Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix's lead designer, David Sirlin, was recently interviewed by IncGamers.com. [...] Do you think the decline in arcade culture is a real shame? I know it's still reasonably strong in Japan, but in the UK at least, arcades are nowhere near the level of popularity they used to have, and to the best of my knowledge it's the same in the US.
Japan is physically much smaller than the US, and that alone helps arcades there - you are never so far away from opponents as we are here - but arcades also did plenty to kill themselves. The business was based on having more and more expensive hardware that you can't have at home, but home consoles got better and better and starting having pretty amazing graphics themselves. Arcades should have realized they were marketing entirely the wrong thing. Their strength was that they are a social gathering place for gamers, not that they have expensive hardware, and I think it took far, far too many years for most to realize that. By then, their ship had sailed.
