heck of it. I believe I was six or seven and it was 1982. I remember it being dark and only very dim lights being used for lighting. It was also night. I remember gravitating towards centipede and robotron (berserker was a favorite Atari 2600 game). The floor was concrete. All arcades had concrete or basic grey carpeting back then until the mid 80s and the video game industry was revived. That's when we got crazy designed carpeting. Blue was a major one. Black lights started being used in a lot of places. Putt putt, as I recall, didn't use any odd lighting but had dimmer then normal lights. It wasn't so dark because by then arcade machines had a crap ton of lighting. In the 90s arcades started closing down a lot. Mall arcades where I lived were relegated to the walkway to the bathroom area. There was a time where a small revival was happening at the tail end of the ninties and I remember being surprised (at that time I was an adult and hadn't seen an arcade in years) when I moved to Florida and saw one in a mall there. Then they died off for a final time before coming back as either retro of huge mobile app style games.
Yeah, good point on rules not being universal. My father bought an arcade with a bar and kitchen attached, so food and drink were allowed, though people were encouraged to eat away from the machines. It was common for drinks to be placed on machines or nearby tables. Smoking was prevalent, with ashtrays actually mounted on the side of game cabinets. Later on, I worked for an arcade in a mall (Balley's), and there were strict rules on that. In fact, it was common for kids to place their Orange Julius on the floor outside the entrance in order to play video games. Two very different feels of arcades/amusement centers.
Nice video. Laws and ordinances varied widely around the USA. All I can say is being born in 1971 and growing up in Maine, pinball was not banned. We had pinball and arcade games like crazy in my home town of Lewiston from the mid 70s to late 90s. Cheers!
Seeing how diverse old arcade themes could be honestly hurts even more. I don't know how much of it is aesthetics changing and how much is just me being a bitter adult, but public businesses don't try to make themselves look like a straight-up adventure anymore.
Does for most of us.
Space Port's theme was cool, though in person (at least in our Space Port in King of Prussia PA) even as a kid, it was pretty cheap looking. You know the level of effort that Spirit Halloween / Halloween Adventure puts into its temporary stores? It was a step up from that. But not a big step.
My childhood arcade was in my local mall in the 80s and was dark with the black light carpet almost exactly like its displayed in pop culture.
I got to disagree. I went to a lot of arcades in the 80s and most all of them were the dark, neon walled, fluorescent carpeted. I think I maybe went in one or two that were well lit and one of those was part of a fun park / amusement center. Dont get the idea that the majority of 80s arcades were clean, well lit affairs. Arcades were kept dimly lit so you could see the screens. The Showbiz Pizza in Athens Georgia was so dark you practically needed a staff member with a flashlight to show you to a table.
Having grown up in the 80's and having spent a lot of time in arcades, most of them were dark, dingy and smoke filled. The clean and brightly lit ones were mostly chain arcades, restaurant arcades or mall arcades.
To be fair, I noticed much of your footage is from the 70s... myself having been born in '69, I was a kid in the 70s, teen in the 80s, and was in my 20s through the 90s. Showbiz was marketed for families, and was a brightly-lit restaurant/fun center with parents, young kids, and a few annoyed teens milling about... The games there were a mix of video/screen games and "physical" games. Goldmine and Tilt were in our local malls which open around '77. In the 80s, they were indeed dimly-lit places with neon lighting and eye-popping carpeting, and catered to teens and were exclusively video-game arcades. I don't have pics to prove it though... we generally didn't lug cameras around with us back then, and I only had one friend whose parents owned a cam-corder. You'd have to set the shutter-speed to slow in order to film in low lighting... and most people didn't know how to use them beyond "auto" settings - probably why there is very-little footage of these spaces.
Good points!
I went to an actual 80s arcade in Florida about a month ago… it was a restoration project to, well, restore dozens of Pinball machines and Arcade Cabinets
im curious whats it called 🤔
@ Silverball, I looked it up and it’s like the second result on google.
Replay Museum in Tarpon Springs, FL fits that description as well. I had my last birthday celebration there.
I feel like skating rinks and movie theaters carving out small sections for "arcades" in the '00s and peppering them with beat up older 80s machines that were cheap to buy and fix is largely where those false memories came from. False equivalency. You play DigDug, notice the space carpet before your pirates of the carribean movie and it imprints, gradually forgetting it was a movie theater over time.
Not everyone had dedicated arcades in their area... for many the 'arcade' was just where someone had their corner of arcade games. Like you highlighted, the wall of games at the skate ring, or bowling alley WAS the 'arcade' for many... especially in more rural areas. It doesn't negate make the look a myth as the video claims, it was just that 'arcade' is something that really changed quickly. Very few lasted long.. and even fewer both pre-dated and survived the early 90s.
@@flynnibus It's true. Even growing up in the suburb of a top-5 US city (with the largest mall in the country) I don't remember any arcade lasting more than a few years. It was (unfortunately) kind of a fad.
