I like arcade games, but so do enough content creators online, and there is no shortage of game journalists writing on this topic either. However, after having sunk my teeth into arcade games, it became blatantly obvious that a lot of information out there is downright nonsensical, with people not understanding certain gameplay principles or even entire genres. Also, I speak from a position of relative authority as I managed to achieve a respectable degree of mastery of games in three genres, racing, puzzle, and fighting. My total count of one-credit clears is over 40, if I include a few shmups I otherwise would not include, as I played them on default settings but on an easier mode.

Another angle I provide is a hefty dose of high-IQ autism. I notice this when I watch some content creators, and a lot of them just seem to not be knowledgeable enough. In contrast, thanks to my methylphenidate-powered autism, I did extensive research, both by reading and by playing a lot of games over the last 18 months or so. I am at a point where I can ask an AI like Grok something about Japanese arcade games and point out inconsistencies if not downright wrong information in the answers. Of course, these answers are based on what people wrote online, often on community forums. This will be a long text, but it is supposed to be introductory. It’s a hardcore autist’s intro to arcade games. I mention quite a few games, but I deliberately am not going to include links or videos, primarily for space reasons.

A Bit of Personal History

I have been playing arcade games in one way or another for decades. The first such game I played was the Super Nintendo port of Capcom’s arcade smash hit Street Fighter II. I did not have access to a real arcade, but I recall that I once came across an arcade cabinet as a kid, tucked away in a corner at some restaurant, and put in some of my pocket money. The game was P-47: The Phantom Fighter, a mid-tier shmup. Due to my early exposure to this kind of game, primarily Street Fighter II, my view of video games is that you should ideally be able to complete them in one sitting and there should be an element of mastery to it, i.e. you get better because your execution and knowledge of some game’s mechanics improves as opposed to the modern approach of game design according to which your avatar levels up while your actual skill does not meaningfully improve.

Gaming in the West in the early 2000s did not really appeal to me. I essentially dropped this hobby after the PS2 got introduced, and only got back into it about a decade later. To my great surprise, I saw myself confronted with a sea of games that you are supposed to merely fumble through. Some games had mechanics so bad that it made me chuckle, i.e. sections where you could not avoid taking damage, but this was not an issue due to regenerating health. For a gamer with an interest in skill-based games, this was not a great time. Clearly, the world had changed considerably and the increased mainstream success of videogames was to blame for it.

I only more seriously and systematically sank some time into gaming after I had discovered modern shmups. Crimzon Clover I played a lot after its release, for instance. This is also how I came across the concept of one-credit clears, i.e. beating a game on one coin. Well, some arcade games require two or more coins to start them, but that is irrelevant. The point is that you do not put in some extra money to continue the game after the game over screen. You have one try to clear the game, and that is it. This is an approach to gaming that has almost completely disappeared. It is great fun, though, which is why I embarked on a highly enjoyable as well as educational deep dive on arcade games.

One-Credit Clears (1CCs)

In your typical modern video game, sloppy design abounds. I mentioned the problem of single-player games with regenerating health. It is often no longer possible to play flawlessly. As long as you muddle your way through somehow, you can tell yourself that you have beaten the game. Most ridiculously, this principle applies even on the highest levels of difficulty. I recall reading posts by guys who bragged about clearing some Call of Duty or Sony third-person action-game on the highest difficulty setting. One guy mentioned that he died over 150 times clearing The Last of Us at the highest difficulty setting, as if it was a badge of honor. Obviously, this only means that he fumbled his way through the game with a vengeance. It is ridiculous to design a game like that but it is more ridiculous to play it with these settings and confuse accidentally making it through the game with actual skill.

In contrast, a good arcade game is either like a classical music piece or a jazz improvisation. Some games require a heavy dose of memorization, like classic platform games or shmups, whereas others require you to master mechanics while each run is different due to randomness. A prime example of the latter category are puzzle games but even racing games can fit this description, if you need to make your way to the first place, overtaking one erratic driver after another. In the latter category, you need to be able to think on your feet, which is why such games often maintain a dedicated fan base decades after the original release.

The joy of a one-credit clear is that it is an indication that you have gained a good basic understanding of a game. It does not mean that you have mastered it. Quite often, you got a bit lucky and may even have fumbled your way through, for instance by relying on bombs in a shmup to defeat the final boss instead of really understanding the various bullet patterns. Your real journey begins after the one-credit clear, and you may be surprised by how much better you can still get at a game at that point. There is a meditative element to playing a game well that you understand to a high degree. Even better, because arcade games are often short, you can easily do successive runs if you so desire, with each run perhaps only taking ten to fifteen minutes.

The motivation for playing also switches from extrinsic to intrinsic. It is easier to motivate yourself if your goal is the 1CC. However, if you do not like the game well enough, but merely enough that you want to see the credits, then you probably will not keep playing it. In contrast, if you keep playing it, you do so because of the joy of honing your skills. In a shmup, you like seeing your final score increase, in a light-gun shooter you may want to get a better final grade, and in a racing game you want to shave off fractions of a second of your times, over and over.

A Tour the Force through Arcade Genres

After surveying arcade games from the 1970s to the present day, I noticed certain trends. There are of course some exceptions, but my focus is on the big picture. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the predominant concept was the static one-screen game. Think of Space Invaders with its rows of aliens descending from above, as an example. Other prominent examples are Pong, Break Out, Frogger, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, and Dig Dug. These games you could theoretically play endlessly, albeit some have “kill screens”, i.e. a game state at which the game either freezes or otherwise becomes unplayable, normally due to programming errors. These can be excused because the creators of these games did not think that there are turbo autists who would play Pac-Man for six hours straight to hit level 256. What these games have in common is that they are basically impossible to play if you have not grown up with them. Granted, they did pioneer certain mechanics but they are clearly outdated. There is a reason why the static one-screen design has disappeared virtually completely.

