You Don’t Want the Home-Arcade Hassle (Sync Magazine)
FIVE REASONS WHY OWNING A CLASSIC VIDEO GAME, LIKE LITTLE RICKY DID ON SILVER SPOONS, IS NOT WORTH IT. BY DAMON BROWN
1. You don’t have the space The average arcade machine is 8 feet tall, 3 feet square at the base and weighs 250 pounds, while sit-down (cocktail) machines and deluxe four-player titles are considerably bigger and heavier. Also, classic coin-ops heat up quickly and need space to breathe. Not for the studio apartment, yo.
2. No, they ain’t cheap Everyone wants to own a Ms. Pac-Man, Frogger or Dig Dug machine. Sellers know this and gouge buyers on the most popular titles, which go for about $2,000 each. Lesser-known games cost half as much, but do you really want to shell out for Popeye or Tron?
3. Shipping is a doozy Buying an upright is one thing; getting it home is another. Expect to pay at least $200 to ship a system to your doorstep. But you could save some cash by picking up the machine at the local airport. Hope you drive a truck.
4. What money-back guarantee? Thanks to the demise of the local arcade, thousands of mom-and-pop shops are unloading coin-ops for cheap. But these machines usually don’t come with warranties. And good luck finding replacement parts for that monitor, joystick and backlit marquee.
5. Sky-high electric bills Arcade machines require loads of juice. Expect your electric bill to triple. Of course, you could always unplug the coin-op when it’s not in use, but that would delete your Defender high score.
May 30th, 2009 at 11:14 pm
Granted, it wasn’t Defender. But back in the 80s I played an arcade machine in the fish and chip shop in my home town, and can say for sure that it did remember the high scores through a power outage. Power goes out relatively often, and I think it would anger people if it erased their scores; luckily, the arcade machine makers thought of this a relatively long time ago.
But yeah. Why buy an upright when you can build one which uses MAME and thus runs LOADS of games. The only justification would be if it was some machine with an unusual console, like rhythm games.