I was at the arcade in Bugis for a short while after dinner. I’m not exactly an arcade guy because the noise level at most arcades are on par with an idling Boeing 747, but I was there just to look around and made a few observations.

The most popular games today are the musical ones – guitar, drum, DJ, dance. Some other popular ones are the car racing games like Initial D. Finally there’s a crowd at the corner with old-style arcade games like Street Fighter where you sit down with a joystick and 3 buttons. I call this crowd the one-token warriors, i.e. one token lasts them an entire day.

Games come and go, some of them are hypes and go away after a while, some really sucked and didn’t even work out, but some good old classics remain. I asked myself, why?

On top of that, I had two other questions. What was the game companies’ revenue model? Was it one-off, i.e. the sale of the arcade machine, or was it continuous, e.g. profit sharing. I have no answer for this yet.

So to figure out an answer to my first question, I narrowed down some classic car racing games that I am familiar with.

Daytona (the original) is really the best of its’ time. It was around since the mid 1990s – that makes the game more than 10 years old to date. This is quite obvious because it still uses the old fishbowl-shaped CRT tubes.

Daytona 2 is the newer version released in 1998, but wasn’t very popular and slowly disappeared from some most arcades. There’s a version of the machine with motion simulation as well, making the game a little more fun – I think it’s still around in Cineleisure.

Sega Rally was launched probably around the same time as Daytona but wasn’t very popular. The hardware is the same as the Daytona, but the game play is very different.

So I asked myself, what makes Daytona so popular that it still exists in almost every arcade today?

I think it’s simplicity in game play and moderate realism. Here’s where I think the other two games failed.

Sega Rally was difficult to control and didn’t have the feeling of thrill – it was too realistic, too diffcult and felt slow.

Daytona 2 had too many vehicles to choose from. While this sounds like a feature from a marketing perspective, this makes the learning curve steeper, requiring more experimentation from gamers to get it right, and of course more tokens which means the game became too expensive. On top of that, it had the speed realism of Sega Rally and also felt slow. The graphics in the background was also excessively distracting, often causing players to miss a turn.

Daytona (the original) had only one car, two transmission modes and three stages. The car was easy to control and the graphics were clean and probably fantastic at its time an age. Sounds like a magical number sequence, doesn’t it? 1, 2, 3.

I draw another observation from my visit to the arcade and the three games above – people love games that challenge their hand-eye co-ordination. Actually, that’s probably what most games really do. Thus it is true that if the game felt slow, it isn’t fun to play. Think about it – Counter Strike, Quake, Daytona, the ancient Snakes game in Nokia phones, the new music games in the arcade… they are all the same in this aspect.

What do you think?