In the 1980s graphics and memory capacities increased tremendously, which led to much greater expressivity. This was the age of the scrolling game. There were two main genres: platformers and shooting games (shmups). In the former, which used to be called “athletic game”, you steered a character through some kind of obstacle course. This was the predecessor of Super Mario Bros. The original Mario Bros. game, on that note, was a static single-screen game. Shooting games were quite similar to platform games, with the exception that you could move your game character freely across the screen. Shooting enemies is not distinctive of shooting games. For instance, in Contra you traverse platforms and you shoot like in a typical shooting game like Gradius or R-Type. However, your ability of move across the screen is greatly restricted. These games sometimes looped indefinitely long, getting progressively harder, but some had exactly two loops so that they would end after about one hour. The reason was that arcade operators did not want to have a bunch of autists hanging around who play some game for half the day, after having put only 25 cents or 100 yen into the coin slot of the arcade cabinet. Shmups are still around but since the mid-1990s, at the latest, they are a niche genre. Raiden and Raiden II were big commercial hits. This franchise is still around but genre fans are hardly enamored by it. There are other shmups with a hardcore following, though, such as Dodonpachi Daioujou, Ketsui, and Mushhimesama Futari. These belong to the bullet hell genre, which differs from old-school shmups by having a much higher enemy bullet count, smaller ship hit boxes and, normally, no environmental hazards. Bullet hells emerged in the mid-1990s. Since the 2010s or so, a few bullet hell shmups were ported from PC to arcade. Today, you can get these games cheaply on Steam, but more on that later.

I find the mechanics of the aforementioned 1980s games quite difficult to get used to nowadays. They are quite awkward to play and they are normally not even that interesting, from a conceptual point of view. There were some classics, like Contra or Ghosts ‘n Goblins or, on the shooting-game side, Gradius and R-Type. However, these games focus heavily on memorization, which means that you need to play them over and over and over to get better at them and you need to know where the gotcha!-elements are. There are very few games from that era that stood the time. Interestingly, this genre fell completely out of fashion in the arcade, but it managed to thrive on home consoles for many years. In the 1990s, there was a deluge of platformers on the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo, and the Genesis also had a plethora of shooting games. Today, Nintendo keeps platformers alive, primarily with their Super Mario games, the latest of which is Super Mario Wonder. They also own the Donkey Kong Country franchise, but it has been over a decade since there was a new release. It is essentially a dead genre, at least as far as the mainstream is concerned.

In the late 1980s, Capcom released the beat ’em up Final Fight (1989). It was quite similar to Double Dragon (1987), but its graphics were incomparably better. It looked like a leap of multiple generations. This game was a rousing success and there were plenty of attempts to follow-up, but no other beat ’em up really stuck. Capcom itself released multiple such games in short succession, such as The Punisher, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, Alien vs. Predator, or two games based on the Dungeons and Dragons franchise. They used licenses in order to generate interest, but none of these games made as much money as Final Fight. The last beat ’em up Capcom released was Battle Circuit (1987). It did not do well. In fact, it did not even see a release outside of Japan. There was a minor resurgence in the PC indie scene in the 2010s but these games have no mainstream appeal at all anymore.

Another very notable release in the 1980s was Sega’s version of Tetris. This was one of the most successful arcade game in Japan from that point onward. It most certainly did not make as much money as Space Invaders. However, it remained a top earner for well over a decade. Even in the late 1990s it showed up in lists with the year’s top earners. This led to a boom of “falling-block” games, such as Sega’s Columns, which was also a hit and saw multiple sequels, but this franchise could not stick. The only other really important puzzle or action-puzzle game is Puyo Puyo. Inspired by the success of Street Fighter II (see next paragraph), it focused on competitive gameplay. This game was a massive success. Home console ports sold millions of copies, and there were multiple sequels, none of which managed to surpass the commercial success of Puyo Puyo 2. This genre was essentially dead in the mid to late 1990s, with the exception of Sega’s Tetris, which a lot of Japanese boomers apparently enjoyed playing indefinitely. This is not a joke. I have watched a few videos of retro arcades in Japan and quite frequently you see a Japanese salary man enjoying a game of Tetris there. If you look at list of top-earning action-puzzle games in the mid-1990s, you come across Puzzle Bobble (Bust a Move in the West) and Mr Driller, but when these games appeared, arcades were already declining. They were successful but had nowhere near the impact of Tetris or Puyo Puyo.

Arcades were on the decline in the 1980s as Nintendo’s Famicom/NES sold like hot cakes. The games on this console may not have been as good-looking as in the arcades, but the experience was comparable, and you could play games at home over and over, without having to endlessly feed coins to an arcade machine. In the 1990s, however, arcades got a new lease of life thanks to the 2D versus-fighting game Street Fighter II (SF II). This was originally designed as a one-player game in which you go up against one boss character after another, but it really took off due to the two-player versus mode. This game was a sensation. Arguably, it made the Super Nintendo a success, selling over six million copies overall, similar to how Tetris made the Game Boy a success. Street Fighter II was a cultural phenomenon. It had four sequels in the SF II series alone, a reboot (Street Fighter Alpha/Zero), a commercially disappointing sequel (Street Fighter III), and a 3D spin-off series (Street Fighter EX). There were countless copycats, many of which tried adding their own flavor, such as Mortal Kombat (digitized sprites), Fatal Fury (two lanes!?), or Samurai Shodown (weapons). However, the 2D fighting game genre peaked with SF II and then went on a long decline, first slowly then rapidly. In the mid to late 1990s, this was a pretty stale genre.