Once home consoles got "good enough" for many I think there was a lot less appetite for arcades. The Atari VCS (2600) was strikingly primitive compared to what was in the arcades. But once the SNES/Genesis era rolled around I think a lot of people were satisfied enough with what they were getting at home.
I'm typing all of this as an arcade fan. Just spent many hours playing old arcade cabs last weekend. I'm just saying - I think this is why arcades had such a brief heyday with the general public.
@@yoteawhirl1987 in the 80s skating rinks were dark as well. I completely forgot about that. And they had the carpet. Ours had a side room with the games and food but it was a little more lit because of the food.
@@yoteawhirl1987 I'm also guessing you didn't grow up in the eighties. Arcades weren't easy to forget back then. It's funny how younger people who didn't have those experiences are telling us that we didn't either.
This isn't quite true. In the early 80s arcades were dark (think pool halls) and had concrete floors and weren't really as loaded but around the mid to late 80s arcades were very much black lit, had those star carpets that were mostly blue and jammed with machines. Especially those cool moving cabs like afterburner. They were also loud. So the accuracy lies not in the decade but what part of the decade. Also whether it was a chain/mall arcade or independently owned one that was in the back of a bar or a small section of an old downtown area
There definitely were a few really over-the-top aesthetic arcades back in the day in my hometown (Winnipeg). I’m 46 and back in the late 80s there was an arcade called “Laser Illusions” at Polo Park mall and it definitely had the aesthetic. Metal grate false floors with Bright neon colored lighting, glow in the dark everything and even smoke machines running! So it was a mix. There were basic arcades but there definitely was super over-top-top Synthwave looking places like Laser Illusions too!
6:30 honestly an aquarium arcade hybrid sounds like such a cool idea, since arcades are already dark you could have dimly lit tanks with low-light species of fish/invertebrates and plants. would be a lot of upkeep and there could be an issue of water leaking all over the machines but it would look so cool if done right.
media is obsessed with nostalgia, not accuracy it's a curse of period pieces
True.
I’m nostalgic for both the look of actual arcades (my childhood one looked like the real ones shown) and the “fake” ones. Idk, one is more direct while the other is an encapsulation of a dream and a vibe. It’s not always bad to represent a vibe if you know what it is.
The ones I went to in the 80s all looked like the Google ones with a very few exceptions.
@@gulfofmexico1569 Same here.
Literally just for people who see something they vaguely recognize and point at the screen and make soy faces
Most of the arcades I went to in the 80s were very bare bones. Just throw a bunch of games in a space and there you go.
Now that's the reality for most people that grew up going to arcades in the 80s. Most either went to barebones indie arcades or Aladdin's Castle, whose theming wasnt... all that unique.
@@okso... Yeah, just a normal big room with cabinets.
True for me. The arcade that was in Berkeley, CA was called Silverball Gardens. It took up the entire second floor of a building and other than a cool mural on the side as you walk up, it was just a dark dingy space with game cabinets.
My suburban New England town of 40,000 had three arcades in the 80s heyday, and countless other places to play arcade video games: bars, restaurants, entryways of supermarkets and department stores, gas stations, convenience stores, laundromats. The arcades were mom and pop places, very plain (as you put it, barebones indie arcades). These types of places are where 90% of us played our games, not (for the most part) in the glossy “professional” looking arcades and chain arcades depicted in this video.
Yeah, most arcades did not last long and were not elaborate productions. I think (but do not know) that most arcades were probably operated by dudes in the vending machine business. These weren't like.... Disney imagineers coming into the arcade business with high-concept ideas. These were dudes who rented Pac-Man machines to supermarkets and bowling alleys, who had the idea of putting a bunch of these machines under one roof to generate some easy mostly-passive cash.
Am I the only one who grew up with an arcade that actually fit the stereotype described in this video? They did exist lol
Wow, I just noticed you used the jail theme from the lost classic "The Fantastic Adventures of Sexdick"! That's such a good underrated track; I'm surprised you even know about that game. Great video. It's interesting to see how arcades developed from feared seedy places to family oriented spaces like today. The few retro arcades I've been to had a lot of families in them. My favorite nearest video game and pinball focused arcade is like that. I'd be interested in how ticket redemption (aka child legal gambling haha) came to be the main type of arcade today.
In my city between 1980 and 1983, there were five arcades that look like the ones that you say never existed. Only one of them had a brightly-patterned carpet (although not as bright a pattern as in your examples). The usual thing for arcades to do was to paint the walls black, kill the lights, and run a thin strip of neon along the top corners of the arcade. Of the ten total arcades in that city, eight out of ten of them were very dark and lit almost entirely by the arcade machine screens. It wasn't until later that arcades started to be brighter looking as a response to parent concerns. However, from 1979 through 1983 in my part of the world, there were none of the restrictions that you outline in the video. I guess we had it pretty good.
To add to this, nostalgia comes in 20 year waves. Our vision of the 1950s was colored by media in the 1970s where we think everyone was either a greaser or preppy and train car diners were ubiquitous but the height of their popularity was actually in the 1960s when the highway system was implemented. It makes sense that people who came into adulthood in the early aughts have this ideal vision of their early childhood filtered through their teen years in the late 90s when the "arcade" as an establishment was being transformed into the more generic "fun center."
