The arcade one particularly distressing given that arcades and their unique arcade hardware are rapidly vanishing across the world without replacement.
And the arcades that DO exist are often 90% shitty ticket games that cost $1, have about 15 seconds of gameplay, and then maybe after blowing through $50 you'll have enough tickets to buy $2 worth of Tootsie Rolls and maybe a balsa wood glider. If you got really lucky, maybe a plushie.
Though there are some "barcades" popping up these days that focus on classic arcade games to appeal to older the older crowd.
I happened across a nice one when I was in Denver, recently. It's called Akihabara. Tons of imported Japanese cabinets (including Taiko no Tatsujin and Typing of the Dead), and a bar with imported beers, sake and house cocktails. I wish I'd had a smartcard for saving progress, but it was only something I found out about during the trip.
I'm definitely more into the 90s and early 2000s era of arcade games than 80s stuff (and the seat-friendly JP cabinets are nice) so I enjoyed the opportunity to play games that are hard to find here, and bring back memories of wandering (relatively lackluster) bowling alley arcades with a pocket of quarters.
I understand that there is an entire culture surrounding these machines and that people enjoy collecting and restoring them. Hell, I would even like to build a cabinet myself one day.
But there's a reason they are disappearing. They're old and obsolete. While they may have value to a niche group, they are overall viewed as mostly worthless.
Secondly, there's a very simple solution to disliking what someone else does with their own property. Purchase it before they do whatever you dislike. Either from them or by beating them to the punch and buying it from the previous owner before they do.
> Secondly, there's a very simple solution to disliking what someone else does with their own property. Purchase it before they do whatever you dislike. Either from them or by beating them to the punch and buying it from the previous owner before they do
I think this kind of sums up why it was a bad ad.
"Don't be mad, you could have just outbid me" isn't a great thing to have to be saying at the same time you're asking the same person to get hyped about a new product.
The Gutenberg bible is also old and obsolete. The pyramids at Giza are old and obsolete. Stonehenge is old and obsolete. Ancient cave paintings are old and obsolete. The Wright brothers' flyer is old and obsolete.
Most of the reason that collectors have to spend a lot of money on arcade cabinets, though, is not that they have high market resale value; but rather that the machines they can manage to acquire are usually in terrible condition, requiring large amounts of conservation work to get working and presentable again. And they’re so broken down, because everyone but these few collectors have valued — and continue to value — these machines so little that they’ve allowed them to rot in warehouses for decades. Many arcade cabinets are recovered from e-waste recycling centers, or even landfill.
If they truly had market value, then people other than the collectors themselves would be making a business out of finding and restoring these cabinets, in order to sell them to the collectors. But no such business exists — because there just isn’t the demand to sustain it.
I’m reminded of a recent YouTube video about MadCatz gaming peripherals. The video’s author had to spend thousands of dollars buying the few remaining controllers on the used market to use as examples. Why so much? Not because of high demand. Because of limited supply — they were so valueless (mainly due to just being awful products even when new) that every owner of one had long thrown in away; no gaming store wanted to buy any used (being seen selling such brands was a mark against the quality of a store!); and even thrift stores had long dumped them for lack of interest. These gamepads and flight-sticks had value to this one guy making this one video — but literally nobody else.
A one-time purchase, does not a market-clearing price make. The market is still just as illiquid after such a purchase as before it.
> Why so much? Not because of high demand. Because of limited supply
Eh, "high demand" is meaningless on its own in this case. There's high demand relative to the supply.
And not everyone recognizes value in an old cabinet and throw theirs out (further reducing supply), but that just means the market isn't efficient, but that's true of the market for most things.
Your "solution" is so unrealistic for all but the very wealthiest people that it's on the verge of seeming disingenuous. My bank account would have to be quite a few orders of magnitude larger for me to be able to purchase even a fraction of all the things in the world I would like to preserve.
I was so angered by your opinion on relics being worthless that I checked your comments and you seem alright in other respects. I do like HN for this reason. So yeah I disagree with you this time but I’m not going to be rude
The console says “Space Imploder,” which isn’t a real arcade console, from what I can tell. There’s more discussion here[1], but it seems likely that a lot of the things weren’t real (or if they were real, they weren’t were junk that was broken beyond repair).
This seems to be a major point that’s missing from the discussion. If a lot of this is stuff that was fake or already headed for the dump, it completely undermines the argument that perfectly good equipment was destroyed.
The point isn't how it was produced, but what the message is. And the message is destruction of creative instruments is good, akshually, because shiny & thin.
No amount of "but we only rendered it" is going to fix it. It speaks about values the company holds.
Also, the focus on how these devices are increasingly consumer only instead of me being able to use my device to create
Disclaimer: one of my goals is to build apps for my machine on the machine itself. I had this working on the now defunct Firefox phone OS (Its apps were deployed as Zipped HTML/JS and related resources -- I cobbled together a dev environ out of a few browser based tools).
TL;DR: I'm a tool-using creator-type species, The modern "CONSUME ONLY" device craze makes my eye twitch; Ads that reinforce destruction of tools make me want to join fight club.
Man, you touched on something that has been a sore point for me my entire smart phone owning part of my life. The inability to make a simple program without huge hurdles, just for my phone and no one else.
Having a locked down tool that is so dumbed down is annoying. For example, I'd love to make a custom unit converter so that I can quickly and unobtrusively convert between metric and imperial without being online/etc. that also displays the answer with closest drill size
This reminds me of an article from Maddox in 2007 about how the Nokia E70 is better than the iPhone because he can use the terminal on it. [0] Time may have proven him right.
Art creation is creation. Muic, images, video -- they all benefit from good screens, fast processors, quality stylus integration, first party apps, and full-stack attention to latency. The iPad is about creation, just not your type of creation.