In the 1990s, the Sony PlayStation was a huge step up compared the two main predecessor consoles, the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo. Worse, for the arcade, the quality of ports got sometimes so good that there was little incentive to leave the house. Some companies, like Namco, put out arcade games on hardware that was based on the Sony PlayStation. This meant that arcade games no longer had an edge in graphics, with some exceptions. For instance, Tekken 1, 2 and 3 looked basically the same in the arcade and on PlayStation. The 3D fighting game genre did not start with Tekken, though, but with Sega’s Virtua Fighter. This game was a massive success, primarily because it convincingly modeled human bodies in 3D. The actual gameplay does not hold up. Virtua Fighter 2 looked even better, but it is unplayable without nostalgia goggles. Then Namco entered the arena, putting out a worse-looking 3D fighter that, however, was a lot easier to learn and more intuitive to play: The Tekken series turned into a global phenomenon whereas Virtua Fighter never really took off outside the Japanese arcade scene. Virtua Fighter 4 did really well in Japanese arcades in the early 2000s, supposedly making money like Street Fighter II back in the day, albeit I have a hard time believing this. Even if this is true, VF4 was not a cultural phenomenon the way SF II was, and Sega, the company behind this game, was never able to commercially exploit this franchise the same way Capcom managed to milk the Street Fighter franchise. The biggest fighting game franchises, with arcade roots, these days are Street Fighter, Tekken, and Mortal Kombat. Since the early 2000s, the home console versions are basically identically to the arcade versions.

Racing games have been around basically since the beginning of the arcades. However, until the advent of 3D games, you essentially moved the car only on the X-axis. Examples of this are Out Run and Final Lap. Even these games were big successes during their time, presumably because of the sense of speed they conveyed. In addition, they were housed in were big cabinets, essentially consisting of a replica car with a big screen in front of you. These were called “deluxe cabinets”. However, only after racing games were modeled in 3D did controls meaningfully improve. There were some early experiments by Namco in the late 1980s with Winning Run, which saw various sequels. However, 3D racing games really took off with Sega’s Virtua Racing (1992). This game has a fantastic art direction that holds up to this day. It completely obliterated games in the old-style racing genre, but they stuck around a bit longer because Virtua Racing was a very expensive arcade cabinet that operators also charged a multiple of the typical 100 yen for playing. One year later, Namco released Ridge Racer, which made look Virtua Racing look downright primitive in comparison. It also played a lot better. Then Sega panicked and worked really hard on Daytona USA, one of the most successful arcade racing games of all time. The racing genre remained quite strong for a few strong years before falling off a cliff. Namco released two sequels to Ridge Racer while Sega found renewed success with Sega Rally Championship. Namco shifted its focus to console gaming whereas Sega pumped out a lot of racing games in the arcade throughout the 1990s and 2000s. None of them had the same impact as Daytona USA or Sega Rally Championship, albeit some were very well received such as Sega Rally Championship 2. F355 Challenge (1999) was praised for realistically replicating the controls of the titular F355. This was the first “sim racer”. Sega is still around. Their biggest racing franchise is Initial D, which has been enjoying a decent run for over two decades now, with the first release in 2002. It has some interesting ideas, like modeling the wear and tear of tires via physics simulations. The greater the attrition on your tires, the more difficult it is to control your car while drifting. Namco produced a similar series on the manga Wangan Midnight. Both focus on one-on-one races. Arguably, these two franchises are largely carried by their licenses.

The other big genre that relies on special-made “deluxe cabinets” is light-gun shooters. You have probably come across a Time Crisis or a House of the Dead arcade cabinet in some mall or airport at some point. This is an old genre but before Sega’s Virtua Cop (1994), they were shooting-gallery games where the camera panned from left to right, and the other way. In contrast, Virtua Cop put you in first person, with a camera zooming around. It felt like being in a movie. There were two sequels, but the more important game is probably House of the Dead, which is still an active franchise. Namco’s Time Crisis completely wipes the floor with Sega’s games, though, as it is much more dynamic, allowing you to take cover and influence the speed of the action, versus the wait-and-shoot style of Sega’s games, in particular Virtua Cop. The light-gun genre still exists, with some graphically pretty impressive games. If you come across a machine in the wild, throw in a coin or two. It’s good fun, and not replicable at home. However, this is a dead genre. First-person shooters provide a more immersive experience.

At the end of the 1990s and after, arcades changed completely. As the various genres had died off or moved to home consoles, various kind of gambling machines (pachinko) took over. Some novelty games were also popular for a while, such as various horse riding simulators or digital trading-card games. Rhythm games, however, really blew up, with Konami’s Beatmania series leading the charge. Konami released countless rhythm games, as did Sega and Namco. They have an incredible execution threshold. Furthermore, they are no longer designed to be fully mastered. I read of more recent versions of these games containing hundreds or thousands of songs. IThe idea is that you throw in some coins, pick a song you like, and have a go at it. Even top players seem to only focus on a small subset of songs. The rhythm genre is still very much alive in Japan and also has found a modicum of success in the West, thanks to the Hatsune Miku series or, much earlier, Elite Beat Agents on the Nintendo DS.

The only arcade video game genres that seem to commercially work out these days are racing, light-gun, and rhythm games. However, modern arcade racing games do not seem to be as well designed as they used to be. Some are based on normie franchises like Fast and Furious. Frequently, mobile games get licensed to make arcade games based on them. Every one to two years, there is a new light-gun game. The most recent one seems to be Bandai Namco’s Goldstorm Pirates. The trailer makes it look like a kid-friendly game for the entire family. Rhythm games, in contrast, seem to offer something for every level of skill, but they are also extremely autistic. You may as well just learn a music instrument.

Some arcade genres have successfully moved to PC or game consoles, such as fighting games and shmups. You can even argue that the desire to drive and shoot is adequately served by a game like GTA V. For normies, this is certainly enough. By and large, 1990s and early-2000s arcade-gaming concepts have completely disappeared, though. The “arcade-inspired controls” of GTA V and other triple-A games have little to do with masterfully designed arcade games of yore.

