The "Great memories of Arcade days" thread - Page 2

Were it not for arcades I would have never known that winners don't use drugs. Thank you William Sessions Director of FBI.

I think I'm the only one that ever beat Gauntlet without going broke. I used to work for a Pizza joint that had the same tokens that worked at a local movie theater. I brought in a bucket once and with my brother's help, beat Gauntlet.

I think it took about an hour.


I've also beaten all 3 house of the dead shooting games. I think two took about 10 dollars to beat. The bosses eat quarters.

NARC is the best anti-drug arcade game of all time.

I'm pretty sure that we beat the game a few times. As I said in an earlier post, we found a machine that had the health set too high (each quarter bought you around 10X the normal amount of health) so $5 would last you a long, long time.

I can't remember what it was called, but there was a GREAT 4 player football game that was out in 1991-92. This was when I was in college, and we'd play this game (and drink pitchers of beer) on weekend afternoons.

Another great bar arcade game: 'Golden Tee'.

I usually would set my high score name as BVC, but sometimes set it as ASS.

I wonder how many of us did this?

My best friend and I went to this (somewhat sleazy) arcade many years ago (while he was attending college) and played CAPTAIN COMMANDO with a ton of quarters until we finished it. That was a lot of fun. Hell, those old school Capcom beat 'em ups are still great after all this time. Oh and those NEO GEO machines were evil for having so many fun games on one machine.

Of the single player arcade games, which one(s) were you best at playing/beating? Everyone seemed to have one or two that they excelled at AND could kick anyone's ass at on any given day.

My best:
'Moon Patrol'
'Xevious'
'Phoenix'

My worst:
'Robotron 2084' (loved the game, though)
'Centipede'
'Missile Command'

In general, I was terrible at the trac-ball games, I guess.

I could kill at most shooters, save a few like the Terminator ones.

I sucked at fighting games.

Gotta pimp this old pinball thread - http://chud.com/forum/showthread.php...hlight=pinball where we have a ton of classic pics.

As a true child of the 80s I can relate to all of these arcade memories. I'm amazed my parents lent me so many dollars to play back in the day. I really, really miss the old 80s arcade vibe. What a great place for kids that will never exist again. But then again I am a sentimental old fart.

I swear that one day when I have the financial means I am going to buy a sit down Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga and a Demolition Man pinball machine for my basement.

This made me laugh. After a gap of many, many years, my friends and I are playing some D&D again, and we're still saying things like "Wizard is about to die" and "Don't shoot the food".

Hardest game ever: Sinistar. I pumped quarter after quarter into this thing, and was lucky to get to the third area. That thing was a gold-plated bitch. It was notorious. I'm still known to whip out my impression of the Sinistar voice around people who are old enough to appreciate it. Of course, I say "Howard", because that was the joke at the time.

Two links that I think everyone here will enjoy:

STARCADE! The 80s video game show with full episodes.

Arcade '84. A trip back in time via well done 3D computer graphics. Highly recommended.

Warning: These may cause nostalgia overload.

Anyone actually have arcades in their area anymore?

I have to go all the way to the beach (around 100 miles) just to set foot in one. They aren't even that good. Although there is one in a mall about hallway to the beach. Haven't been there for a good 4 years so its gotta be gone by now.

There's a mini-golf place in Sherman Oaks that has a fairly large arcade, but it's mainly stuffed with Daytona 500-esque stuff or Dance, Dance bullshit.

Sinistar was a fucking great game. I HUNGER!

I actually just discovered one in Houston, just outside of Downtown, though I haven't been yet. They also restore and sell cabinets. I plan on getting a KI cabinet, and a pinball machine when I buy my house.

I remember when my family and I went to Disneyland in 1987 and they used to have that HUGE arcade there near the (long gone) race track with the electric cars. This was when STAR TOURS was new AND Captain EO was still the 3D fixture.

Best vacation ever.

Assuming that Gameworks counts, then yes. They've had to farm out some of their formerly cavernous space to a restaurant, but it's still there. I haven't gone in years, though.