My absolute favorite arcade I used to frequent would have to be the western themed Nickel Ranch back in the late 90s, which you could only find in the Lakewood area of Dallas, Texas.
I miss it so dearly.
Great video. I really enjoyed it. I think one of the things unmentioned here with 'video games in other places' is that you did cover some Pizza spots and Restaurants, but you didn't really touch upon convenience stores, gas stations and laundromats. These machines were everywhere back then. Not just in the places you'd expect. Practically every convenience store had them, for example. They had small areas of the stores reserved for them and some of them actually installed tables and chairs close by to get people to hang out. (Mostly teenagers, for sure.) They even advertised on the outside of these stores. I remember reading an advertising sign posted in a window back then: "Play Video Games at Quiktrip." This was a profitable revenue stream for these places in those days. Thanks for the video.
Yes - they were even in the porn shops! Lol😂
The Aladdin's Castle in my hometown mall circa 1994 was absolutely the stereotype complete with movie theater lighting, loud purple carpeting, and no windows. I'm positive the branding was an attempt to compete with a local venue called Fun Land. Look up images of Fun Land in Fredericksburg VA, they haven't updated the look in 30 years right down to its black lighting and glow-in-the-dark carpet.
@@retroinspect same in Kalamazoo but I could have sworn the competition was called funcoland. I'm going to have to Google fun land now .
Oh hey, a local! I played and later worked at that Aladdin's Castle. Small world.
@ neat. If you’re still local check reclaim arcade on rt 3. Classic barcade setup with an 80s living room lounge.
Bally's Great Escape in So. Cal as well. As well as many others minus the patterned carpet. It's just too bad we didn't have digital cameras back then. I just keep seeing the same old pictures of 80's arcades online when there should be thousands.
This is why I find Vaporwave and the movements that spawned from it so fascinating. It's interesting to see an aesthetic based intentionally on a hyper-reality that never existed, something that's so divorced from the things that it was cribbing from it that it circles back around to being a timeless thing.
I suppose. Just felt different for someone like me who lived through it.
Vaporwave - more 80’s than the 80’s ever was, by people who think retro stuff is so cool, but don’t even own a VCR
As someone who lived through the era of 90s arcades, I never felt a dissonance with media presentations of arcades. In fact, the carpet you mentioned was exactly the kind of carpet at the arcade room in a movie theater at my old hometown, and was the look that a laser tag place cultivated. I appreciate the hyperreality because it feels like a bunch of memories melding together to form an archetype, rather than das ding an Sich.
Of course, I also really appreciate photos of actual arcades in operation! It's good to have both realistic and real-world depictions as well as the abstract recreations born of fuzzy memories.
I will say, as someone aspiring to be an architect since early childhood, the theming/designs for a majority of amusement centers from the 80's/90's (most notably Time Out, Station Break, Space Port, Atari Video Adventure at Marriott’s Great America, and even Chuck E. Cheese early on), hell, I would go as far as to note other entertainment venues like movie theaters where those influences were apparent, are really eye-poppingly expressive and imaginative in terms of aesthetic that I'd definitely strive for if there are plans to open any new facilities, just to put my own twists onto them for a fresher look that would require some careful planning.
On top of that, this is a pretty informative video regarding the history of arcades/amusement centers, from how they've evolved over time, the spiking popularity, right down to the aesthetic influences in the entertainment world, to the point where the dark neon lighting/galactic design (known as Arcadecore) would become the common interpretation of a typical arcade among many people and various media. But a funny thing to point about this is at a small city where I used to reside as a kid, there was a local amusement center (which is no longer in business, sadly) inside a shopping mall attached to a nightclub that consisted of retro arcade machines and billiards. It was a loud place, but unlike what many describes a typical retro arcade with all those bright neon lights everywhere, it felt like a dungeon with very few lights aside from the machines, due to the fact it was in the downstairs underground.
I really enjoyed this documentary. Very nicely researched and put together! I lived through mid 80's Arcades, and still play a lot of these classic Arcade games to this day. Good times!
We used to go to Dream Machine in Massachusetts in the early 80s. Very dark and black lit in sections. Neon carpet. I remember my mother bringing me to see a new game that came out called “Pac-Man”.
Also in our area, we had The Silver Ball arcade which didn’t have much of the neon stuff going on. It was pretty industrial looking, actually.
I think the takeaway here is the neon lit arcades are the ones that stood out as the ultimate in 80s arcade look and feel, so it became the preferred style to go with for nostalgia.
Fyi, there’s an arcade in Hanover Pa called “Timeline Arcade” and they styled a fair amount of the place after Time out, even down to the whole tunnel being present.
I've really got to make a trip down there--I work in Lancaster, so it's only around an hour away.
@ I went there a bit ago, a lot of the pinball machines had issues but apparently they’ve really come around. A whole bunch of new machines and they’ve fixed quite a bit of stuff. Hopefully I’ll be able to make a trip out again.