Why Arcade Video Games Thrived and Eventually Died

From a documentary on Japanese arcades I learned that until the late 1980s or early 1990s, Japanese arcades could be open 24/7. Thus, arcade cabinets could, theoretically, generate revenue around the clock. However, due to a change in the laws, opening hours had to be greatly reduced. This put pressure on arcade game manufacturers to produce tighter experiences. It was no longer feasible to let a game go on forever, and even a one-hour two-loop game was too long. Instead, in the 1990s, arcade games were made to last about fifteen minutes or so, with rare exceptions such as shmups, which hearkened back to 1980s arcade-game design. At that point, this was a genre on life support, however.

The guideline was that a game had to earn 100 yen in three minutes, and games were designed with this in mind. The idea was that the customer would feel as if he got his money’s worth within three minutes, but not frustrate him so much that he would not come back. This also worked for the arcade operator. You can see this in some games, which rapidly ramp up in difficulty after about two to three minutes. They are not impossible to beat, just a lot more difficult. In racing games, this was often quite explicitly part of the design. For instance, the beginner course of Daytona USA takes a little less than three minutes to complete. Presumably, it was timed so that the whole loop from putting in a coin, selecting the car, and actually playing take more or less exactly three minutes. Then the game is over and you can put in another coin.

Interestingly, from an interview with former Midway employees, the company behind Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam, among others, I learned that they had tuned their games to make a quarter every 45 seconds. Four quarters equal one dollar and four time 45 seconds equals 180 second, which equals 3 minutes. Superficially, this looks like the Japanese rule of thumb. However, the effect is much different as you need to take the first quarter already after 45 seconds. Thus, cheap deaths may happen sooner. Midway often put out games we would consider poorly balanced, for players, such as the Terminator 2 light gun game or Revolution X. Terminator 2 did extremely well for them. Apparently, it cannot even be beaten on one credit. However, having gotten high on their own farts, they designed Revolution X just as poorly, attempting to take one credit every 45 seconds, and the result was that people just did not play the game very much. The Terminator franchise carried Midway’s light gun game on the franchise. However, Revolution X, for which they worked with the then very popular rock band Aerosmith, was a commercial disaster.

The Japanese approach leads to a much more interesting approach to design as there is not that much pressure to get the player off the machine right away. They get some time to get used to the game’s mechanics before they have to prove that they know how to play the game. The result was a compact, fine-tuned experience were you saw yourself improve, sometimes quickly, and because games are not that long, they do not look like completely insurmountable challenges. On top, there was the “100 yen democracy”, which is the idea that the arcade visitor votes with his 100 yen coins on which games he wants to play. In the intro I spoke about clueless people online. Here is a great example: very often, people speak of arcade games derogatorily, calling them “quarter munchers”. This is completely backwards. A quarter muncher has to be an excellent game because you would not put quarters into the machine if you did not enjoy the game. Midway learned this the hard way with Revolution X.

In the 1990s, you could still make arcade games with fairly small teams, relatively modest amounts of money, and did not take that much time. Thus, you had game studios putting out game after game, trying to improve upon what they saw their competitors do, or just to get out a better version of a recent hit. If a game did not make enough money, it did not stay in arcades for long. The risk for arcade operators was also quite manageable as they could rent or sell back games to the operator, thus there was a willingness to give new games a chance. Also, hardly any game appeared out of nowhere. There were big trade shows and, more importantly, many games had to first do well during a location test, which meant that the publisher put up a few arcade machines with the current version of some game they were working on, and it had to make a certain amount of money to justify a proper release. Game developers often attended such location tests, observing players and talking to them. This led to changes in game mechanics or difficulty adjustments. If someone managed to 1CC a game during a location test it was seen as a very serious issue that needed immediate attention. However, the worst outcome was that a game did not make enough money. These games were unceremoniously canned. This is one reason why Tetris the Grand Master 4 only saw a release on Steam this year: It failed a location test in 2009, not making enough money to satisfy the publisher. There was another location test in 2015, which perhaps did not go so well either. On that note, Tetris the Grand Master 3 was released in arcades but fared rather poorly. Apparently, it did really well during location tests but given how small the community around this series is, it is plausible that a bunch of guys put so much money into the cabinet that the game passed the location test, leading to the misguided conclusion that the game had widespread appeal.

At some point, arcade games began costing too much money for rapid iterations. Also, player number dwindled, due to competition from home consoles. When you read online discussions on the death of arcades, people often talk about consoles, which was surely a factor. However, if that had been the main issue, there should not have been a recovery in the early 1990s as Nintendo had a very successful console on the market in the early 1980s. A YouTuber I quite like, Mark_MSX, promotes the hypothesis that arcade games died because of “save states”, i.e. in the 1990s you had memory cards and games could get longer and longer, thus providing different experiences. This is not convincing because the Nintendo Famicom had battery-enabled saves in the 1980s. The Legend of Zelda (1986) is a very prominent example.

My argument is that arcades died because the various genres that were invented there had run their course. They got refined, peaked, and declined. The only surviving genres are those that cannot easily be replicated at home. Take beat ’em ups: there was a winning formula, discovered via Final Fight. Afterwards, Capcom could never really improve on it, and less than a decade later, they had released their last arcade beat ’em up. The situation with traditional shmups is even more dire. You can argue that Gradius (1986) codified this genre, and if it was not Gradius, then by the time R-Type (1987) released, you basically had seen all the genre had to offer, with all future games being a variation on a very familiar theme. What is worse, once you have mastered a game in a particular genre, it is a lot easier to also master other games in the same genre. Thus, playing such games becomes somewhat repetitive. This is how genres die. Sometimes, there is a cycle of successive refinement before a genre reaches its peaks and then declines. Arguably, Street Fighter II: Champion Edition and Puyo Puyo 2 are better games than their predecessors. However, afterwards stagnation set in.

