Aussie Arcades: Playing Into the Future

You can find a game arcade on just about every street corner in the neon playgrounds of Tokyo, Seoul, and Singapore, but in Australia, arcades have been going out of fashion since the early '90s. Only a handful of dedicated game arcades still remain in capital cities across the country, and with an increasing number of cabinets collecting dust in the corners of bowling alleys and movie theatres everywhere, the once-lucrative arcade amusement industry in Australia looks set to breathe its last breath.

Dreaming Big

Zak Athanasiadis played his first pinball machine at the age of 6, inside a low-lit arcade next to his father's fruit shop in the Latrobe Valley, east of Melbourne. He spent most of his early teens dropping coins inside Pac-Man and Space Invader machines before taking up computer programming in high school to learn how to make his own games. He studied computer science and applied physics at RMIT, hoping to one day join Australia's then-booming game development industry. And then, while bartending at a St. Kilda pub late on a Friday night in his early 20s, Zak had an epiphany.

"We had a few pinball machines in the pub, and the ball was always getting jammed on a Friday night because so many people played it. But the guy responsible for fixing the machines wouldn't come until Monday morning. So one night, I asked him to leave me the keys to the machine. I'd been hanging around arcades since I could walk, so I was pretty certain I could work out how to un-jam a ball. But he got angry at me because I was only 21 and thought I knew everything. He said to me: 'If you think it's that easy to run pinball machines, then why don't you buy your own?'"

So he did.

Zak has made a living from importing game arcade cabinets to Australia.

Zak now owns and runs Zax Amusements, the largest distributor of coin-operated video game arcade machines in Australia; he owns and runs about 800 machines in hotels, cinemas, bowling alleys, and dedicated arcades like Time Zone and Playtime across Melbourne. The company imports new and used machines from Japan, Taiwan, and China and also exports to the US and Europe.

When Zak first started the business, pinball was where it was at, but after spotting the very first Tekken arcade machine in an arcade in Melbourne in 1995, Zak scrounged together A$30,000 and bought 10 machines from Japan. He placed them in video stores, 7-Elevens, milk bars, and pubs around the city. His tenacity paid off: Tekken became a sensation, and Zak's business thrived.

"Because I was an active gamer, as I am today, every time I went to a trade show, I could tell what would sell and what wouldn't. It's very rare for me to assume something will make money and it doesn't. I know straight away."

Big Buck Hunter is a good example. According to Zak, it remains Australia's most popular arcade game, due in large part to the fact that unlike other arcade games, it's not achievement based: Every player is guaranteed the same game experience no matter how good they are. But with only two or three dedicated arcades like Time Zone and Galaxy World remaining in each capital city, old-school arcade games like Street Fighter, Tekken, Sega Rally, and Time Crisis are becoming increasingly harder to find.

"Arcades are no longer a destination business. No one wakes up and says: 'I'm going to go and play a driving game.' You could argue shooting games were popular up until a year or two ago, but now, you have the Wii and Kinect slowly edging those out."

Zak has changed his business accordingly, moving away from video game machines toward ticket redemption games like claw machines, basketball, and air hockey. In Zak's mind, this is the way of the future for Australia's once-thriving arcades.

"Sure, the occasional video game--a new fighting game, a new driving game, etc.--will make it into an arcade here and there, but it's the ticketed stuff that will keep arcades in Australia open. It's a different story in countries like Japan and Korea, where there is definitely an amusement centre culture. In Australia, however, our culture is to go to the pub and have a drink."

"I think that arcades in Australia have a dim future--the quality and availability of titles on consoles keeps improving. As soon as other factors start pulling players away, it doesn't fare well."This lack of certain ingrained cultural behaviors has been the biggest contributing factor to the decline of gaming arcades Australia wide. The Good Games Store (GGS) on Broadway in Sydney's CBD recently removed all of its arcade machines to make room for the more profitable non-electronic gaming side of the business: board games, card games, role-playing games, and tabletop miniatures games. GGS co-owner Scott Hunstad says the concept behind the store originally revolved around the potential for crossover between the gaming mediums. What ended up occurring is the opposite: The arcade players and tabletop players kept to their own areas of interest, and as business grew, Hunstad realized which area was the least profitable.

"Our business model focuses on player space and community interaction, and as such, more than half of our stores' floor spaces are devoted to game-playing areas," Hunstad says. "When we first started, we had a little more flexibility with our extra space and the arcade game machines were a good fit; we're now in a situation where every square meter counts and we just needed that space for our retail business to operate."

"I think that arcades in Australia have a dim future--the relative price of rent is always rising and the quality and availability of titles on consoles keeps improving. With any gaming community, you need that critical mass, and as soon as other factors start pulling players away, it doesn't fare well."

Arcades once represented a large part of Australia's urban culture in the 1980s and early '90s, with cities like Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, and Adelaide sporting as many as 10 arcades each in their heyday. Their popularity came from the ability to successfully re-create schoolyard conditions without the oppressive undertones: a place for young people of all ages to come together and exercise their competitive streaks in a fun, social environment.

According to RMIT media and technology lecturer Christian McCrea, the global decline of arcade culture past the mid-'90s was a direct result of a lack of new and interesting arcade machines, as well as a general overreliance on physical gimmicks inside arcades.

"In Australia, we experienced a huge wave of Americanization in the 1990s that was quite unlike what had happened before. This pulled people toward different uses of public space," McCrea says. "At the same time, Asian youth migration and children of second-generation Asian families were influencing arcades with highly popular Japanese games such as Dance Dance Revolution, ParaParaParadise. So by the late '90s, Australia's arcade scene was a mix of ethnicities, competitive Street Fighter and King of Fighters scenes, and dance and rhythm games."

Australia doesn't have the same kind of arcade culture as countries like Japan.

But ultimately, it all comes back to culture. Arcades are fundamentally about spending time with others in public, something McCrea says is increasingly counter to the Australian idea of leisure. Originally, arcades in Australia thrived near beaches, rivers and piers; these days, Australians have found different ways to spend their time together.

"The arcades that are surviving combine the delights of the mechanical age, the best social video games, and teenage photo booths. Places like Time Zone have largely shrunk to a miniature version of themselves, and the big commercial arcades, such as Galactic Circus in Melbourne, give a lot of their real estate to mechanical games, which date back to the '50s and '60s in design."