A few days ago, I had a quiet revelation. Or maybe the apocalypse was a little stronger. You’re familiar with that feeling, I’m sure – I feel like what I already know deep down crystallizes into a point of view that’s easier to express. That is: I miss dedicated gaming hardware.
Now, apparently, we still have some type of “dedicated gaming hardware”. We have consoles, pro PCs, retro nostalgia and more. But I’m really talking about something different; we have highly game-specific add-ons, extra features, and even entire machines designed to provide a unique experience for a particular game.
I’m talking things like light guns and dance mats. I’m talking arcade machines that deploy big specific hardware, from Street Fighter’s infamous shit and quick-dropping hands ruining pressure-sensitive buttons, to the Game Boy Camera. I’m talking Guitar Hero and Rock Band. I’m talking about those stupid GameCube tambourines.
The idea was formed in a strange place: Las Vegas. I love to gamble, and while my heart is always at the table, I do love slot machines. I especially love a well-designed empowering machine that can hit the senses with a wave of nostalgia for a certain movie or TV show. I like to find new machines based on franchises I like because, to be honest, they aren’t very common within the UK.
These nostalgic vehicles are even making their way into gaming now – on a recent trip, I found slot machines based on Resident Evil and the incredible House of the Dead. The latter is especially interesting because I haven’t seen a House of the Dead: Scarlet Dawn shooter in the wild outside of Japan, but gambling spinoffs can now be found at nearly every major Las Vegas casino.
Anyway. I like licensed machines, although supposedly their payouts are slightly worse considering the license fee. These machines are often extremely nefarious creations of game design, creating a surge of dopamine that, of course, lowers your inhibitions and keeps you gambling until you have nothing left. It’s evil shit, really dangerous, and needs to be heavily regulated by the government – although as someone who has control and doesn’t struggle to walk away, I love it. For me, it’s not about winning (although that’s always nice), because it’s about the machine popping up when it encounters a feature. I love the spectacle of it, as I do in any well-designed game.
A recent trip to Las Vegas was my first time back in four years. The city is changing at an alarming rate, but I’ve noticed a funny and sad change: many of the most original and complex slots are disappearing. This has undoubtedly been happening for a while – but this trip is the one I’ve really noticed. This is evident not only in major large hotels, but also in smaller settings.
To be fair, the functionality is still there. There’s a really nice new Willy Wonka machine that can keep Oompa Loompa songs in your head. But now it’s all digitally driven. Machine areas that were once uniquely shaped, molded and engineered are now just giant screens. A machine that at some point had the spectacle of a big wheel above the player that would light up and spin a function is now just… a giant screen showing the big wheel.
In fact, casino floors are generally pretty homogeneous these days. You’ll see five or six identical “designs” of machines, some made by generic gaming giants like Sega and Konami, with different software deployed on them. Those House of the Dead and Resident Evil slots I mentioned earlier? They all run on the same cabinet. Machines with truly raw hardware, where physical cabinets and games intersect and co-exist are rare. The rest, generally speaking, are old and slowly decaying. Soon they will disappear completely.
The same goes for the arcade. We don’t have a lot of new Light Gun games right now, but the ones we do, like Raw Thrills’ Halo and the Jurassic Park arcade game, follow a strict template, which keeps the machine relatively uniform. Now, “Video Pinball” isn’t just something you play on your TV to replicate the arcade experience, but a real pinball machine where all the tactile fun is replaced by a gory screen showing the same moves.
Of course, the same goes for home video games. We’ve lived through an era where plastic tats are everywhere, and I can’t wait for the Guitar Hero trend to end – but for now, I’m sorry it’s gone – and the demise of other long-standing peripherals burst that took it .
We don’t play light gun games anymore. Even Nintendo, the king of random slightly nonsense accessories, has really cooled off its Jets lately. We got a really good idea in Ring Fit Adventure and a slightly half-baked idea in Labo, but it does feel like that era is over. Most shockingly, Harmonix releases Rock Band DLC almost every week, but buying new Rock Band hardware is next to impossible.
Of course, there is one exception. We do have one expensive piece of specific gaming hardware: virtual reality. But honestly, I don’t see these headphones that way. They’re more like consoles and platforms in their own right. None of the glossy specificity that I loved about certain accessories as a kid. I miss that. I don’t want a new Time Crisis in VR; I want a real new Time Crisis, with a bloody GunCon. I don’t want another damn fixed-gun light gun shooter in an arcade – I want something wacky and weird like Konami’s 24/7 dodging and diving cops.
Maybe I’m just an old man shouting at the clouds. But I do feel that a certain sense of artistry and creativity has been lost in the homogeneous nature of today’s gaming hardware — whether it’s in arcades, casinos, or our living rooms. I really hope that, in the years to come, we can take some back.