I think that there is a “rule of three” in arcade games. The pattern consists of success, refinement, and excess. Suddenly and unexpectedly, a company has a hit on its hand, far exceeding all sales expectations. The next step is that they want to refine the game. They want to have a better version out there because they know that other game studios are already working on their own versions of this game. This second version is often the best in the franchise. Not wanting to stagnate, however, they put out a third game that normally does quite poorly as it only appeals to the hard core of fans. This is obviously no law of nature, but it is surprising how many franchises follow this pattern, like Puyo Puyo (Puyo Puyo, Puyo Puyo 2, Puyo Puyo Sun), Street Fighter II (SF II, SF II:CE, SF II:HF), Street Fighter Alpha (1, 2, 3), Street Fighter on a meta level (Street Fighter II, Street Fighter Alpha/Zero, Street Fighter III), Metal Slug (1, 2/X, 3), Tetris The Grand Master (TGM, TGM2, TGM3), or Mr Driller (1, 2, G). Seeing Capcom so often on this list I found a bit surprising at first as it contradicted what I had read in an interview with them, where one of the key designers said that their goal is to make every new game in a franchise 5% better. Apparently, once you have a nearly perfect game, trying to make it even better invariably makes it worse.

There are two main approaches towards genre fatigue. One is to make games more difficult. Bullet hell shmups did this. They also have intricate scoring system, artificially raising the difficulty ceiling even higher. Some classic games like Dodonpachi (1987) and Ketsui (2003) are still being played today by a small cadre of hardcore gamers. The other approach is mixing up the formula. This means that with each new game or sequel the game mechanics change in inexplicable ways. Infamous for this is SNK. I used to hold them in high regards, but this was before I put some time into their games. For instance, they released a mainline King of Fighters game every year from 1994 to 2003. There are new mechanics every time, but there is no successive refinement. They just throw some crap at the wall, not even waiting to see what sticks, and the next year, they change the game mechanics. They did this in all their franchises, such as Samurai Shodown, Fatal Fury, Art of Fighting, or World Heroes. It is absolutely cringe-worthy. In contrast, Capcom very carefully added new mechanics, albeit after their reboot of the Street Fighter franchise with SF IV, they started doing the same with the sequels. In any case, once a genre has peaked, there is little interest to keep playing. We observe the same with today’s big online games. People flock to the same few games: Counter Strike, Fortnite, League of Legends. Whatever you may think of them, they have perfected the formula. However, due to their massive multiplayer nature, people are very invested in them, and due to high costs, it is next to impossible for competing games to dethrone any of these titles.

A good example for a genre peaking and combusting is arcade racing. I consider Rave Racer the best arcade-racing game ever made. It was the last arcade racer Namco produced, instead focusing on console releases for the PlayStation. In these games, there is little realism. There are no racing courses you would recognize from TV or real-world car, and the driving physics are not at all realistic. Supposedly, there is little content in such games because there is just one car and four courses. However, the goal is to master the courses. To do so, you can easily sink a few dozen hours into it, if not more. Then Sony released Gran Turismo, with dozens if not hundreds of real world cars and real-world tracks. Normies bought this game in droves, and quantity won out over quality. Namco thought they had to compete, so later games, like Ridge Racer Type 4 for PlayStation, allow you to choose more realistic driving mechanics. Fun drifting is no longer on the menu because it is not realistic. In addition, Namco put over three hundred fake cars in the game! The cars in Ridge Racer and Rave Racer are iconic, even if they were made up by Namco. A few years later, it was over for racing games as Gran Turismo turned into a phenomenon. Normies apparently preferred picking one out of over 1,000 real cars and driving against brain-dead AI on real-world courses versus the high-octane risk-and-reward racing action of Ride Racer and Rave Racer.

How to Pick an Arcade Game

I have found that the best way to pick a game today is the same as back in the olden days. Of course, if you use an emulator you do not need to put any coins into a machine. Just try a game you may like and if it does not hook you then the game has already failed. A good arcade game has to be immediately accessible and appealing, but designed in a way that its true depth becomes apparent only after a while. This is not like a console game that supposedly gets good ten hours in. This is a ridiculous concept to begin with. If you do not like an arcade game after two or three credits, do not waste any more time on it. The best games you like the moment you start playing.

You may think that nostalgia must be a big factor to enjoying arcade games that are twenty to thirty years old. To some extent this is true. I do not think that Street Fighter II is particularly appealing to anyone who did not live through that time. For a while, it was the game basically everybody played at home in his Super Nintendo. However, almost all my favorite arcade games I first played within the last few years. There were some I was aware of and others I did not even know they existed. It is also important to point out that 1990s arcade games were normally not aiming for realism in graphics. Thus, their visuals are often of a timeless quality. In fact, I find that the low-polygon look of Virtua Racing, Ridge Racer, or Street Fighter EX has a charm that more recent 3D games with their aspirations towards realism do not have. I quite like this clean stylized look.

What Game to Pick

If you are unsure, start with the games that made the biggest impact during their time, and then branch out. Below, I list some standard recommendations as well as games I like a lot but which may not be as well known. The first three genres below have their roots in the 1980s. I think they are only historically relevant. Some genres that blew up in the 1990s hold up really well, though.

Platformers: If you must, Ghosts’ n Goblins, Ghouls ‘n Ghosts, and Contra. However, this genre has better games on home consoles, such as Castlevania on the NES, Super Castlevania IV on the SNES or Contra III, also on the SNES. 2D Super Mario games are a distant descendant and probably the best representation. Super Mario World (SNES) is great. Many people online praise Metal Slug. I find it too memorization-heavy, though. I consider Metal Slug 2 the best of the series, but normie consensus is that the really bloated Metal Slug 3 is the best one. There is a remade version of Metal Slug X that has less slowdown but a worse art direction. Normies will tell you that it is the better game, but I disagree.

