VR
BY GOGO LIDZ
THOUGH I WAS born at the height of the arcade craze, I never caught Pac-Man fever. Sure, I attended a few Chuck E. Cheese parties as a kid, but by the time I hit puberty, video arcades were already GAME OVER. By the turn of the millennium, home gaming consoles like Nintendo had zapped the public amusement spaces: From 1981 to 1999, combined U.S. arcade revenues dropped from $8 billion to just over $1 billion. As Back to the Future Part II predicted in 1989, video arcades izzled into a niche nostalgia market propped up by hipster bars. However, these days excitable nerds are once again inserting coins into public gaming spaces, at least virtually.