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Document Type

Introduction

Abstract

[First paragraph]

In 2009, Stride Gum launched a campaign to “Save the Arcades,” offering $25,000 to an arcade on the brink of closure through a convoluted contest. Arcade fans could play a retro reboot game on the campaign’s site, then assign points to one of the four arcades deemed eligible for the competition. In the rhetoric of the campaign, arcades are an endangered species, each arcade an outpost of something precious and threatened. Much of contemporary gaming culture revels in a nostalgic pull for so-called classic arcades, and players’ desire to validate through remembrances of games past helps drive and legitimate the nostalgia. Those were, after all, the days. But arcades are not entirely absent from contemporary culture. The same nostalgia that constructs an essential canon of arcade classics also fuels the survival both of long-running iconic arcade and newly opened businesses like the Barcade chain of arcade bars or the similarly themed Emporium bar and arcade in Chicago. Reports of the arcade’s death seem to have been greatly exaggerated, but this does not mean that the arcade culture of the early 1980s has continued in an unbroken line to the present. The game industry has transformed, and so have the arcades. They have become sites of nostalgic longing and player authentication, of entrepreneurial zeal and even of a strange cultural reverence. Today’s arcades, both new and old, seem to occupy a peculiar position in contemporary gaming culture. The arcade is dead – a form long past its zenith, an experience that cannot be recaptured – and yet it lives.

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