I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and when it came to gaming at that time there was something so special about going to your local arcade. There was such a distinction between what you could play at home and what you could play for a quarter on what seemed liked huge, powerful machines. The gulf was enormous. You could play arcade ports on your NES, or Genesis, or SNES, but they were never, never as good as the real thing. I miss those days… but looking back on it now, it’s so clear why things happened the way they did.

Genre Depreciation
Shooters and fighting games were the mainstay of any arcade in the early to mid 90s. Street Fighter alone caused such a revival in the business, such a sense of competition that it would be stupid not to compete with Capcom and try and get in on its success. SNK was the most notable of these competitors. Not all of it was very original but they did their part in bringing some innovation to the genre, especially with the Samurai Shodown series. Shooters were going through they’re own innovation with games like Raiden helping make a splash here in North America. None of that would last, though. Fighting games reached their peak around 95′ or ‘96 and both fighters and shooters had just about lost all appeal in both arcades and home consoles, thanks in small part to the huge wave of bad clones that flooded the market during that period. The market just became so overcrowded with shameless ripoffs, people just got tired of the same old thing. Worse still, gamers were getting bored with the oldest and most recognizable icon in arcade gaming: the pinball machine. When Williams, who were in the pinball business since the ’40s, announced they were going to cease production of all pinball machines in 1999 it pretty much put a nail in the coffin of traditional arcade gaming.

The Power of the Home Console
The difference in what was available on a console and what you could experience at an arcade used to be so huge. Developers made ports for home consoles but they were never the same, even if the gameplay was spot on (like the infamous SNES version Street Fighter 2). Things started changing around the 32-bit era with the Sega Saturn and Sony’s Playstation. Titles like Mortal Kombat 3 and Ridge Racer were ported pretty much identically from their arcade counterparts (save for some load time) and the timeless promise of “bringing the arcade home” started becoming believable. There was still a ways to go though. Sega had trouble porting 1993’s Virtua Fighter to the Saturn, but that could’ve simply been a case of the rushed launch as they later released an almost arcade-perfect version of Virtua Fighter 2. As time went on things continued in this direction. The Dreamcast and GameCube were home to the perfect arcade conversion of Ikaruga, the Playstation 2 got Virtua Fighter 4 and dozens of hardcore Japanese shooters, and the Playstation 3 - nearing it’s European launch - is getting a down-to-the-last-detail arcade replica of Virtua Fighter 5 (coming to the Xbox 360 as well later on this summer). The increasing power of home consoles have eliminated any need to go to the arcade in North America.

So what’s left of arcades? They still have a fairly strong presence in Japan, but they’re all but dead here in North America. There were attempts at revivals with ideas like Playdium here in Canada, but interest has been low after an initial spike. It’s pretty sad seeing an icon of your youth wither away and die, and it’s sad to say that I don’t think anything - barring another console crash - will ever spark the kind of interest in arcades that it once had.