I know that place. As a kid, it was awesome. Now, not so much.

And Lethal Enforcers at the time was tits.

My friends and I put so much money into Double Dragon it was crazy. That was at the 7-11 though. We'd team up, plow through, and if one of us died and somebody not in our group of friends joined then whoever was playing would quickly beat his ass so that we could play again. Many angry people.

The other games I played a ton were Strider (I beat it on 2 quarters my first try, and it took about 4 bucks every time after that) and Rastan (I loved that Conan rip-off when he got his flaming sword).

As for arcades, I had one by my house called Starship Fantasy. You walked in, and the whole arcade looked like it was on the command deck of a starship. The guy who handed out change got to sit in a captain's chair inside an enclosed space pod. They'd give a token for every A on your report card, and that was the main reason I did well in grade school probably.

Why people don't open up arcades now boggles my mind. Besides getting your hands on the old cabinets, how could it not make money??

I'm not sure why you think that. Speaking personally, there's not much reason to go pump money into an arcade cabinet when I can sit on my couch playing HD games on a 50" TV with a surround system.

There's no way sitting at home playing on Live could compare to playing at an arcade with a bunch of your friends. Who needs surround sound when you have 30 other games playing around you!?

People say the same thing about watching movies in a theater versus home video, and look how that's going. People are lazy. Give them a reason to stay home, and they'll stay home.

Well what if i just put a la-z-boy in front of every cabinet.....perhaps hire a couple of ladies to come and exchange your dollars for change or bring you refreshments when ever you yell "Mooommmm!!"

Indeed, why be able to hear your game and instead go deaf because of all the other noise.

If they wear a thong, I'll consider it.

My old ass spent too much money on Cyclone (pinball), Tempest and Battlezone (Pizza Hut!). Later I loved some of the guns you got in Alien Syndrome. The bomb throwing gun that lobbed exploding balls over the maze walls was great.

Fab Cafe, Manchester, England. Sep. '05. Getting all the way to Jedi's lightsaber battle with Vader on Sega's Star Wars Trilogy Arcade with a knackered joystick. Even though Chris and I ran out of pound coins... the best of times.

No love for Space Harrier? In fact, is that not worth an updated version for 360/PS3? Admittedly, without the moving chair it would lose something - I'd probably do myself an injury on a swivel chair trying to recreate it. Loved that game though - anything at the arcade that moved was a winner for me. Second the love for Samurai Shodown - wasted many an evening playing that one in one of my home town Blackpool's many arcades!

Mintadon, Space Harrier is cool.

I agree, Space Harrier is/was one of my favorites. I wouldn't mind seeing a revamp but I'm quite happy with the classic game. I remember spending a lot of time in Aladdin's Castle and Godfather's Pizza back in the day. One of my friends had his birthday party in Aladdin's and it was the best thing ever. Four of us played all the way through the TMNT game only to get a totally shit text-screen ending. Fun game, though. And I think I single-handedly made the RoboCop cabinet at Godfather's worth the floorspace it used.

And Greg is totally right about arcades being viable today. The kids are all spoiled with the fancy game tapes for their Sony GameStations and Microsoft Wiis. We have a Tilt in our shitty mall and it's terrible. A bunch of abused light-gun and racing games and some impossible crane/ticket games. There might be a Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga machine in the back but that's it for a traditional cabinet game.

Places like Gameworks seem to work because they AREN'T for kids, and have a ton of cabinet games. In Gameworks there's a bar, and cupholders on the machines. 18 and up only. It's great.

When I was a wee nipper I was a very spoiled and lucky little boy when it came to arcade games. My old man was a bit of a fan of gaming himself and so, for his own amusement and to earn a bit of side cash, he purchased a bunch of table top arcade games back in the late seventies and hired them out to pubs. This was done under the guise of earning money, but he himself loved to play them, and he also worked out a perfect way for him and mum to get a sleep in on a Sunday morning even though they had a 3 year old child.

