Alex Manning is a troubled suburban teenager. Her mother committed suicide and the school counselor feels that she has not dealt with her feelings properly. Manning and her friends decide to visit the local video arcade known as "Dante's Inferno" where a new virtual reality arcade game called "Arcade" is being test marketed by a computer company CEO who is more than willing to hand out free samples of the home console version and hype up the game as if his job is depending on it, and it is. However, it soon becomes clear that the teenagers who play the game and lose are being imprisoned inside the virtual reality world by the central villain "Arcade". And it gets worse when a virtual reality game begins to take over the minds of teenagers. The computer company felt it would be a good idea to use a boy's brain cells in order to make the game's villain more realistic. Instead, it made the game deadly. And so now Nick and Alex must enlist the help of the game's programmer and head to the video arcade for a final showdown with "Arcade" and his deadly virtual world.