Were Arcade games meant to be 1CC’ed

[Goemon]

I’m still regularly dipping into the Capcom Arcade Stadium games and as part of this I’ll just credit spam my way through a game.

 

I get to some bits and think “impossible” however generally a quick search on YT will bring back someone blitzing said section with some strategic positioning, timing, mashing etc.

 

It just made me think, were Arcade game meant to be able to be completed with 1 credit?

When you work on a game you get to know it intimately, so I imagine the devs were actually able to get pretty far in their own games, which again just makes me think the 1 CC was always a plausible option. At the same time I wonder if devs never actually imagined people being able to do certain sections without dying (I remember reading Miyazaki refused to believe that someone finished Dark Souls with being hit).

 

So I guess maybe the question is, was the original theory behind buying credits on a game for you to get better or just to take you money?

 

I guess it was probably both, I just find it interesting that my original thoughts were always impossible to finish without credit munching but now I’m not so sure.

 

[phillv85]

Some games definitely were, there’s loads that are done in 15-45 minutes. There’s some that are more or less impossible to do. I believe Double Dragon II for instance has such a severe time limit that it’s either impossible or ludicrously hard to do. 
 

There’s games I thought were impossible to do only to become proficient enough to do them, then there’s games like T2 Arcade where you’re feeding coins every couple of minutes no matter how much you play it.

[JamesC]

I think they were just meant to encourage you to keep putting money in. That was the design philosophy. 

I guess if someone is tempted to practice to the point of being able to 1CC a game it still fulfils the brief pretty well as they'll spend plenty along the way and will probably encourage others. 

[Soulstar]

What about those fighting games which actively cheat like MK2 and SF from what I’ve seen on YouTube. Something about the cpu reading your commands to counter, then stuff like instant recovery where an enemy will attack faster than is usually possible following a knockdown. Don’t know enough but I’ve seen info on this which applies to the arcades specifically. 

[dumpster]

I believe it's linked to the shift from Jamma based interchangeable cabinets to big dedicated monsters.  For example, games like Pac Man and Mr Do go on forever until they crash.  Arcade owners don't like you playing for an hour for 10p so games started to have defined endings. Bubble Bobble can probably be completed in one coin but it's a challenge  (and if you activate the power up mode  the arcade owner chucks you out. 10p for an hours play, doesn't even cover the electric). But that game has dynamic difficulty.  Keep getting extra lives and see how hard it gets. Not sure if it's possible to 1cc it. 

 

Then as machines became more expensive and cabinets became dedicated, gameplay design changed to give you absolute dead ends.  For example, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (still Jamma) with the simultaneous 4 player mode had a beautiful bespoke cabinet with great artwork.  Gauntlet, Simpsons, 6 player X-Men, all with weirdly unfair bits.  Unlimited lives if you keep ploughing in the money but Christ that game becomes right bastard tough.

 

Time Crisis is a good example, for me I can finish it on two credits if I'm lucky but that involves what I consider to be a perfect playthrough avoiding everything you can avoid, and being hit by the stuff that I've never worked out how to avoid. I don't know if the game is possible to do a no-damage run, because you get hit in the same places every time. 

 

Arcade games also have the super hard barrier level sometimes referred to as  "Billy's Wall of Coconuts".  The first example in my head is Arkanoid.  Level 3 is just a total pain in the arse and if you have the patience and skill to get past it, you'll probably be OK for the next load of levels.  But Level 3 wants your money.  You'd often hear arcade players complaining to staff at the change booth, "I want my ten pence back - that game is pure Billy's Wall of Coconuts".

 

One aspect of this post  isn't true. 

[phillv85]

I find non-SNK fighting games are mostly doable quite easily. The ones that are bastard hard are a lot of the Neo Geo ones. Art of Fighting for instance has the most brutal AI I’ve ever come across. Then you have the SNK boss syndrome where the difficulty spikes on the last boss on a level that’s hard to believe. 

[Dig Dug]

I'd say once the 90s came around we saw the turning point where one credit clears became part of the games design. I once watched a 1CC playthrough of Final Fight and it's obvious you were not meant to 1CC that game, it looks like it is absolutely no fun to do.

 

I think the big signifier around 1CC becoming accepted was the way scores are handled. I've beaten Space Harrier on 1 credit, but it is not my highest score in the game due to the fact that scores do not get reset on a new credit.

