Vintage gaming community.
Rules:
If you see these please report them.
How fun the game was at the cost of a credit.
If the game was not fun enough to justify spending the nickel/quarter to play, then it was a bad game.
The really good games were known in my area as the "quarter guzzlers." Because they were extremely fun, but still hard, meaning you wanted to keep playing at the cost of the quarter or credit per play. And you'd end up dumping multiple dollars into the machine before you knew it.
For players, the length of play you’d likely get out of a single credit.
For owners, the amount of money a given cabinet could make, on average, per week.
Also, units of fun earned while watching other people play.
One nice thing about an arcade is that you can see regular people (not streamers/professionals/actors) interacting with a game, and notice subtleties that aren't represented in a bullet list or trailer video.
That's what I was thinking might be the case for players, alongside the fun/new factors Jordan mentions. Thanks for the reply!
Whether it was a "quarter eater" or not was a big one. Some games were seen as having unfair levels of difficulty that were just designed to take your money. Take something like Haunted Castle as an example.
There wasn't much thought behind it other than "is it fun" or "is it new".
There was huge word of mouth whenever a new machine dropped and kids would ride their bikes from store to store to see the new ones.
This was before arcades started collecting them. Arcade machines were just at the local bars, Pizza shops, 7-11s, and grocery stores.
Bars would set them up in non-age restricted areas so kids could play.
I remember it was not really a surprising set of metrics: gameplay, graphics, and fun.
It was about having an experience you couldn't have at home (or anywhere else) because the games were always noticeably ahead of the curve.
Graphics were what was most attention-grabbing. It's hard to communicate how impressive it was since we're in the diminishing returns era for graphics. But a jump from Pac-Man to Rush 'n Attack or Contra, and from that to Street Fighter II, and from that to Ridge Racer, and that to Daytona USA, and so on... Every step was so imagination-bending.
What would it feel like now? Maybe like if you could play an actual Pixar movie as a game? Something like that, but there's nothing that really expresses it, photorealism isn't even that impressive anymore.
Quarters?
Gameplay is top, is it challenging, varied and beatable?
Can you 1CC it, and get 40-50 minutes from that 1 credit?
Did it seem like the designers and programmers were interested and invested in producing a decent game?
Were their any hitbox fails or physics errors that cause massive annoyance? Skip.
Then graphics and sound quality can influence the choice.
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1CC games========
Slap Fight
Willow
Wardner
Heavy Barrel
RoboCop
Wonder Boy in Monster Land
Black Tiger
Calibre .50
Gun Force
These all took about 30-50 minutes to complete on 1 credit.