From the operators manual to Ghosts 'n' Goblins, but this was in the manuals for a few other games Romstar distributed in the US, like Toaplan's Out Zone.
I mean, some of the first, if not the first, microtransactions were field tested in the US version of Double Dragon 3! Not to mention the similar levels of flash and polish that go into arcade and mobile game's visual stylings.
And yet the myth of arcade games being "perfectly fair and built for 1cc" persists. I suspect there's a few reasons for this:
- People are simply remembering the best games from that era.
- People forgot how many quarters they had to sink in to get their first 1cc.
- People casually ignore fighting games when discussing "fairness".
- People are remembering the home port and not the original arcade game.
- Most people's experiences with arcade games are via emulation.
If you spent actual time in an arcade during their heyday, you'd know that most games were way harder than the default DIP settings would lead you to believe. And for every top tier game, you had five or six quarter munching fighters, lightgun games, or early 80s "classics" to go with it. Even the best games weren't worth bothering with after the first two or three stages anyway, because the developers clearly ran out of ideas by that point and the only thing that lied ahead was quarter trap after quarter trap.
That said, one way they do differ from modern mobile games is turnaround time. For example, the "pay to play" nature of arcade games perfectly explains the rise of fighting games. Not only was turnaround much higher (rounds were often over in seconds), but the competitive nature of the genre meant you'd likely be getting twice as many quarters for the same amount of time. Anyone who has played an arcade fighter solo can tell you horror stories about how brutal the AI was, or how awful the final bosses were, which often disregarded the rules of the game entirely.
On this note, but the recent Out Zone re-release ran into some mild controversy over the devs using the most commonly available version of the game, rather than the later revision that everyone emulated because that was the only version people had played. Turns out the developers of the remaster were using a stitched together frankenrom based on an incomplete revision with DIP settings that were out of whack! See the first comment on this post for more info.
I could go on and on, but it's fascinating how much of our memories of certain "golden eras" are simply half remembered truths like this.
For pointing out microtransactions didn't start with horse armor
honestly my only issue when people talk about arcade games being out to get your money isn't that it's not true, is that it's usually said in the context of "...and that's why they're not worth looking at at all" and that's simply not true
but they sure were a greedy motherfucker of a medium, huh! sometimes the way this design shaped the games brought unique things to the table, such as Battle Garegga's absurd dynamic difficulty going from "a weirdly complex way to screw you over a lot" to "a science in and of itself that makes the game one of the most legendary shmups of all time"
it's a weird spot where those old arcade games are legitimately better now that they don't have to actually do what they were originally built for, because you can set your own goals and limitations rather than them being decided by the arcade operator and the limits of your wallet
These sorts of motives have always arguably been even more transparent in Japan, where the standard amount of money per-credit has pretty much always been 100 yen for anything relatively timely (or more for especially big, bespoke machines), even dating back to the Space Invaders boom. It's still a hefty chunk of money compared to a quarter for the amount of play time you get even now and it only gets heftier the further back in time you go. Even if they have some beloved entries that are looked back on with fondness now, there are some often forgotten/disregarded genres that were conceived to be basically as extractive as NBA Jam for that market such as quiz games and mahjong games. The former tends to do so by barraging players with tough-as-nails questions and a very limited lives count intended to deplete quickly and the latter, of course, just tend to have AI players that straight up cheat and do their damnedest to rig games in the house's favor, your motivation for soldiering on regardless being pretty ladies, shall we say. The dip switch settings naturally reflect this mentality as well, tending to offer more ways to make things harder on players than easier. On quiz games especially, this can be stark; my Kosodate My Angel board has no dip switches to make the game deal up easier questions. The most I believe you can do is change the usual plays-per-credit, which, even if you were to set it at its most generous, I can tell you from attempting to play it, isn't much of an olive branch to frugal players at all.
Arcade games were and still remain a tremendous institution worth enjoying and exploring. I've probably dumped a couple thousand dollars into collecting some PCBs the last couple of years, so far be it of me to turn my nose up at them! But they were very much the industry's first real incubator for ways to maximize revenue across short play sessions, including and especially by tapping into player psychology. You can't have an honest conversation about them, their motivations, and their impact unless you recognize that economic reality from the get-go or else it simply becomes a useless exercise in self-indulgent nostalgic wankery.
It was really striking to see this magic 2m30s number mentioned not only in operator guides, but in fact in developer guides. SNK's recommended (required, probably?) development process for the Neo Geo/MVS straight up includes doing iterative design by means of location testing to make sure that players are hitting an ideal playtime of 2m30s to 3m30s—so actually a little bit more generous than Capcom! But like, this framing makes it clear that the primary goal of an arcade game is to generate $x every 2.5 minutes, and if they hit any goals along the way, that's just a bonus.
If anything it feels like arcade games have gotten a lot nicer in the modern era, where the dominance of rhythm or competitive games have made it explicit that you're getting a set number of rounds for your money. Every player knows now that they're paying for the minute no matter how good they are!
