Wife Like Me

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This is Colin. I am guest posting because I got something to say…

For as much as the video game industry has grown by leaps and bounds over the past 20 years, its growth has been inversely matched by the death of the full-size arcade industry. There are many reasons for this. First, there’s just so much more money in making PC and Xbox games, enough so that there’s not a line of kids clamouring to spend 25 cents ten times a day. The bread and butter of the industry has evolved into kids secretly studying moves and practicing button-combinations, so when they do go out in public they have rank and privilege. So many see the crash of the arcade game industry as being based on the quick and pointless burst of complexity required to survive such games. Game designers didn’t do their jobs with the early 90s fighting games, and they dropped back into the early 80s tricks of sloth–including that of making every level exactly the same, but arbitrarily faster or more difficult. Three weeks later all that was left were fighting games and driving games. Driving games could always attract the passers-by with flashy graphics and ease of play; and fighting games could always attract 12 year old boys.

But the arcade industry betrayed its bread-and-butter by ceasing to produce real games, and by real games, I mean… the side scroller. Oh, the joy, the youthfulness, the simplicity. Every game had a jump button and a fire button and that was it, and every game involved running around (or driving or flying or whatever) through a scrolling wallpaper world, jumping over various ditches, swinging on vines, and shooting things just because they were running the other way, and if they were running toward you, they were running away from the fortress where the princess was being kept. These games were the first wives of the industry, left for dead for flashier games that proved without substance or direction. And there is no more industry, as every pizza place and movie theater only has 10 year old games now… So, here’s to you, Pitfall, Moon Patrol, Commando, Double Dragon, and Super Mario Brothers.

Someone would still do well to put a bunch of XBoces (plural of XBox) and Playstations into full-size boxes and start charging quarters.