Maybe it’s a matter of region, but what’s being said here isn’t true for at least part of the country. Post-85, local, independent arcades did absolutely look like that, at least in the regions I had access to as a kid.
This is talking entirely about mall and chain arcades, which weren’t really considered the cool arcades, at least not around here. The “real” arcades were shady and seedy and pitch black inside most of the time, except for the largely muddled black light carpets and wall paper. The idea anyone enforced any kind of smoking policy is laughable.
There were three in or around my area in the Midwest, with others I had seen in other states. There’s no way any mall run by a sane person would have allowed one of those independent arcades be attached to it. They were always in junky old buildings or run-down plazas.
Two had “video parlor” as part of their name, which added to the carney seediness of the experience.
Part of the appeal of going to the independent, seedier arcades was the fact that you were utterly unsupervised. If you had older brothers or sisters, you just didn’t go to the family/chain arcades when you could help it.
I remember having to leave the one just called “Arcade” once because some older people were going around demanding quarters from younger kids. My older brother decided it was best just to leave.
Granted, the period of time I’m talking about was the mid to late 80’s, not during the boom period, and I only had experience with a few regions in the US, but to say the depiction is “inaccurate” is at least in part not itself accurate.
I would compare this take to someone from the future claiming that towny bars never existed because bars looked like “this,” which is a series of images of TGIFridays and Harry Buffalo.
Dark, gross, neon arcades definitely existed, at least in a few areas, and they were often the ones you actually wanted to go to as a kid. You only settled for mall arcades out of necessity.
Great Video but I do disagree with you and your definition of what a Arcade was in the 80's. Having grown in those years and having worked at several arcades I can tell you that what you claim to not be real, actually really was and awesome!
Agree. I was an 80s teen!
I used to work at a Time Out in the 90s, and all of the familiar names (Space Port, Aladdin's Castle) were all owned by the same company (Edison Brothers).
Then Namco (who owned the Cybertainment arcades) bought all of the Edison Brothers owned stores, and then they all went out of business in the very late 90s.
Great video. When I was a kid in the late 80s/early 90s I remember the existence of arcade like places where you could “rent” NES games and play them on special TVs they had set up. When you got game over the game turned off. Does anyone remember this?
That sounds similar to a Playchoice 10 but I'm not sure if that's what you're referring to
This is a great vid! Good taste in music as well. I look forward to watching more of your stuff
I used to love going to arcades ( and still do) in general but I used to really love going to space port arcades in the 70s and 80s because of the way they looked, I spent a majority of my time ( and money) in arcades back then and they were some of the happiest times of my life
There were many arcades in the Northeast US anyway that looked exactly like you are trying to disprove. Dream Machine, Aladdin’s Castle, Fun and Games all had the neon/blacklight decor and in fact competed to outdo each other in that regard. I think it depends strongly where you lived during those times. This video does not fully represent how all arcades looked back then.
The carpet pattern at 9:26 is STILL in the bowling ally (in certain sections) in my hometown & to be honest, i think it's been there since the 1980s
Nice exploration into the popular chain arcades and some rare photographs I have never seen before. Great to see the years the arcades where around too as I was not aware of much of this info and that some had survived as long as they did.
a couple things I remember from the 80's, i was born in 78, so our "technology" was arcades, atari, colecovision, and then Nintendo/Sega, these were our "iPhone" equivelents. Every person I knew was obsessed with NES at some point, it was an epidemic. Also, Spaceport did have that neon carpet that reacted to blacklight, Aladdins castle was more well lit, and there were "funzone's" that were brightly lit and featured miniture golf alongside arcade machines. But every resturant also had a "mini arcade". Even 7 eleven had at a bare minimum 1 or 2 stand up arcade games, while some would have a tiny room with half a dozen games, and I remember spending a lot of time at the 7 eleven playing street fighter 2 and the first time I played SMB3 was at the 7 eleven 2 blocks from my house on a "playchoice" machine. The fuddruckers had a dedicated arcade, Pizza hut always had a sit down pole position game, every time I hear the music it reminds me of the smell and taste of pizza hut panned pizzas! Everywere was an arcade for a while, it was very profitiable, the same way payphones were everywere and profitable.
I remember 2 arcades I went to in the late 80s and one in the 90s. My home town arcade in a strip mall. It had black carpeted floors and tons of cabinets against the walls and a middle section filled with cabinets. The bigger games like Afterburner were in the front so they could be seen through the window. There was a huge arcade in Old Orchard Beach in Maine they I got to go to once a year. It was kind of brightly lit for an arcade and had white tile floor. It had all the ticket games that my home town one didn’t have. I looked forward to going there every year. The one from the 90s was in a mall. It was smaller than the other two but was packed with games. I remember getting beaten in Mortal Kombat 2 there a lot. It did exist in the 80s as well but I remember it better in the 90s. It was brightly lit with white tile floors. I also have random arcade memories of attendants with change belts on. You’d give them your dollar and they press their button and give you your 4 quarters.
yet another banger, i really love how your channel has picked up momentum, it really deserves it with the high effort you put into the vids mate.
