Back to the Hearth: The Decline of Arcades

Back to the Hearth: The Decline of Arcades

Throughout the 1980s, a combination of economic and technological forces moved play away from social, communal and relatively anarchic early arcade spaces, and into the controlled environments of the sanitized mall arcade (or “family fun center”) or into the home. By the 1990s, the diverging trajectories of home and arcade sales were starkly evident. While home games flourished, arcades waned.

Figure D. Consoles and computers come to the home, 1977-2000 (% penetration).

For home games, the economic force at work was the Nintendo boom of the late 1980s (see below). The technological change was the reduced gap in performance between arcades and home games, which became obvious by the mid 1990s. Whereas the early arcade games offered vastly superior game play and graphics to their relatively low-powered home cousins, by the end of the decade many next-generation home units and PCs offered capabilities equal to arcade games. These two factors help explain the rise of the home game over the arcade, but they cannot account for all of it, especially the drop-off after 1987. In fact, there is one major question left unanswered—why did people leave arcades and stay away? If the demand for entertainment and video games never went away, why did arcades slowly but steadily drop off even before the second home boom? The answer is that game machines have lead the charge toward powerful and private digital technologies.

Games functioned as a stepping stone to the more complex and powerful world of home computers. Figure D shows the dual trends in adoption for home game systems and home computers. Notably, games preceded computers at every step of adoption, and have continued to be in more homes since their arrival. Gaming histories make the case that familiarity with home consoles lead to eventual comfort with PCs. Additionally, an early study of game players suggests that they enjoyed challenges and were generally more comfortable around computers than non-players (McClure & Mears, 1984). Another suggests a direct link between game use and computer literacy (Lin & Leper, 1987). Computer use has had a further effect on the location of game play; as computers became more and more common in homes, they offered even more opportunities to play games in private spaces. In studying the diffusion of the first wave of home computers, Rogers (1985) found that the most frequent function of the new machines was video game play, which accounted for nearly one-third of all the time spent on the machines.