Scores resetting on game over becoming the norm is when we started seeing arcade games being designed with the expectation that some people were going to clear them on one credit. It also helped signify the end of the endlessly looping games besides a few exceptions.

 

Once that bridge had been crossed, I think we entered a golden period for scoring system design. Just look at Cave and all the different scoring systems they use in their shooting games. You can try and play their games without them but once you begin to educate yourself and discover the true depth of these games it becomes clear just how much thought went into scoring and just how integral it is to the game design. Likewise, the decision to give the player a maximum loadout on continue is also a deliberate choice to challenge the player to try and be better next time. You're not supposed to reach full power until a certain point in the game, maxing the player load out early messes with the rank and can ultimately screw the difficulty pacing.

 

It's a really fascinating bit of game design which isn't talked about much because it's not really something you'd normally have in home gaming.

 

Eventually we saw a shift in arcade games where you couldn't one credit clear many of them at all. Instead, the games were now designed to be played in short sessions. Racing games like Daytona and Ridge Racer will give you 3 minutes of play (1 race) if you are good at them. The 1CC model did persist for the likes of Sega Rally but even that game has a very strict time cap.

Music games were best suited to this model. Play any music game and pretty much all of them will give you 3 songs per credit which adds up to a 7-minute session in most cases.

 

As previously mentioned in this thread there are also light gun games but whether or not those games were designed to be cleared on one credit is almost entirely down to what game you were playing. They are like a hybrid model where even if you do 1CC them you still played a session length game.

[Lorfarius]

I would have thought if people were readily 1 credited a game quite easily the arcade operator had just set it to a really low difficulty by accident. The point of them is to keep pumping money in so they should be quite tough to force you to pay out more. Most of the real cabs I've seen have hidden switches in the back or another way to change difficulty/time played.

[Qazimod]

1 minute ago, Lorfarius said:

I would have thought if people were readily 1 credited a game quite easily the arcade operator had just set it to a really low difficulty by accident.

 

Yeah, it would surely depend on the dip switches and service modes and things. Some games probably could be 1CC'ed but they allowed the owners to be cruel and make things harder.

[spatular]

Loads of arcade games I've played seem impossible to me, but then as already said, there'll be someone on YouTube 1cc it with a bongo controller wile blindfolded and juggling flamethrowers.

[MagicalDrop]

33 minutes ago, spatular said:

Loads of arcade games I've played seem impossible to me, but then as already said, there'll be someone on YouTube 1cc it with a bongo controller wile blindfolded and juggling flamethrowers.

 

But probably MAME runs with suitable use of rewinds, video stitching and other trickery. It's been going on since Billy Mitchell, allegedly. 

 

Going back to the OP, I bought the jamma board of Magic Sword, naively thinking that I would eventually learn the game well enough to 1cc skill my way through it. Ha what a fool. It's hard enough for 2 players but 1 player would really massively struggle to get up the first few levels of the dozens that await. So no, it's designed to show players new sights with the carrot of a little more progress every time to take in coin. 

 

I'm pretty certain the notion of 1cc more or less ended with whatever the first game was to introduce the enticing 'Continue?' option at Game Over. 

[dumpster]

I had Jamma boards for the Gradius series, and I remember me and a mate taking it in turns for hours trying to complete Vulcan Venture.  You couldn't pause it, and we came to the conclusion that if you lost one life later in the game it was impossible to complete.  You needed the power ups you lost, and the last level is insane.

[dumpster]

There must be a calculation on return of investment that the arcade machines use.  I remember looking into buying an Outrun 2 machine back at the time and a single player cabinet was 60K.  Now I'll be generous because my memory may be incorrect, but even if your arcade opens at 10am, closes 8pm, 7 days a week, that's 10 hours a day, 20 games an hour (5 minutes each) means that machine earns you £200 a day assuming it's in constant use every second of every day that you're open it would take 300 days to pay for the machine.  Actually, when you put it like that it doesn't seem too bad.  But realistically, to have an arcade with all the latest games in, you need money in that slot so frequently the last thing you want is an expert player spending all day on one credit.  (Saw that in Blackpool once, a group doing 1 credit on Bomb Jack over the whole day).