In the 90s the Tilt arcade at the Meadowbrook mall had those carpets (with rocket ships) with a black light at some point so its not entirely inaccurate to say some arcades did look like that to a degree, just not in the 80s.
Of the 80's arcades I grew up going to, 2 were called Starcade and did have a neon space theme. The other 2 were Golf N Stuff and Gold Mine. I really value growing up in that time and having access to a lot of the best arcade machine throughout the 80's, 90's and 2000's. Having to venture out of the house to play the video games was half the fun as well. Not only that liquor stores, bowling alleys, pizza places and laundry mats all had games too. What a time to be alive.
It’s not just the skating rinks and movie theaters that had the neon and spacy type of aesthetic, i distinctly remember my local bowling alley in the ‘00s and early ‘10s still having it’s space themed walls and neon bowling pin carpet. The arcade there was wicked small with most games being ticket redemptions, the billiards room next to it definitely took up more real estate. If anything, the bowling alley was the hangout spot when i was growing up
Fantastic video as ever! As someone born in the mid 90s, a lot of my arcade nostalgia comes from heavily themed restaurants and local bowling alleys that just so happen to have arcade games alongside those blacklight "popping" carpets. Although I wasn't a child of the 70s/80s, and my view of arcade games comes from a much later time, to me, an arcade is exactly what a stereotypical falsified memory of an arcade nowadays looks like.
Part of me hopes the youth begins to find enjoyment in heavily themed areas and arcades again. In this age of minimalism across every corporate entity, it's nice to see some oversized props, bright colors, and interestingly designed carpets. One can only hope the age of maximalism returns, and life can look lively again!
Another great video, legit feel a little gaslit by some of the films and sows that depecited arcades the way they do when they had so many unique and interesting designs and theming.
Thank you for this! This reminded me of my hometown arcade called Fun & Games in MA which had a Spaceport theme in the 80s. I looked them up and they’re still in business going strong 👾
From the dingy, seedy looking small arcades to the big colorful ones; I loved them all. And I appreciate the footage
No way, this video goes up after I coincidentally do a google search for 80s arcades hours earlier for a thread I was writing? Wooow, lol. Cool video once more!
I don't remember arcades being themed at all in my country, just sparsely decorated with the brand's colors if they were part of a larger chain. They were either targeted to kids and as a consequence brightly lit places or dingy dark spaces aimed at teens, I can clearly remember these two arcades downtown in my city and how their vibe was drastically different because of their target audience despite the fact that they mostly had the same type of games.
BTW the arcade I usually went to as a child in the 90's ended up closing before the turn of the millennium and a few years later got turned into a casino, the irony wasn't lost on most people.
What's even stupider is seeing arcades in modern cartoons and TV Shows that characters walk a few blocks to reach, when they basically don't exist locally anymore.
Wow someone did their research very well done. Seeing this really brings back the moments the memories of being and seeing a lot of these environments. Thnx 4 posting 👍 and thnx 4 reminding me how old I am 😂
Um it really did depend. My area did not have a big corporate arcade like Time Out. Mine was a crusty hole in the wall that smelled like stale cigarette smoke, did have some neon signs and black lighting, no fun pattern carpet, very dim overhead lighting. It was kinda scummy but us 7 year olds were dropped off there for hours at a time anyway. We put money directly in the machines, which was not allowed in the big chain arcades. This would’ve been an indie arcade from the 70s; was gone by 1996. If you look up Fun Spot in Laconia NH their third floor arcade, while bigger than any I knew as a child, retains a bit of the scummy casino vibe of many smaller locations from the arcade game boom. I was born in 1985 btw.
If you were born in 1985 you're referring to an arcade in the 90s. This video focuses on arcades from the early 80a.
@ understood my point was that this arcade was from the late 70s arcade boom era. The mall it was in opened in 1973 and the arcade as best I can tell opened a few years later (I’ve done my best to pinpoint it through local newspapers/business filings). Your video focuses on the big well documented chain arcades that dominated the West Coast. I just wanted to point out that plenty of us played in unsavory shitholes that we’re not as well documented. It wasn’t uncommon for game arcades to still be split between pool tables and video games. There’s a reason people didn’t like these places.
I’m a cultural historian and why it’s important for me to split this hair is because the “80s arcade” we depict in modernity is a composite of the entirety of the arcade era, and to me that’s way more interesting. In the same way that no 50s diner had all in one place greasers and turquoise Formica and chrome and a juke box, we choose to remember these places as a Disneyland “best version” of themselves.
@Foxxy999 You make a lot of great points! I tried to showcase a little of the hole in the wall arcades by showing off Michael's Game Room and The Boardwalk but it's hard to talk much about them and have something to back you up when, as you said, they're undocumented. Your analogy with diners works pretty well. Both are just kinds of places, and those places come in small and cheap or big and expensive sizes.
