Through the lens of video games in 2023, I think younger people misunderstand the relationship we had to consoles like the Atari 2600. It wasn't that we tolerated the extremely primitive graphics, that we were snookered by fancy box art; we thought that shit was awesome. It was state-of-the-art. At first arcade machines weren't much better, and you couldn't have those at home anyway, unless you were a millionaire! As a kid in the late 70s and early 80s you were thrilled to get your sticky hands on any video game going.
It's true that the 2600 hung on far longer than you'd have expected, and that by mid-decade it looked ridiculous compared to current technology, but it lasted that long because of how mindblowing it was when it first came out... also because you had third-party game makers like Activision and Imagic wresting higher performance out of the console as a primary selling point. But the idea that we were sullenly shoving giant pixels around while waiting for the technology to advance is just untrue. We were hooked.
Also, in researching the Atari Pac-Man situation, found a guy in his 20s talking about 'having to go to the arcade' to play games like we were being sent to the fuckin' gulag. Like, our parents had to pry us off the doorhandle of any arcade we passed by, on the rare occasion we were obliged to endure parental supervision outside the house... while we're at it, it's not like you had to go far. This picture you have of this flashily-decorated formal Aladdin's Castle setup at the mall wasn't the main reality. At the height of the video game craze, every business with any amount of disused floor space would put video games in. Any convenience store, most restaurants and bars, to say nothing of people just renting stores in strip malls and filling them with games. I don't think you grasp the enormity of this, kid.
I'm pretty sure a lot of the dudes out there going "you had to go to an arcade" are just fundamentally incurious people who can't imagine things not being how they remember them being and primed to turn into complete boomers in 20 years when they get confronted with the fact that they're doing things the clunky old way now that no one else puts up with with all their gamepads and downloads instead of whatever the fuck is going on then
also yeah, arcade machines used to be like vending machines, if you ran a store you just rented a tiny bit of floor space to some company that owned hundreds of them and it was basically free money since the cabinet wasn't your responsibility. I remember one in a pharmacy when I was a kid, also the only place in town to get photo film developed the same day.
