Second Life Arcade Game

Video game arcades "died" some time around 1995. Doom had come out for the PC in Deember 1993, Marathon came out for the Mac in 1994, so the idea that arcades always had better games than home systems was fading. Also, with the introducton of the PowerPC and Pentium CPU chips, (with 66-100 MHz speeds and above) emulation of 8-bit arcade games, plus the ability to play MP3 music made PCs even more of an attractive replacement for going to the arcades. Finally, the Playstation console came out and people had still more reason to stay home than go to video game arcades, which had been a pretty prominant part of life since the mid-late 1970's.

So... what games are relevant today? Well, there's DDR... but what about Second Life? If youre traveling and a Greyhound Bus station has it's own internet LAN connected to broadband.. why not have a Second Life cabinet in the arcade? People could use it to sign up as new, or play their regular characters. The cabinet could have the best graphical and sound capabilities possible for SL, too.

(I'm guessing this would mostly be a college campus thing.)

In fact, it might be a little better to depict it not as an arcade "game" but more as a "virtual reality communications terminal", wich a status more like a payphone.

A great idea that unfortunately will not get off the ground, if only because new players would need a credit card to start an account (YOU try putting in forty quarters!). Also players would have to pay for time spent playing (else the machine not make a profit to justify its presence).