The Verge has a fascinating (and long) read, “For Amusement Only: the life and death of the American arcade.”
“The crash of 1983 nearly killed off the entire video game industry. It wasn’t just arcades that suffered, though this marks the beginning of their very steep and permanent decline. History has told us that the rise of home gaming killed off arcades, and so our own laziness is to blame. To an extent, of course, that’s true. If this were a history of video games, it would be time to talk about Nintendo, and the epic release of the revolutionary NES console in 1985. This event reinvigorated a decimated industry, and ultimately gave birth to the video games ecosystem we all still live in. But that didn’t happen until 1985, and so it wasn’t technology that killed off the arcade, not to begin with. It’s fair to concede that the arcade, already dying, was allowed to stay dead because we were all happily gaming at home by the time anybody noticed that all of the actual arcades were disappearing, and fast.”
