Many people would say that the golden age of arcades was either the late 1970s or even the early 1980s but for me it was the 1990s that were king.
It was not just the video games that made arcade emporiums special, however, there was so much more to the experience than that. Sadly, this golden era could not last and things began to change around the time of the original PlayStation launch. For the first time a home machine could almost match an arcade cabinet and to a lesser extent Sega’s Saturn console produced amazing ports of the likes of Virtua Fighter 2 and Sega Rally, that many gamers did not feel such an urge to visit arcades any longer.
I also think that this genre suffered due to 3D beat ‘em-ups such as Virtua Fighter and Tekken not being anywhere near as popular as the earlier 2D games such as Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter 2.