Around ten years ago, arcade management sim ArcadeCraft arrived on the Xbox 360’s unregulated XBLIG store. A shining beacon in a sea of trash, it was more than worthy of a full release on XBLA. Arcade Tycoon falls into the same genre, favouring tidy pixel art over ArcadeCraft’s 3D visuals, and just like ArcadeCraft it proves to be a good ambassador for the Switch eShop. Perhaps not the eShop as a whole, but certainly tycoon games in general. It’s clear the barrel is being scrapped thin when recent examples include Satay Shop Tycoon and Salad Bar Tycoon.
Thanks to its self-explanatory name, chances are you already have a rough idea of what Arcade Tycoon entails. To wit: shrewdly choosing and placing arcade machines, hiring staff, following trends, keeping customers happy, and turning a steady profit. The surprisingly lengthy campaign is fuelled by a dream of owning a large and profitable arcade, beginning with a tiny garage outfit and ending with a sizeable chunk of mall space. Along the way, you’ll get to cram an arcade into a narrow disused train station, build a horror themed arcade in a haunted house, and take advantage of a booming area next to a toy shop. A whistle stop tour of 12 locations, no less, incrementally increasing in size.
To begin with only a handful of retro cabinets are available, along with the fundamentals every arcade needs such as ATMs, toilets, staff rooms, token machines, and food/drink vendors. Unlocking new arcade machines requires stars, gained by keeping customers happy and completing quests – which vary from giving out a certain number of staff bonuses to putting on a birthday bash. Unlocking new arcade machine types takes more effort and is a slower process. Periodically, coin pushers, claw machines, pinball tables, light-gun shooters, and modern machine bestowing tickets are added to the slowly growing catalogue.
As you’d expect, dozens of machines are homages to classics of yore. The branding is all over the shop, with some games cheekily or cleverly named, such as Ghouls ‘n Gremlins, and others more brazen like a pinball table straight-up called Alien 3. Every machine varies in popularity and entertainment value, and it’s possible to toggle the cost of a credit and the difficulty level. Modern machines, meanwhile, require a ticket redemption booth, which takes up a lot of room. The quality of prizes can be adjusted to circumvent a tantrum.
The day-to-day running of the arcade is engaging, with the right amount of interaction and intervention. Bins need to be emptied manually, and if the robot vacuums are slacking it’s possible to pick up litter. Busted machines are automatically repaired by technicians but must be powered on again after a patch-up. Leaving a token machine out of order can be costly. Power usage must also be regulated or risk a power surge that’ll blow fuses and leave customers unhappy.
Additionally, each stage of the campaign has three goals to achieve, ranked bronze, silver, and gold. One of these – and not always necessarily gold – will unlock the next location. At one point I had to return to an older arcade and complete a goal I’d missed, as this unlocked a new machine type – vital for completing the next set of goals in the campaign. Goals can vary from establishing an arcade of a certain value – the most time consuming of all objective types – to simply purchasing a set number of cabinets. It’s possible to ‘cheese’ a quick win with some of these, selling everything in an established arcade just to instantly purchase whatever is required to progress.
Couple mandatory objectives with the optional quests, research trees, ability to unlock new cabinets, and the challenges each location brings, and the result is a demanding experience. The campaign doesn’t take long at all to hook, constantly teasing upcoming locations and new machine types. There’s also something pleasurable in planning a new arcade in a different town, harnessing knowledge gained from one campaign mission to the next. Over time, some machines become firm favourites. Ol’ dependable. None of my arcades felt complete without the Altered Beast homage. The campaign is meaty and substantial, too – the 12 stages each take 1-2 hours to complete, so set aside a good 15-20 hours. Then on top of that, there’s a sandbox mode. The bigger locations found here allow for more customisation, creating pirate and horror themed sections and such.
This new Switch conversion (Arcade Tycoon first launched on PC) does have a few minor issues, however. Nothing that ruins the enjoyment, but they’re niggles all the same. Portions of menu text are too small to read when playing on a Switch Lite, and there doesn’t appear to be a way to scroll the quest log menu without accidentally accepting quests. It’s an odd omission, as the controls are otherwise easy to grasp, even intuitively mapping speed settings to the bumper buttons. Another minor issue, presumably not linked to this Switch release, is that the difficulty level is lax. I would hesitate to call this a casual affair, but still, don’t expect to be challenged much here. You’d have to be a very sloppy arcade planner to become bankrupt, and even then, this is something likely only to occur when learning the basics. This does at least mean anyone, young or old, can ‘press start’ and play.
Arcade Tycoon proves to be a compelling and light-hearted business sim that’s almost as addictive as funneling 2p coins into a coin pusher. Fingers crossed a successor isn’t another ten more years away.
VincentCorporation’s Arcade Tycoon is out 25th January on Switch. It first launched on PC in 2019.