Where have all the arcades gone?

I remember a time when there was a video game arcade on just about every corner. It was a favorite past time of mine to go after school and spend countless hours playing the latest machines. If you new how to spend wisely you could easily make $5 last a long time and my parents liked it because it would keep me out of their hair for a while. Something happened over the years, though. Arcades have closed down and shrunk to a bare shell of what they used to be. In my old hometown, all my old favorite arcades are gone except one and it is barely surviving. The arcade industry is truly on its last leg. The blame of the decline of the arcade industry could be put in several places. There is the fact that it got diluted with a few to many cheap fighting games, many of which where a joke and not even worth the twenty-five cents they cost. There is also the rise of large event games that could cost in the upwards of a dollar per play and usually last for less than a minute of play time. These mammoth games would attract people by their gimmicks but more times than not leave them with a sour taste in their mouth when they were finished. Both of these factors couldn't have helped any, but I place most of the blame somewhere else. I place the blame on the rise of the console system into the powerhouse it has become today. There was a time when arcade games vastly outshined their little cousins: the consoles. You couldn't get anywhere near the graphics and experience on a home system that was possible on the higher end arcade machines. That time has changed through. The launch of the Playstation 2 marked the first time in history that not only did a home system have the power to match the top arcade games, at the time of its release, in the world, it also in some ways outshined it. The reasons to go to an arcade have all but vanished as you can usually wait a couple months for the home port to come out and play it all you want in its full glory. Many gamers have chosen the comfort of their own homes to the dirty environments that are most arcades. With the online play that the Dreamcast brought into the world they no longer even had to sacrifice having a bad opponent around to play. The video game arcade industry simply lost its competitive advantage and as of such has suffered greatly. This is all not to say there is not hope for the arcade industry, but the outlook is not pretty. With most arcade developers looking to use home console hardware for their games, the chance of them looking fundamentally better has all but washed away. The revenue is simply no longer there for developers to spend the huge amounts on R&D that they used to. It is going to take something special to bring the masses back to the arcades. Developers have got to keep machine prices down. No more $1 a shot games. They need to be more creative and provide arcades with games that cannot be played properly at home. Silent Scope and its sequels are a good example of this. While there has been home ports, none of them have come close to matching the feel of using the arcade unit's built-in sniper rifle. Finally, arcade developers have got to once again take the technological lead and provide games that truly outshine in all ways what is possible on consoles available at that time. If they do this, the people will come. Let's hope something along these lines happen soon, because I, for one, miss the golden days of the arcade.