The Arcade, Reissued March 2, 2012

With the recent resurgence of the very early classic arcade games from the 70s and 80s like Donkey Kong, Dragon’s Lair, Joust and others, a lot of players from that generation should be quite pleased to find pretty accurate versions of these arcade games available to them in a variety of platforms ranging from the PC to their phones. This has been a fantastic development, as it means that so many of these games which required huge arcade cabinets which had to be purchased, housed and transported can have a much cheaper equivalent version made available to their die-hard fans as well as a new generation of gamers.

However, I’m not a product of that generation. I grew up in the 90s, well, that is to say, I mostly grew up in the 90s. In those days the arcades were getting a major resurgence after the revival of the home video game platforms like the Nintendo Entertainment System. The arcades, which originally started to go south following the gaming crash of 1983, started to regain ground and a new generation of arcade games, with superior graphics to what was achievable with home consoles were being released. Games like Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and The Simpsons sucked plenty of quarters out of my pocket back then.

To compete with the home consoles the arcades had to be several steps ahead of them. They needed to be capable of things that the home consoles just couldn’t do, or else they would never be able to compete with them. I can think of two major steps that they took to accomplish this. First off, they had better hardware, capable of making games with higher fidelity graphics. Even if a home version of the game could be made, they wouldn’t look anywhere near as good on the console’s of the time. The other thing some of the later arcade games did, especially by the second half of the decade, was make the games more immersive, either by creating larger fully enclosed cabinets, or games with bigger custom screens. When I was vacationing in Vegas fifteen years ago there was a major interest in Virtual Reality, and there were arcade games provided that had fully gyroscopic cockpits. Oh I miss those.

While there was plenty of attempts to get those games on home platforms back when they were in their heyday, in fact there was certainly some success towards it during the 16-bit generation, there were plenty of games that never saw home console releases that met the quality or feel of the original arcade version. Others never saw a home port at all. It may have been that the home consoles just didn’t have the hardware on par with what the arcades at the time could produce, but you can’t imagine how disappointed I was in so many home games that claimed to be ports of the arcade version turning out awful with problems ranging from bad controls, extreme difficulty, to insufficiant graphics and sound.

After an arcade port of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles hit Xbox Live Arcade, I was hopeful that a lot more of the games I played in the 90s on the arcades would make it to the platform. The digital marketplace has really become the best possible distribution channel for these arcade games. The games don’t take up a lot of storage space and can be launched at much lower prices than a retail disc game. Plenty of games would follow from all over the arcade catalog, but unfortunately I would still be waiting for some of my absolute favorites. Finally, The Simpsons got released, and twelve years after playing the game I have a copy of my own to play.

So, I beg you, can we get an HD-release of Area 51 now?