Americans Are in Love With Video Arcades Again

Flip on one of those grainy, black-and-white films of Americans having warm-weather fun at the start of the last century, and you’ll see them rushing the gates of an amusement park, or milling around under the lights of a penny arcade. Flash forward 100 years and only one of those businesses is still going strong—and it’s not the one you’d expect. As summer vacations and family trips approach, Americans trying to decide what to do with the kids will discover that some of the local attractions they took for granted are no longer an option.

If there’s any enterprise that should have been extinguished by the ubiquity of smartphones and fast Internet connections, it might be charging people to play arcade games a couple of quarters at a time. Yet for those of you who miss the old stand-up games of Galaga and Defender, there were more “amusement arcades” in 2014 than in 1998, according to the Census Bureau.