I grew up in the 80’s and 90’s, arguably the golden era of the video game arcade. Not the trendy bars disguised as arcades we have now, but the “real” ones. These were cacophonous dark rooms full of random bespoke hardware and software wonders, and ranged in size from a tiny room at the back of a pizza place to a giant room at the back of a bowling alley. I was lucky enough to grow up with access to some home video games, but arcades were always my favorite, without question.
The towering wooden arcade cabinets with TVs shoved into them were at one time the pinnacle of video game development, using dedicated hardware to push the medium forward in both the technological and monetization arenas. If you wanted to see how cool games could look, you had to go to the arcade and spend too much money playing them. Sometimes these games would come home, but the ports would always have to make tons of graphical sacrifices in order to be crammed onto affordable genericized home systems. You could play Street Fighter II on the SNES in your living room, but it was missing frames of animation and tons of sound details compared to the original.
