what's your fave era of arcade games?
- Thread starter soop
- Start date
For me, the Arcades began and ended with SEGA's 3D output.
My earliest vivid memory of the Arcades is seeing Virtua Racing running. It was unlike anything I had seen before; So vivid, colourful and 3D. It's hard to overstate how good looking it was in comparison to any other Videogame at the time. Then we moved onto Virtua Fighter and the animation of the Humans was so lifelike and real, it was a joy to just move the characters in this 3D world.
The apex of Arcades for myself was seeing Virtua Fighter 3 running in London back when I was a young teenager, it was astonishing. John Carmack and his team at iD rightfully get plaudits for his work on the Quake engine, running on a home PC. But that same year, SEGA AM2 had released VF3 into Arcades and the 2 titles couldn't look anymore different. Quake is humbled by the astounding graphics available to AM2 because of the mighty Arcade board powering it, and walking into the London Trocadero and seeing this stunning real time 1 on 1 fighter playing their Attract Modes in unison was literally jaw dropping.
As I've got older, I've found an appreciation for some of the Atari classics and the 80's golden era of Arcade games. But that early 3D explosion still retains a hold over me and I'm forever grateful I got to grow up during that time in 3D graphics. We may be in an impressive place in 2026, with Unreal 5 powering games of all sizes and technically sharp games being expected, but I'm forever disappointed we no longer have that yearly jump in graphic displays; From textured polygons, coloured lighting, curved geometry, GPU powered rendering, it was all so new and advancements were occurring so frequently, it was astonishing to see. VF1 > VF2 > VF3. Just, wow.
My earliest vivid memory of the Arcades is seeing Virtua Racing running. It was unlike anything I had seen before; So vivid, colourful and 3D. It's hard to overstate how good looking it was in comparison to any other Videogame at the time. Then we moved onto Virtua Fighter and the animation of the Humans was so lifelike and real, it was a joy to just move the characters in this 3D world.
The apex of Arcades for myself was seeing Virtua Fighter 3 running in London back when I was a young teenager, it was astonishing. John Carmack and his team at iD rightfully get plaudits for his work on the Quake engine, running on a home PC. But that same year, SEGA AM2 had released VF3 into Arcades and the 2 titles couldn't look anymore different. Quake is humbled by the astounding graphics available to AM2 because of the mighty Arcade board powering it, and walking into the London Trocadero and seeing this stunning real time 1 on 1 fighter playing their Attract Modes in unison was literally jaw dropping.
As I've got older, I've found an appreciation for some of the Atari classics and the 80's golden era of Arcade games. But that early 3D explosion still retains a hold over me and I'm forever grateful I got to grow up during that time in 3D graphics. We may be in an impressive place in 2026, with Unreal 5 powering games of all sizes and technically sharp games being expected, but I'm forever disappointed we no longer have that yearly jump in graphic displays; From textured polygons, coloured lighting, curved geometry, GPU powered rendering, it was all so new and advancements were occurring so frequently, it was astonishing to see. VF1 > VF2 > VF3. Just, wow.