Learning in the arcade?

You'd go to gamefaqs or wherever and print out a movelist. Then you'd study that shit. Then you'd go to the arcade and fuck around with friends. It wasn't until other players showed up that business time started playing in your head. You'd also spend a lot of time in line watching other people play, and if the noise wasn't too bad and you weren't shy, you could ask questions. Still, it was a pain in the ass to get into established games sometimes, but new ones were always up for grabs. I remember in the 90s you could get competition for every stupidfuck fighter released, and in Toronto you could troll up and down Yonge street (there were 4 arcades in an 8 block strip) to find different skill levels. I spend a lot of time learning stupid shit for games like Mace: The Dark Age when I could have been doing something useful.

I miss arcades. :/
 
I feel like this is why SF2 is still being played. Not only is it a stellar fighting game, but a lot of people feel like they have put in EXTREME amounts of work into it when it wasn't easy to learn things.
 
The most important aspect of learning in the arcade wasn't the technical end of things, it was the exposure to pressure and competition. Maybe you didn't have time to practice that new combo, but if you lose, you wait. So you do what it takes to win. This is something that's hard to replicate on consoles, even with laggy online matches if you lose you just jump back into another match.
 
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