Classic shmups: Gradius, Gradius II, R-Type, R-Type II are the most common recommendations. There are also three basic Raiden games: Raiden, Raiden II, and Raiden DX. They are very difficult. I think you are better off playing Raiden Fighter Jet or Strikers 1945. This is also a genre you will probably find unapproachable if you did not grow up with it. There is a modern version of Gradius, Gradius V, on PlayStation 2. It captures the spirit of this series well, and it also illustrates why this kind of game design has fallen out of favor: A single loop takes over one hour and the game requires a lot of memorization. It is a very static game.

Beat ’em Ups: Double Dragon and Final Fight are the best-known titles. I quite enjoyed playing through Cadillac and Dinosaurs (once). Probably the best graphics in the genre can be found in Capcom’s two Dungeon-and-Dragons beat ’em ups, Tower of Doom and Shadow over Mystara. I also liked Knights of the Round. This is a genre I would not play for an 1CC as the mechanics are really archaic. I do not enjoy these games very much at all.

The 2D versus fighting genre really started with Street Fighter II. If you have not grown up with it, you will probably find it unplayable. The default recommendations are SF II: Champion Edition, SF II: Hyper Fighting, and Super Street Fighter II Turbo. In my view, the best game in this genre is Street Fighter Alpha 2 (Zero 2 in Japan), but the problem is that if you have played a lot of SF II, you will wipe the floor with the CPU opponents as Capcom attempted to remove the CPU cheating, based on input reading and giving it access to commands you do not have yourself, such as firing projectiles instantly. Street Fighter III: Third Strike is supposedly the best 2D fighter ever made but as a single-player experience I did not find it compelling. Also note that this game flopped hard in the arcade and has kept alive by a small bunch of autists who have been singing its praises for over two decades online. There is also a often-praised derivative series based on Marvel characters, which normies like but I found them to be quite dumbed down. The most successful entries were Marvel vs, Capcom and Marvel vs. Capcom 2. Vampire Savior is not a bad Capcom fighter. It is very quirky but it controls really well. Often you find games by SNK on best-of lists with fighting games. Frankly, I do not think that SNK knows how to make a good game. The mainstream likes King of Fighters 98, King of Fighters 2000, Fatal Fury Special, Garou: Mark of the Wolves, Samurai Shodown II, Samurai Shodown IV, and both Last Blade games. SNK was a real master at producing garbage. I wish they would have produced fewer games and put more thought into them. The games were sold cheaply to arcades, which is why some spread widely.

The 3D fighting genre is a bit tricky because the gap between today and the 1990s is enormous. I find the first three iterations of Virtua Fighter uninteresting. Virtua Fighter 4 I like better on the PS2 because the characters are smaller than in the arcade version, improving visibility. This is a version I recommend checking out, preferably the VF 4 Evolution revision. Tekken 1 and 2 you probably do not want to subject yourself to, but Tekken 3 is a high-quality game that I like playing occasionally. Still, I cannot seriously recommend it, given that this franchise thrived for many years afterwards. Street Fighter EX is worth a few credits, just to see an attempt at translating 2D SFII mechanics into a 3D playing field. Soul Calibur was quite popular back in the days and is still quite playable. I enjoyed the first game the best. It has an excellent port for the Sega Dreamcast. The sequel is held in higher regards by the hive mind, though.

In the (action-)puzzle or block-stacking genre, historically significant games are Sega’s Tetris (1988), Columns, and Puyo Puyo. None of them appeal to me. Sega’s version of Tetris is really awkward to play. Puyo Puyo 2 is generally considered the peak of the series and even to this day, this is the most popular rule set people play. My recommendation is Tetris The Grand Master and its sequel. Mr Driller is also very good. Less well-known games I really enjoyed are Cleopatra Fortune and Aqua Rush. There is also the quirky Dancing Eyes. Tetris Giant is also quite fun, showing the inventiveness of Sega once again.

The most highly regarded 1990s arcade racing games are Daytona USA, Sega Rally Championship, and Ridge Racer. All of them are still worth playing today. I also like Virtua Racing, Ridge Racer 1 and 2, Rave Racer, Sega Rally Championship 2, and Daytona USA 2. My two favorite racing games, by far, are Ridge Racer (1) and Rave Racer. Rave Racer contains the absolutely fantastic Mountain course, which I consider to be the peak of the genre. My favorite racing game from Sega is Indy 500, which is a game hardly anyone seems to play. It is more methodological than the sometimes rather chaotic Daytona USA. However, the best Namco racing games I like better than the best Sega racing games.

Light-gun games are not the same at home, in particular if you play with a mouse to emulate the light gun. The genre codifiers are Sega’s Virtua Cop and House of the Dead. You will often come across praise for House of the Dead 2. However, Namco’s Time Crisis series eclipses Sega’s games in this genre. Time Crisis was already a very good game, but Time Crisis II is even better. My favorite game is Time Crisis: Crisis Zone, but I am only familiar with the graphically improved PS2 port. I would find it hard to believe that someone who seriously played Time Crisis could go back to the early Virtua Cop or House of the Dead game and say with a straight face that they have the same level of quality.

Bullet-hell shmups are a niche genre. However, as a consequence, the people who talk about these games normally also play them. Consequently, the default recommendations are often also the games you would find the most well-made if you played them intensely yourself. There is only one game studio that really matters in this genre: CAVE. The game that birthed this genre is Dodonpachi, which is still worth playing. The sequel Dodonpachi Daioujou is often praised as the best bullet hell ever made, and if it is not this one, then it is Ketsui. I am partial to Progear as it has wonderful graphics and great bullet-cancelling mechanics. Game journalist say that Ikaruga, made by Treasure, is the best shmup ever. It is available as a port for Steam, so it is very accessible. It is not a game I can see myself putting a lot of time into.

Modern Arcade-Style Games

The term “arcade game” is used inflationarily nowadays. No indie Steam game referring to its supposed “arcade roots” can have the same quality as the games it cribs ideas from, though. Not only is the competitive environment different, today’s game designers also no longer have the experience and competency to design a tight game loop. However, there are some pretty good games available on Steam that are of very high quality. None of them are especially popular. Of course, the 1990s/early 2000s arcade is dead and it is not going to come back. Still, you can get somewhat comparable experiences.

