Agreed, this is turning into a really cool thread...

I always love hearing the stories from mrbally, LTG, and the other legacy operators/techs that I'm missing. It's fascinating to me.

Of course, I yearn for the days when the History channel played WW2/military, technology, aviation, etc. documentaries instead of all the scripted picker/pawn and other "reality" crap shows they do now, so that should tell you my mindset, haha.

That said, I remember in the late 80's/early 90's when my local movie theater arcade attempted to raise the price of everything to $.50, strangely similarly after they got a Dragon's Lair as well, that was itself, priced at $.75. I thought it was weird at the time, considering the game was already 6-8 years old at that point, and while it was still as close to "virtual reality/controlling a movie" as we were going to get in those days, there wasn't much to it other than pushing a button or pushing the joystick in a direction when prompted as I recall. My money got dropped in pinballs and videos.

Anyways, I remember the 16 year old attendant saying it was going to be a disaster the Saturday they increased the prices.

Well wouldn't you know, the following Saturday after walking out of our weekly Saturday matinee movie and into the arcade, my older brother and I noticed the place was empty. Like, totally empty, at 3:30 on a Saturday afternoon, in a popular, suburban, movie theater arcade. I guess the other kids must have thought that playing Final Fight, Afterburner, Outrun, Taxi, and the others at $.50 no longer seemed "worth it" either, when we could play nes or genesis at home.

Low and behold, 2 or 3 weeks later, the prices were readjusted back to $.25 a play. And as I recall, the place never really "recovered" until SF2 came out.

Looking back now from a pricing standpoint in those days, it would have made more sense to price only the newest videos/pins at $.50, then drop them to $.25 after the new novelty wore off, or in the case of token arcades, dispense 3 tokens per dollar instead of 4. While this seems like common sense to me now, I do not recall seeing this scenario in my arcade days. Games were priced at either $.25 or $.50, but the price stayed that way for it's entire duration at a particular location.