Even for really old stuff like Space Harrier the feeling of moving along with the screen gives you a more visceral experience than almost any VR setup. Hard to fake the effects of gravity!
[0] has a list (in japanese) of moving arcade machines. Mikado in Takadanobaba has some of these. These things are getting older and older of course so the window of opportunity is unfortunately shrinking as time goes on.
(EDIT: just realised that list itself is over 10 years old at this point so YMMV)
The best arcade games sell did this - it doesn’t take much - like the pedal for time crisis. Sure you _can_ buy one at home but most people don’t and even then it’s a crap placid pedal.
It was like, $1 per game compared to $0.25 or $0.50 for a normal cabinet.
As a young person with limited income, it DEFINITELY mattered to me... I preferred to sacrifice a little bit of motion and enjoy 2x or 4x the playtime on something else. I mean realistically you'd be spending $20 an hour or more if you stuck to deluxe cabinets. At that point (according to my teenage mind) I was basically halfway to buying a home console game that I could keep forever.
Operators really should have priced those deluxe cabinets the same as regular games during off-peak hours.
I’ve seen a couple of bars open up that try to have an arcade as well but they never take care of the machines/drunk people break them, so after a few months half the games don’t even work. There’s only so many times I can lose a quarter or a dollar before I decide it’s not worth it anymore and I just go drink somewhere else with friends.
The only real arcade left in my city is attached to a laser tag, it would be super weird for a bunch of grown men in their 30s and 40s to roll up during kids’ birthday parties they weren’t invited to lol
WHAAAAAAAAAT
Seriously insane levels of money-no-object zero-fucks-given design.
Anyway, Mikado in Ikebukuro has the standard F-Zero AX cabinet, and it is great. I have never visited their game center in Takadanobaba though, it is still in my TODO list...
From there, Nintendo relied on gimmicks and corporate mascots/IP.
I guess sega was a few years ahead of them on their own timeline.
I’m not sure how successful it was, it was outsold by Xbox and PS2. Although the Xbox was a massive money pit for Microsoft. At least in Europe the Gamecube began to disappear from retail a fair bit before the Wii was out as well. Still, got things like a Wavebird for cheap on clearance though…
I think you're underselling the role of their game design expertise. They figured out that there's more to games than high fidelity graphics, a concept which has somehow alluded most AAA game studios.
It was a pretty great console, in its own way.
But thanks to the community, after reflashing it with Gekkoboot it can load Swiss from a SP2SD2, and from there load ROMs from the SD card! Reflashing the modchip was a pain in the ass though, the programmer required a parallel port and the software only runs on Windows XP, but in the end it worked and I am pretty happy with the results.
Must have taken a heckin' amount of work!
Sometimes, this overlap was quite profound but not 100%. NeoGeo home consoles famously use the same hardware and software as their arcade counterparts, but the game cartridges were not pin-compatible. The Nintendo VS line were technically the same as a Famicom/NES, but not the same build; the software has subtle differences. Perhaps the Nintendo PlayChoice would count but again, it's not like they used NES mainboards to build those.
So, the idea of taking a Nintendo console mainboard and grafting it to SEGA-designed components so it can run in a dedicated arcade cabinet, is just wild to me.
The Mega Drive derivated from the System 16, but was itself converted into an arcade system.
Titan-Video derivated from the Saturn, according to sources online.
NAOMI/NAOMI 2/Hikaru were derivated from the Dreamcast during development, and there is significant overlap in specs between them and the DC.
Chihiro derivated from the OG Xbox.
Perhaps as a result, we might see LLM and video model-powered games become mainstream in arcades before any home consumer platforms.