Most obviously, versus fighting games thrive on PC (and console) nowadays. I do not think modern versions of Street Fighter or Tekken are as well-designed as earlier versions were, but they still offer a relatively pure gameplay experience. The most technical fighting game is arguably Virtua Fighter 5, which was recently released on Steam in a new version named Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O. Its player base is a small fraction of Tekken 8 or Street Fighter 6. I have played an earlier version of VF5 on PlayStation 3 and quite liked it.

Bullet hell shmups are easily available nowadays. The top games on Steam are Crimzon Clover, Dodonpachi Resurrection, Death Smiles I & II, Mushihimesama, and Rolling Gunner. The game-journo favorite Ikaruga is also on Steam. If you want to explore this genre, pick one game and focus on it. For someone new to the genre, Rolling Gunner would be an excellent start.

The two most important action-puzzle franchises are also on Steam. You can buy Puyo Puyo Champions as well as Tetris the Grand Master 4. These are games with a very high skill-ceiling. Both are acquired tastes. I have been playing Tetris the Grand Master 4 since its release. I think it is a very good game.

Ultimately, I think that gaming is a lot poorer off without a thriving arcade industry. There are so many innovations in gaming that are erroneously ascribed to the first company that introduced them into the consumer market. Namco’s Alpine Racer inspired countless skiing and extreme-sports games. They also had a jet-ski game that likely prompted Nintendo to make Wave Race 64. There were analogue controls in arcades over a decade before Nintendo and Sony put such technology into their controllers. Even the supposed stroke of genius Nintendo had in the early 2000s with Nintendogs did not come out of nowhere as Sega had released a dog-walking game in the arcade a few years earlier. Another Nintendo innovation, the 3D space shooter in the form of Star Fox, looks a lot like a poor man’s version of Namco’s Star Blade, which had been released years earlier. What was lost was the rapid pace of innovation, as a consequence of the intensive competition between Japanese game studios. They also needed to satisfy both arcade operators and gamers, so they had the difficult task of making sure that players kept putting coins into arcade cabinets. They can walk away anytime and if they do not like the game, they may only drop a single 100-yen coin. This resulted in the best games having rewarding game loops and great mechanics, and there was not any fluff either because arcade operators did not like wasted time. You can even argue that the best arcade games were the commercially most successfully ones as they had to keep making money. This is a much better model, for ensuring quality, than the one-off asking price of console games. Of course, this idea got perverted by endless DLC for modern “games as a service”. Still, this approach better connects revenues and quality as gamers who did not like the game would stop playing and not purchase any DLC.

The Big Japanese Arcade Developers

When looking at the history of major Japanese gaming companies, it seems that the earlier they got out of the arcade market, the better it was for them economically. Nintendo realised that it had no future in the 1980s. Their Famicom/NES was a big success and they went where the money was. Note that Nintendo was not an also-ran in the arcade industry. Their title Donkey Kong is one of the most successful games of all time. Capcom also saw that the writing was on the wall in the 1990s. They did not manage to produce a game anywhere near as successful as Street Fighter II. Street Fighter III was a flop. However, they managed to turn their arcade successes into console blockbusters and doubled down on it, developing hit franchises like Mega Man in the 1980s, Resident Evil in the 1990s, or Monster Hunter in the 2000s.

Konami was a second-rate arcade developer but they were savvy enough to double down on good concepts while dropping game concepts that were no longer viable. They probably peaked in the 1980s with Gradius, and in the early 1990s they had some minor hits. (Konami beat ’em ups like The Simpsons and X-Men did a lot better in the US than in Japan.) However, in the late 1990s they struck gold with rhythm games and managed to almost corner the market. On gaming forums you hear a lot of whining about Konami “betraying gamers” because there has not been a good Contra or Castlevania game for decades. However, these are no longer mainstream franchises. Konami have been around for a very long time and they clearly understand the market better than countless of their competitors that went bust in the 1990s.

The biggest joke of a company is SNK. They had a successful run with their NeoGeo system, but this was simply low-cost hardware, for which they sold low-cost games. This was the reason why the NeoGeo was so popular in the third world. They could not afford Capcom, Namco, or Sega games, so they bought from SNK. The difference in quality between Capcom and SNK is incredible. I am aware that there are SNK fanboys out there, but this is based on people praising digitized sprites, thinking this is the peak of 2D art. If you look up earning charts in Japanese magazines like Game Machine, you observe that some SNK games make money for a few weeks and then they drop like a rock. I was most amused when I learned that games that SNK fanboys claim are oh-so great barely made it into the top 20 for one two-week period after release. When the NeoGeo was released, it was already an outdated system. Amusingly, SNK tried to do the same with 3D hardware in the late 1990s in the form of the Hyper NeoGeo 64, not realizing that 3D technology was advancing so rapidly that a low-cost platform would not be an attractive proposition. What is worse, at this point the arcade industry was imploding, so there was no space for a new system. It is a surprise it took them so long to go bankrupt.

The most tragic company, in my view, is Sega. They were very creative but seemed to have little idea about how to run a business. Oftentimes, they had a smash hit, based on a technical innovation. But then a competitor came around and completely blows them out of the water. This is followed by Sega just doubling down, seemingly without learning their lesson. I find it incredible that Sega had basically a monopoly on the action-puzzle section of the arcade market, but did nothing with it. Their 1988 version of Sega was an incredible success and they waited 11 years before releasing an updated version with better graphics and marginally better gameplay, but at that time a small competitor had already released a much better Tetris game the year before, i.e. Tetris the Grand Master. Columns also made a lot of money but this franchise has been dead for two decades. Lastly, Sega helped turn Puyo Puyo into a massive success, collaborating with Compile. Later on the even bought the franchise, after Compile went bankrupt. The status of this franchise is that it is basically irrelevant.