I was born in 85 so I barley caught the tail end of Arcades but damn I remember it being magical to be a lil kid with some quarters. The older kids smoking out front and the dark lit interior where kids could go and hang out.
In the arcade Tilt, which was in the Governor’s Square Mall in Tallahassee, I can guarantee that in the 1980s and 1990s, it looked like the pictures you pulled up for 1980s arcade (neon lights, carpet, black lights). However it’s not the default baseline for how arcades looked (as I’ve been to multiple arcades over the years including in my youth).
There were even Timeout arcade locations opened in Australia in the 1980s with one located on Station Street in Box Hill’s central shopping district near the shopping centre and train station which is a suburb in Melbourne! That location continued to exist as a privately owned arcade after Timeout’s bankruptcy only to then permanently close in 2016-2017 and by 2018 it had been subdivided into two smaller shop units which are both Chinese businesses as Box Hill’s current dominant demographic is Chinese! The arcade also had a cool painted mural sign that covered the whole first floor wall above the arcade but that was most recently painted over with red paint.
The Starcade in Disneyland also was renovated multiple times over its existence with games regularly being replaced with newer ones until it permanently closed in the late 2000s! It remained abandoned for quite some time while being used for storing pieces of old closed down attractions until it reopened more recently as a gift shop.
Great video🎉 I love seeing this stuff . I was born in 81 so most of my time in arcades was in the 90’s but growing up in Silicon Valley CA I was lucky to be around the “original” chunky cheese. I also had an Aladdin’s and a Tilt. But my main arcade was a place called Golfland .
My suburban New England town of 40,000 had three arcades in the 80s heyday, and countless other places to play arcade video games: bars, restaurants, entryways of supermarkets and department stores, gas stations, convenience stores, laundromats. The arcades were all mom and pop places, very plain (as you put it in one comment, barebones indie arcades). These types of places are where 90% of us played our games, not (for the most part) in the glossy “professional” looking arcades and chain arcades depicted in this very good but slightly misleading video.
Damn, I didn't realize anybody actually, honestly believed arcades looked like that... I mean, the whole neon light nightclub look is, like, a cartoonishly stereotypical late 80s, 90s look. It's like imagining every single car and piece of furniture in the 70s having wood paneling... I guess I underestimated the power of stereotypes, especially for people who just don't know much about history...
It's always been like this. You say twenties, fourties, fifties, sixties, seventies, etc, and 80's/90's kids absolutely had stereotypes about what those looked like.
I'm 16 and the stereotype of the 80's I have is that everything looked browner
Exept for people
@gabriel9116jyep, same with the 2000s; just browner and hopefully depressing
Bro I lived it. The 80s did look like that and the 70s did look like all wood grain. You arent being lied to.
@@gulfofmexico1569 I was born in '75. I saw plenty of 70's in the 80's. Not everyone could afford the shiny and new.
Arcades are always fun. I'd play whatever I found interesting and or wasn't being used/hogged.
The 2 malls near me in the 80s had Aladdin Castles. They were dark, dirty, crammed full of machines and earlier in the 80s didn’t have neon colored carpet but did have busy patterned carpet. They were also full of kids loitering around. By the time I was leaving high school which would have been 87 they were already dying. One was remodeled around this time I assume in an attempt to revive it. By remodeled I mean the walls got a dash of paint, the carpet was replaced with more brightly colored patterned carpet as seen in what you classify as inauthentic representations of 80s arcades and the lights were turned up.
Aw, I always love when someone can find some old pics of Disneyland arcade--I grew up in the country, so we didn't have many options for playing arcade games outside of our local pizza parlor, so the first time I went with my school to Disneyland, I kind of overdid it at Starcade (back when it was on two floors, and the People Mover went through it--it got progressively smaller and more sad over the years until finally closing (though the sign is still there)).
Pretty amazing to be reminded that the issue of kids not having places to hang out isn't a modern issue, but has been going on pretty much since child labor laws were put into effect!
I remember this neon arcade theme being super popular in 00s at least when I was a kid… I can tell you that much. My mall had an arcade that fit this aesthetic. I tried looking around the internet to see if it was archived by anyone but I’ve yet to find it…
I spent SO much time in Aladdin's Castle in Altoona, PA during the 1980s.
Ground Kontrol is an amazing arcade in Portland, OR that deliberately went with this faux-retro 80s aesthetic. But yes, my memories of arcades and "fun centers" in the 90s (wasn't around in the 80s) was certainly more of what you've got here. Rainbow paint jobs, sports theming, lots of earth tones.
When I think of the dominant aesthetic of what I saw and visited - which admittedly is more 90's than 80's - it tends to be the arcades attached to minigolf, go-karts, amusement parks, etc. eg. the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk or Golfland in CA. The Boardwalk is a bit exceptional(family business that is upwards of a century old now) but many of those locations were developed in the 70's within that particular amusement boom. The interiors often got updated some time into the 90's, but the exteriors would remain the same till demolition. And the pinball machines were always a major part of the look of those places, which tends to be overlooked in the modern treatments that are all video.