[Lorfarius]

2 hours ago, dumpster said:

There must be a calculation on return of investment that the arcade machines use.  I remember looking into buying an Outrun 2 machine back at the time and a single player cabinet was 60K.  Now I'll be generous because my memory may be incorrect, but even if your arcade opens at 10am, closes 8pm, 7 days a week, that's 10 hours a day, 20 games an hour (5 minutes each) means that machine earns you £200 a day assuming it's in constant use every second of every day that you're open it would take 300 days to pay for the machine.  Actually, when you put it like that it doesn't seem too bad.  But realistically, to have an arcade with all the latest games in, you need money in that slot so frequently the last thing you want is an expert player spending all day on one credit.  (Saw that in Blackpool once, a group doing 1 credit on Bomb Jack over the whole day).

 

A lot of arcades started leasing the more expensive machines so they'd be sharing the profit but not having the full cost of the machine to pay. Also means they could swap them out regular for the newest cabs to draw punters.

[Unofficial Who]

I'd argue that there was a shift from arcade game design moving from enjoyable (or the Atari ethos of easy to learn, hard to master) to being all about the coin drop around the time the designers of Sinistar were told to make the game harder to the detriment of design because management wanted faster coin drop.

 

It's a bit of a dark art. You don't want some kid hogging the machine for hours because then you're losing more in overheads than you're making but you don't want to make a game so unfair it feels like you're being mugged. There's loads of interviews with arcade designers, operators and other people in the industry on the podcast The Ted Dabney Experience and they touch on this issue every episode.

 

I remember being done with arcade games as an unemployed kid having beaten Aliens by Konami and realising I'd spent $6 that I could ill afford at the time. Apart from large novel cabinets that I couldn't play at home (like Prop Cycle, more of an experience than a game) I wasn't too sad to see home consoles essentially break the model.

[Vespa Alex]

Arcade gaming has gone through so many phases that all options were covered. 
 

In the early stages with stuff like Pac Man then they just got harder till they killed you (well, most people, anyway).

 

Around 1990 was the best era for arcade games IMO, where the really well designed games always felt like it was *possible* to complete on a single credit. The only ones I’m 100% sure I could do were Golden Axe and Robocop, but I know I got close on games like Aliens, 1943, Prehistoric Isle, Double Dragon, Silkworm, Final Fight, Sunset Riders and more. On Gauntlet I could sometimes play indefinitely if the difficulty wasn’t too high. 
 

Skip forward five to ten years and most games needed you to feed coins continually to keep going no matter how good you were. 
One of the few exceptions was Outrun 2 which isn’t at all hard to complete. 

[loathsomeleopard]

The era where it really clicked with me mentally how it was essentially unfairly balanced was when the Neo Geo cabinets first hit arcades. Never saw one that wasn’t set to “your payment gives you X minutes of gameplay.”  Not credits, not lives, just time. Impossible to 1CC anything, even if you were damned good. NBA JAM, IIRC did the same thing around the same time. 

Edited August 6, 2022 by loathsomeleopard
Typo!

[pastry]

It’s really just gambling, plain and simple. Gambling to see how much enjoyment you can get for your 20p. 
 

Of course it’s not the same as a one-armed-bandit, but it’s pretty close philosophically. 
 

I don’t think there’s any intent to give the average player more than a few minutes of fun, the trick and skill in the design is making them feel like they can do better the next time. 
 

This question does make me wonder which version of a game is best to play - eg is it the CPS2 version of Alpha 2, or the Saturn game? Which is better balanced as an enjoyable single player experience?

[dataDave]

I don’t think they thought/invested around that too much, especially in a vs. fighter. Besides, both versions have eight selectable difficulties which play exactly the same.

 

The most efficient method for clearing arcade games is to watch someone else and ask questions. When I first ever started playing SFII there were no moves lists anywhere - you had to watch, ask or listen in on others. I only ever saw this community effort surround SFII and CE in Blackpool back in the day, it wasn’t until moving to Singapore that I got to experience a proper arcade community again.

[Swainy]

Remember that many earlier arcade games didn’t actually have a ‘Continue’ option. The first game to do so was released in 1981, which was Fantasy.

 

The arcade version of Renegade which was released in 1986 certainly didn’t have a continue and that is fairly easy to complete. Double Dragon was a lot easier though especially if you just used the elbow move.

