I lived in arcades as a kid.

I still miss them, especially the seedy out-of-the-way ones. There was just something a poorly lit, smoke filled back room full of blaring arcade noise that always made me feel at home... the more of a dive the better, plus the obscure ones always managed to have some obscure games.

Not really. I was too young when they were still around and by the time I had an interest well, the arcades had all but closed up.

I remember only a handful of arcade machines... Guzzled too much money to be worth it though...

Where I come from the staples in all arcades were the Capcom beat'em ups, and then a selection of Metal Slug, Street Fighter, King of Fighters games.

...and a while ago I realized that probably all those boards and cabinets were bootlegs. I think I played my first genuine arcade cab in a business trip in Tokyo at the age of 30.

On another note, we never had any shmups, which is a shame. It is my favorite genre now, and I wish I was introduced to them at a younger age with fresh reflexes.

One of my favorites when I was younger was the Capcom AvP game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZkB2WgQeU8

Loved that game and could finish it in under a dollar. Hear it was based on a cancelled script for the AvP movie. Shame because it looks like it would have been far better than either of the AvP movies we eventually got.

My childhood arcade games:
Pac-Man, Gauntlet, Xevious, Double Dragon, Space Harrier...

Street Fighter II and Metal Slug are quite new for me...
I am old. :-/

I used to ride my bike all the way to the local bowling alley just to play arcade games (in the 80's). I enjoyed arcades through the 80's and early 90's. Lost interest after that. There used to be a retro-themed arcade in my area - 70's to early 80's arcades & classic pinball only, nothing modern - but sadly there just wasn't enough interest in the place so they eventually closed up.

Year Gaunlet, Bubble Bobble, Streetfighter II, Knights of the Round, Mortal Kombat 1, Xentipede eats lots of my Money.

Never played on it.
Id id saw it at few big shopping malls when I was but my parents never gave me money for that.

My time with the arcades was a bit late so i played the later games like metal slug, virtua cop and house of the dead

Oh yeah. Many a quarter was spent.

My faves were Double Dragon, Operation Wolf (loved that machinegun controller), TMNT arcade, Afterburner, the original Star Wars arcade with the voxel graphics and audio bits from the movie, NARC and knights of the Round.

Vector graphics, not voxels

But I know the game, doing the trench run . Fantastic.

I spend much of my youth in Arcades, remember dropping about £5 (now worth about £15) into Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles (yep just changing the title suddenly removed all violence from the franchise) and completing it.

Getting the graphics wrong proves my old school status. lol. I don't know, there was a bunch of lines and shit flying around in the vague shape of tie fighters. And Han Solo was yelling at me to ejaculate my proton torpedoes into the Death Star's glory hole.

I loved arcades as a kid, but I guess most of it was that the games one could play at home were normally just much poorer imitations of the arcade games.

At some point though, especially with genres like (graphical) adventures, roleplaying games, flight combat simulators and action games where you could save your progress, I realized home games could offer genres and longevity that arcade games just couldn't. I'd say it was e.g. Commodore 64, Apple IIc, IBM PC and 8bit NES that revealed this.

Since arcade games were coin operated and you'd normally restart it from the very beginning the next time you visited arcades, they had to rely on being easy to learn to play, and very sharply increasing challenge (so that you couldn't play too long with only one coin; the idea was that you'd have to feed the machine with coins all the time).

Also increasingly home games did start to become closer and closer to arcade games technically so the arcade games didn't have the technological edge anymore either. At that point all arcade games could offer anymore was some fancy tilting cabinets for racing games and shooters, but I personally didn't feel like paying just for those anymore.

But damn arcade gaming was expensive, you'd blow your whole month's allowances in one night to arcades.

I used to work for the guy who owned all the coin-ops, cafes and other beach facilities all rou d the area.i grew up in, so spent a lot of time on them. We used to have street fighter tournaments (remember the tricks to reset the machine, or set dhalsim invisible). Great days, real multiplayer back then, not hidden behind the internet. Bloody expensive though.