Brick and Mortar Arcades: A Love Letter to What We Miss Most

What better way to celebrate #ThrowBackThursday?

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Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

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Don't buy the hype: The video game arcade isn't dead.

Scads of arcades are still scattered around the United States. The collector scene continues to thrive, so there's still a healthy market for buying and reselling cabinets. And yes, new titles are still being developed. Recently, Sega dropped a teaser trailer for a shooter called Transformers: Human Alliance, and Namco began testing an air combat game called Sonic Storm in Japan.

All this said, there's absolutely no denying that the era of the arcade as a dominant force in the video game industry has long passed. The arcade's true golden age, which lasted from roughly 1970 to 2000, yielded landmark after landmark. The arcade once erupted with innovative gaming, raking in billions of dollars in quarters and doing some serious heavy lifting in terms of promoting video games as a social, mainstream activity.

We're still bummed about the arcade era's end. This doesn't just stem from us getting all misty-eyed about the good memories, although nostalgia has its place, too. There were several genuinely great things about the arcade era that home consoles have yet to replicate to the same effect or haven't really tried to replicate. Here are the 10 casualties we miss most.

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The glory of cabinets.

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Deciding how much money you would spend.

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The opportunity for broke gamers to experience new games.

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Seeing this before your game started.

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Gaming was a social event.

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Opportunities to play against strangers in person.

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Hearing the clink of quarters and tokens.

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Getting to play pinball.

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The immeasurable unpredictability.

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Experiencing generations of gaming in one format.

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