Another aesthetic from outside the amusement center business was the colleges that had an arcade business on campus. Those would be somewhere between cafeteria and pool hall aesthetics - usually wedged somewhere in the innards of a brutalist concrete slab like the SFSU student union building, which to this day has "Rack 'n Cue", a pool hall arcade that keeps the games in full sight of everyone eating lunch, behind glass windows.
I may have stepped foot in a CEC or Time Out a few times but it just wasn't what I saw, where I was.
Something else that comes to mind is that the dark moody aesthetic was big within restaurants generally in the early 80's. Places like Round Table Pizza really owned that aesthetic. The big shift in location-based aesthetics follows with the fashion trends going from dark and earth tones to pastel and neon midway through the decade(as evidenced in, e.g., Miami Vice in its different seasons or the look of music videos). The later part of the 80's had the Memphis-Milano influences, the early CGI, all of that: it presented exuberance and a family-friendly image rather than a restrained, adult one. By the early 90's that fashion went into an over-the-top phase before the more characteristically 90's trends took hold, and the synthwave look tends to use that last phase as the jumping off point.
Oh, queso!
I really enjoy visiting "pinball museums", I think the oldest pinball machine I've gotten to personally play was one from around the 50's, the scoreboard was a physical mechanism as opposed to an electronic/LED display
I think we also need to consider the impact of Synthwave. It's caused us to look back at the 80s as one singular, neon aesthetic. It's almost impossible to google actual 80s aesthetics as a result. Another name for Synthwave is Outrun and that's no coincidence. It was only natural that 80s synths would be equated to chiptunes.
Such a scam genre, full of “retro aesthetic” dweebs trying to imitate something that never happened, producing all the music on ableton plugins, while thumbing through Netflix rather than watching VHS . For shame.
Believe me, I understand the need to combat revisionist history, but as a frequent habitué of video-game arcades in the 1980s I can attest that most of them did indeed have the glowing fluorescent carpeting and neon squiggle art and the rest of these trappings. Not all places, but way more common than what's inferred here. The region I was in [So. California] may have had something to do with my experience.
Correct
I grew up in Indianapolis and remember Aladdin's Castle at several malls, Times Square at Glendale Center, Porky's Place on 116th Street in Carmel, and Jungle Jim's at Keystone Square Mall, also on 116th Street in Carmel. Union Station had an upper mezzanine full of video games, as did Circle Center Mall. Space Port reminds me of the McDonald's at Greenwood Park Mall, which at one point showed various eras with 200s in the front long before 2000 had occurred. they had old-time cash registers as you moved to the back, with the idea that you were traveling backward in time. I didn't get a very good look at it because I was there only once. Later on it was modified to look like a typical McDonald's.
I miss arcades. Those games hit different.
Central Park in Los Altos, California. I went there all the time. It expanded twice. In fact it was big for something that wasn’t Time Zone/Aladdin’s Castle. One aspect of Central Park was that they got a lot of obscure games in addition to the big hits. It was even a testing ground for Atari games before they got officially released, if at all. The arcade closed around 1984/85. Apparently there was a drug bust there, but it could have been a rumor.
You got me to click on this video because of the Casa Bonita coin.
Love this stuff, 10/10 video.
Thanks for making this.
My hometown had a Funland when I was little. I only saw those carpets once IRL and that was at a Discovery Zone in the mid-90s.
The stereotypical '80s arcade that we see now certainly wasn't the norm back then, but it wasn't unheard of. Arcades were like holy sites to me growing up in the late '70s and '80s, and while most of them didn't have the neon, blacklight, and fluorescent carpet look that's almost universally portrayed today, it wasn't unheard of and I still love that look. It somehow captures the "feel" of the places back then.
As an aside, I'd never heard of Space Port before, but as a kid I dreamed of arcades looking like that. I would've lived at a place like that!
It might have been different in the US, But here in the UK most Arcades would smell of Cigarette Smoke. I even remember some Arcade Machines having Ash Trays attached to them. A lot people Smoked back then!
We didn't really get Arcades in Malls, But We often get a Arcades in Seaside Towns, Usally Along the Seafront.
Our bowling alley and skating rink arcades that were usually tucked off to the side or in the back smelled like cigarettes back in the day. I vaguely remember the ashtrays on the cabinets
My arcade was space port. We had 2 of them near me. It was dark with no neon carpet. I appreciate this video for calling this out. I have also noticed that if you search for 80s arcade, the pictures of that neon carpet come up. I never saw that until the 90s. By then the arcades had changed . They seemed aimed toward young kids. I would go to chuck e cheese in 83-84 and it was great. It was dark and they had all the latest games and tons of them. It had a night club feel. It was exciting . By around 87-88 chuck e cheese is what it is today , bright , not too many games , ball pits , ticket redemption etc.. The magic was gone.
For those that weren't there, this video corrects the falsification of history . Look at the pics in the video thats how it was .
