In the 1980s, video games had to go out into the public and compete with each other, head-to-head. The arcade experience had a democratic element to it, with gamers free to play whichever game they wanted. But throughout the decade, the quality of that experience declined, at times radically. Yoshiki Okamoto, the head of arcade development at Capcom Japan, told Polygon that by 1989, “people at arcades weren't happy.”
