I loved arcades growing up. From the 1980s into most of 1990s, the arcades provided gaming experiences that you just couldn’t get at home. The graphics were better and the sound was superior. The joysticks, steering wheels, and guns made it an experience like no other. One thing console games did have over arcade games was how they were made to have greater longevity than arcade games. The notion behind arcades games was to give you a shortened, condensed experience for each quarter you were spending. So a role-playing game like Final Fantasy would have never fit the arcade model.

Street Fighter II‘s heyday in the arcade was insanity. Where I lived, the game brought more people to arcades than any other game I had ever seen. There were lines of people waiting to play the game, which sometimes…