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Arcade Spirits on Steam and other stores (store.steampowered.com)

submitted 4 weeks ago by falseprophet@fedia.io to c/adventuregames@retrolemmy.com

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Arcade Spirits is a romantic visual novel that follows an alternative timeline where the 1983 video game crash never occurred. It's 20XX and you've just started a new job at the Funplex game arcade. Who will you meet along the way? Will you find the romance you're seeking?

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[–] Redkey@programming.dev 2 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

I'm a bit confused about this story synopsis, to be honest. How much does the home video game crash of 1983 have to do with video game arcades?

I'll admit that I was still very young at the time, and wasn't living in the USA. I had no idea about the crash until decades later when I read about it as a historical event. Looking back I can recall that console games in my country were a bit thin on the ground for two or three years, but home computers (the 8-bit and 16-bit kinds, not PC/Mac) and arcades kept going strong.

Video game arcades and random video games tucked into corners of takeaway shops and shopping malls were still a common thing for me well into the 1990s. They only really started dying out rapidly in the 2000s due to increasing competition from home systems and computers (this time it was PC/Mac) in terms of power and networking, along with the rise of Internet-connected feature phones and then smartphones, which gave many people an ever-present source of time-killing entertainment in their pocket.

Dedicated arcades with big cabinet games involving custom controllers or displays, or other special features hung on for a while, but those machines rarely appeared anywhere else, and in the end even most of them couldn't keep drawing enough customers to remain profitable.

[–] falseprophet@fedia.io 3 points 4 weeks ago

I was also confused when I first read the synopsis. But I have not played the game so it's hard to say. I also not from the USA and there was not really crash here so I don't know how it was there. But I think you are not supposed no think about it too deeply. The video game crash is something talked about a lot by gaming youtubers, so I think most people have heard of it now even if they were not alive at the time of lived in the USA.

So I guess it is just a plot device that they used, to tell an alternative reality for arcade games history. Though I could be wrong.