 

I do feel a lot of the later arcade games were impossible to do on one credit though. Teenage Mutant Ninja (Hero) Turtles was one of the first games were I felt that this really was the case.

[Anne Summers]

I think the answer to the OP question is "Some of them". I always felt it was kind of cheap if it wasn't possible to complete a game without taking a hit - in other words a "perfect" run should always be possible, in theory, even if it's really, really hard. Capcom games like Ghouls and Ghosts or Strider are probably the best example of this - some of the best arcade games ever made, and perfectly possible (if very, very hard) to get a "perfect" game. 

 

Of course in order to get to that standard of playing where you were capable of doing so would require pumping in a huge number of credits in order to learn the stages and memorise attack patterns. That was what good game design was about, in the golden age of the arcade (the eighties, basically) I think. 

[phillv85]

Some PCB’s allow you to turn off continues in the settings or dip switches. Pretty sure my Donpachi PCB had that feature and the CAVE SH3 PCB’s I had.

[spatular]

Some later cave games were designed to encourage new players with easier difficulty, like dodonpachi daifukkatsu with the autobomb ship, deathsmiles had selectable difficulty.

[phillv85]

1 hour ago, spatular said:

Some later cave games were designed to encourage new players with easier difficulty, like dodonpachi daifukkatsu with the autobomb ship, deathsmiles had selectable difficulty.

Yeah that is true, they even rereleased DDP Dai Ou Jou on PGM2 hardware around 2010 with an Easy Mode (that’s still fucking solid!)

[thegreathopper]

4 hours ago, phillv85 said:

Some PCB’s allow you to turn off continues in the settings or dip switches. Pretty sure my Donpachi PCB had that feature and the CAVE SH3 PCB’s I had.

All the Neo Geo MVS games also have continues selectable , in fact most pcb’s have this option - pretty sure the Capcom CPS2 games do.

[ScouserInExile]

On 06/08/2022 at 10:48, Dig Dug said:

. I once watched a 1CC playthrough of Final Fight and it's obvious you were not meant to 1CC that game, it looks like it is absolutely no fun to do.

Funnily enough, I've just started watching some of these type of videos of late and I completely agree with you. There's almost always a "do this repeatedly and you'll win" element to it, along with a hefty dose of skill.

 

Final Fight seems to involve a bit of an exploit of the combo, or lack thereof. It's essentially punch, punch, punch, quickly turn away then turn back, punch, punch, punch ad infinitum. You can even stun lock bosses and just burn through their health until they're dead.

 

The D&D themed one (Tales of Mysteria?) is just doing the energy sacrifice move repeatedly and grabbing health along the way.

[Anne Summers]

Oh yeah, I think Final Fight is a bit of an exception to the rule that Capcom games tended to be fairer and better designed. It's not a great game from a game design point of view all round, in my opinion. Limited movesets when compared to other scrolling fighters of the time, and the later levels just chuck hundreds of identical enemies at you in order to chip away at your health. 

[Wonderm]

When i was 8 or 9 - year 4 i think? Dunno for definite - we had a chippy round the corner from my nan's, cycled through a few games. One month it was Pit Fighter and for whatever reason, maybe an easy setting, i just smashed it as Kato, got to the two big lumps and flew through them easily 

 

I'd only done one credit and there i was against the lad with the mask, a crowd had formed, the tension was rife. I gave him a few digs but he's a twat and bang, i was dead. My nan gave me another 20p though and I did it. Legendary status. 

 

A complete fluke i think 

[strider]

We've had more than enough developers apologise for making arcade games purposely difficult so I'm not surprised that some are a lot harder to complete than others. In some cases it was absolutely done on purpose.

[dumpster]

Quick addition as it just popped into my head reading this thread, but there were a lot of games (Sega comes into my list very heavily here) where over the 20 years or so since release I've never got any better. Specific titles include 18 Wheeler, Crazy Taxi, Harley Davidson, all games where I run out of time in pretty much the same place every game. You can continue if you choose but has anyone ever completed 18 Wheeler off 1 credit and if so, how?

 

@Anne Summers did a good thread here about the difficulty settings on arcade machines and I remembered Sega Rally, a game which I was very good at.  But at Alton Towers, you'd complete every track with the time run out and car slowly creeping over the line, even using the HyperCar cheat.  As a self proclaimed expert I couldn't even finish lakeside and it was a huge challenge even to get to that stage.