Then there are the big humiliations Sega had to endure. In 1992 they put out Virtua Racing, setting a new standard for 3D racing games. Namco blows them completely out of the water with Ridge Racer in 1993. Then they get the Daytona USA license and produce a loud, Western-style game. It was very successful, but instead of refining it quickly, they just pump out a bunch more racing games, none of which was nearly as successful as Daytona USA. The successor Daytona USA 2 came out four years later. Meanwhile, Namco refined Ridge Racer and moved the franchise to consoles because that is where the money was. Namco bitch-slapped Sega much more often. Virtua Fighter 2 was a great success for Sega, running on very expensive hardware. Namco, on the other hand, releases Tekken on very low-cost hardware based on the PlayStation. Virtua Fighter started the 3D versus-fighting genre and Namco completely took over this market. Yes, Virtua Fighter 4 did well, but overall, Tekken, which is much more approachable than Virtua Fighter, dwarfs its inspiration. Sega also massively innovated in the light-gun genre, with Virtua Cop moving away from shooting gallery settings to a more complex 3D world. Then along comes Namco with Time Crisis, and multiple sequels. They make Virtua Cop look ancient. These games also sold very well on console, unlike Virtua Cop. Then there is F355 Challenge, the first sim-racer. Sega does not own this market. Instead, Sony came in and funded Gran Turismo. The amount of squandered opportunities on Sega’s record is mind-blowing. Sometimes, they did not even get to milk a hit game for a year before a competitor showed up to ear their lunch. I really wonder what was going on there. Did upper management think they are above taking inspiration from Namco who is quite clearly able to figure out how to make the genres Sega pioneered more accessible? There is an alternative reality in which Virtua Fighter is the top fighting franchise, Virtua Racing was the dominant arcade racing gamer series for half a decade, Sega Sim Racing the top serious racing game on console in the 2000s, Virtua Cop the most lauded light-gun shooter, and the triad Sega Tetris, Puyo Puyo, and Columns is alive and kicking, even if only on smartphones.

Namco is my favorite arcade developer. They probably stuck around a bit too long as well, eventually merging with Bandai. However, in their best games you feel that they really get what makes a good arcade game: tension, action, a high skill ceiling, and a really tight game loop. I was blown away by how good the Ridge Racer track is, for instance. This is a 32-year-old game! You barely start the race before you hit a corner so sharp that you crash into the wall, and once you have learned how to drift, it is intoxicating to play this game. In contrast, I find the course design in Daytona USA quite lacking. Namco was able to produce great racing games (Ridge Racer), light gun games (Time Crisis), fighting games (Tekken, Soul Calibur), and action-puzzle games (Mr Driller). They had a few duds as well, but every Namco game I sunk my teeth in I walked away being impressed by how well-crafted they were. This also applies to games that are sometimes derided for their simplicity like Alpine Racer. It is very unfortunate that we have lost this level of quality.

The Arcade Industry was Destined to Fail

I think that Namco had figured out the arcade better than any of its competitors. Yet, they also had to downsize their arcade operations. They still produce games, as does Sega, but their focus is on console gaming. I think the reason is that as game development got more expensive, the arcade business just became too risky. Remember that a game needs to compete for every single 100-yen coin. On top, there is a ceiling regarding the number of sales. In a declining market this is even worse. On top, private collectors cannot possibly make up for the loss of sales to arcade operators. Gamers simply had a cheap alternative in the form of game consoles as well as other forms of entertainment, which rose to prominence in the early 2000s, such as the Internet, rhythm games, and MMORPGs. Being able to play console games online was also more convenient than going to an arcade. Thus, it became increasingly less clear where the competitive advantage of the arcade environment was.

Up until the early 1990s, arcade games had the best graphics, years ahead of game consoles and PCs. Sega sank a lot of money into hardware such as their Model-series (Model 1, Model 2, Model 3). Their early-2000s system Lindbergh, which ran Virtua Fighter 5, was also quite advanced but the difference to contemporary PCs and game consoles was no longer as remarkable. Yet, if you can play the same game at home as in the arcade, why bother going to the arcade? Furthermore, the game studio can capture a lot more of the money of a successful game. If you sell an arcade cabinet to an arcade operator, you make a one-off sale. Later, revenue-sharing models were implemented. However, you make a lot more money if you can sell a hit game to the customer, be it via Steam or any of the game console ecosystems. Let’s assume you sell 10,000 arcade cabinets, which would have been a very high number in the early 2000s, that cost $10k each. You make $100m revenue but probably also have a profit margin that is not nearly as high as with software. In contrast, a modest hit that sells one million copies at $60 already leads to $60m, with much reduced manufacturing risk. A few years later, the numbers work out even better thanks to digital distribution, and a bigger home console market. Tekken 7 has sold 12 million copies. Let’s assume that they were all sold for $60, which should be approximately correct because the actual sales price is higher and we also assume that no DLC was sold. This means that the total revenue was $720 million. There is no way you could sell enough arcade machines to make this much money. Even if the total revenue was half that figure, it is obvious that it no longer makes any sense to release a big budget arcade game. Note that this is only for the purpose of installation. Today, a lot of the Japanese arcade business is based on revenue-sharing but the machine comes at a reduced price and may even be a free loan. It is not at all clear to me how big money could even be made in this environment anymore.

In hindsight it is obvious that the runaway success of game consoles made the arcade business less and less appealing. It no longer even makes sense to develop an arcade game with great graphics, with the exception of games that were developed for console first and then ported to the arcade, which happened with Tekken 7. Well, porting a game is not much of an effort because arcade hardware is based on PCs nowadays anyway. Also, if you look at an individual consumer, it seems easier to get this person to spend $60 or 6,000 yen one time than 100 yen sixty times. It is wishful thinking to assume that arcades could have survived much longer. It is a small miracle that they stuck around for as long as they have.