Space Port!! Spent a large part of my 80s childhood there, Pembroke Mall, Virginia Beach, VA 😎
This was such a good video damn
My local arcade in high school (Aladdin’s Castle), back in the 80’s, was a dark place. Brown or orange carpet, black walls with some wood paneling and games wall to wall with the change machines. Nothing else, no posters, no neon, nothing, just games and it was great!
Our skating rink had that fun time space carpet and a arcade in the back. But when i think arcade i think of that white tile floor with red, blue and yellow blocks.
excellent video! yeah the carpet thing seemed to always be more associated with the combo arcade/bowling alleys to me. my all time favorite arcade had to have been sam's town out here in california! and it definitely did NOT feature the neon carpet. it was more themed after a wild west town like you'd see in those old spaghetti westerns, sawdust and straw all over the floors, even extending into the massive arcade!
just rows of arcade and pinball games (including 50'' big screen versions of SF2 turbo, something I don't think I've ever seen since then!) and so many pinball machines, too. plus a small gift shop where you could get al kinds of fun penny candy, and a separate area with big screen tvs where you could eat food and drink beer, and watch all kinds of sports. so definitely not the stereotypical 'arcade' like you'd see in popular media these days.
Excellent video as always!
As someone who was a gamer in the 1980s, it certainly made me go "wtf?.." when I realized how younger people these days thought it was like back then. I'm not saying that whole "synthwave/retrowave" neon look is bad or anything... on the contrary... it looks cool. Although it definitely was not like that in most places back in the 80s, or even the 90s for that matter.
It was, to a degree.
I have MatPatify (which overlays Game Theory-style text over YT video thumbnails for those unaware) and it can't be a coincidence it overlaid "OUT OF TIME" onto the thumbnail
I guess I was one of the unlucky ones. Every arcade I ever went to was smoky, dingy, usually reeked of beer. Some were well lit, with florescent lights overhead, but I don't remember any "black light and neon carpets" anytime before the late 90s/early 2000s.
The aladdins castle at 6:44 is at the miller hill mall in Duluth, MN. I think it closed 2002ish. The restaurant to the right is Sbarro
Modern arcades try to look like that at least in my experience. Those places are overwhelming but the fun kind
The stereotypical look of arcades _is_ what I recall, but not from the 80s - that was more a mid-90s thing. Could also be regional.
This is almost complete bullshit, yes some of the images of the 80s arcade is romanticized due to false memories, but I can tell you I've been in hundreds of arcades over my entire 48 year life, and in the late 80s to mid 90s they looked exactly like you're trying to prove they didn't
Yep. The creator is misinformed.
“But it isn’t real”
42 year old me: “Uh…yeah it is”
Maybe it was a regional thing, idk, but in Los Angeles, the two biggest arcades I went to, Sherman Oaks Castle and all the way to the UCLA arcade in the mid to late 90s had that aesthetic
The Arcades in the 80s were dark, in 90s did have neon carpets and lights, good times.
Back in the 80s, our local arcade was called Galaxy. It was in the food court at the Christiana Mall, and I remember it just being an empty shop that had been painted totally black inside then stuffed with machines. I don't remember any theming or wall art or anything like that at all.
Yup - and it's because of the boom people were putting cabinets everywhere. Your 7-11, your kmart, your old bookstore, etc. Decor was usually minimal except for the big corporate chains. But blacked out windows, dark, the sound... very common
3:42
Zone Bowling currently has similar styling to this but with modern features in their new or more recently renovated bowling alleys! :)
During arcade booms, one could just add cabinets anyehere as an extra source of money, so the theme - most often none - would depend on where they would add those machines. First, the Space Invaders boom, followed by the Pacman one. Then fast-forward a few years, Double Dragon-Final Fight, followed by Street Fighter II.
There is always conflict between what we remember and what was commonplace, because it is human nature to remember what stands out and what makes the strongest emotional impression. But it doesn't mean those memories are false, just that they might not represent the full picture.
I loved the vibe of 80s-90s and even 2000s aah arcades. I grew up with the 90s ver. of Chuck E. Cheese's which is known as phase 3 and I have fond memories about it.
My town had a arcade up until last year when the economy hurt small businesses and took the last entertainment spot from the area.
This is a great video. Very well researched. I do think it's important to stress that some of these arcades did end up looking like their movie incarnations eventually. Back in the early 90's, we had an Aladdin's Castle at our mall. It was just a dark room with neon and colorful carpet. It retained that look when it became a Time Out, but with an added Namco theme. The influence from movie theaters and skating rinks had bled over.
Also, what is the homebrew arcade that you show at the 10:00 mark? I used to follow the guy that made that one, but I've forgotten what it's called.
That was Peter Hirschberg's Luna City
Meaning they were essentially wrong.
*Many supermarkets and 7-11s and Wawas had 1-4 arcade machines right next to the entrance door (at least in New York/New Jersey)*
Many times a plain clothes police officers was station next to the door to keep the kids inline.
Some kids smoked! They would place their cigarettes on the 1u/2up buttons as they played, so if you see melted plastic there, its because of that!
I grew up at this time, and even worked in an Aladdin's Castle. Some arcades DID have that look, though.