The person being interviewed theory of how console did not kill the arcade scene is flawed.
He states
"colossal" failures in the home-console business, such as the much-hyped E.T. for the Atari 2600, helped contribute to the industry's decline and saw the stock of Warner Communications (which owned Atari at the time) drop 32 per cent in one afternoon.
"By the end of 1984, Mattel had left the video-game business, Coleco turned its attention to Adam Computers and Cabbage Patch Dolls, and Warner began looking for a way to dump Atari," explains Kent. "So don't blame the end of the golden age of arcades on the home business."
WTF, we are talking about the here and now meaning events of the mid 90 onwards. His theory may explain the crash that happened in his time being the 80 but do not apply in current day and age.
In honesty home console with a hint of piracy through emulation(snk mainly) and other means did kill the arcade industry. Technologically arcade games originally held the unchallenged edge over the console ports, so even when a game was ported it would be flawed due to console restraints which would mean people would still play the arcade original.
In come the 32 bit era and the gauntlet dropped, the technology of arcade hardware was starting to be equaled by consoles built with newer technologies. Arcade hardware however was still uniformed even among different manufacturer built on and around off the self component such as 68000 processor a work horse so old and out dated it should have been put down a long time ago. The only company who did truly design custom hardware was sega. In contrast you have lets say a psone which if only it had the ram it could have run a near arcade perfect port of lets say Xmen vs Streetfighter which by the way the saturn could do. Then you had 128 bit systems which not only equaled but buried their arcade counterparts in most cases, add online play and thre is your human interaction element. No need to track to the arcade to play a game you have a equal or better console port of.
Eye candy, this goes hand & hand with hardware. Arcade games once had the superior hardware so they looked better but now high definition viewing/gaming is the norm and only few arcade systems like type X2 can pull that off at a high price per cabinet. The monitor I imagine cost as much if not more than the hardware.
The big boys Capcom, Konami, Midway obviously did not what to invest in the R&D to stay ahead of consoles nor did they just fall back on PC based hardware they just exited the arcade market or in capcom case jumped in the sack with taito for a quickie.
The blunt truth is, if new arcade games were being made then people would still be going to arcades to play them but because the console ports are soon to follow in a year after a game debut, its hard keeping the crowd up to stay afloat between the new releases in current day and time. The industry infrastructure has been destroyed. Hell capcom is now looking high and low for someone to distribute street fighter 4 because the pussies don't have the muscle to do it themselves, hard to believe they once dominated the industry.