I'd wake up and stumble out of bed to find Dad had set up this in the living room in the night:



...and a huge stack of 20cent pieces to play with.

The fucking machine was almost taller than I was and all I remember is setting myself up in a chair and being in what at the time seemed like Christmas morning and heaven all rolled into one.

As far as being a gamer goes I never stood a chance.

Some other favourite arcade games for me are a lot of the relatively old ones and probably place me squarely as a child of the eighties; I was addicted to Elevator Action, Double Dragon (of course), Kung Fu Master (the only game I remember with two joysticks and no buttons).

Of the later years I was addcted to playing Daytona at my favourite pub back in the mid nineties while drunk (I got fucking good at it after a while - never played as well sober tho), and had a major addiction to competitive Puzzle Bobble.

...but honestly I just fucking loved arcades, they were my favourite places of my childhood (Judas' "Dad can I have twenty bucks?" gave me a massive grin). In some ways it's kind of a shame they've all-but died here in Australia. The only reason to go into many of them these days is if you want to get your head pounded by a gang or to score drugs.

Sure, what I'm playing on my 360 and laptop is pretty much better than anything arcdes have ever produced but I really miss those temples of wasted pocket money.

ETA: Oh and I can't believe I forgot to mention the last arcade game I can honestly say I was addicted to, the Soccer sim Virtua Striker. I dunno if this even caught on in the states but I was a massive massive fan in the nineties.

Holy shitballs yes, back in '89 when the family was lucky enough to go to the states we stayed at The Disneyland Hotel with a monorail that went directly to the park, the hotel itself was like a mini-theme park with the jewel for me being a lake in the middle of the hotels inner courtyard, with a boat mored in it that had an arcade inside. That arcade had all the latest games, many of which hadn't even made it to Australia at the time. Dear god to say I was giddy wouldn't even cover it, looking back I realise I felt drunk with happiness.


Honestly, the only place you see the old table top arcades like the one Ive imaged above these days here in Melbourne is in pubs and while they're always popular, the people excited to play them are getting older and older....

I will never forget the first time I saw an actual arcade box.

My family was vacationing out in Summerland BC. We walked to the beach and I suddenly could hear random 8-bit sound effects. Intrigued, I wandered into a small concrete floored ... open aired room. And in the corner beeping and blooping away??

Galaga.

I spent the entire week, at that machine. I had to steal every quarter i could find but I was hooked harder then a crackfiend.


Some great machines I have stood in front of include

Street Fighter 2 Turbo/MK Series/Killer Instinct/CapcomVs/X-MEN Children of the Atom
Ninja Turtles/Simpsons/X-Men/The Punisher/Batman+many other 3d scrollers
Revolution X/House of the Dead/Time Crisis Series/Terminator 2 Judgement Day

i miss arcades. fucking consoles killed the market

The sadness comes when I try out a game I used to waste hours on, and find out that it sucks. Yie Ar Kung Fu comes to mind. That game was shit, but for some reason, I loved it at the time.

This happened to me with Splatterhouse. I remember playing it at the arcade and having my mind blown by the way you could send the enemies to splat on the walls. Many years later I tried playing it on an emulator and I found it atrocious. I've since stopped trying to play any of the old games I liked, with the exception of Tetris.

First video game I ever played was a Rampage. You were a monster that destroyed buildings and ate people. I was hooked.

we have Frankie's here in North Carolina and it's your standard mini-golf, go-kart, lazer tag park.

The "arcade" area is actually quite decent. They have a mix of some 80's and 90's games with the dance-dance, racing and shooting games.


I still remember being 6 years old and going to the roller skating rink and playing Tempest and Centipede.

God I'm old.

Does anyone else have anything Like Nickelcade? Growing up it was the tits! $1.75 enterance fee (I think it's a little more now) and you could play all the cabinets and pinball machines for a nickel! Alas I no longer live in SLC and hadn't been in years before I left, but it was absolute magic the last time I went.

This is exactly what i think when i imagine opening up a Arcade. Put it in a college town...instant billionaire!

It's funny playing TMNT: The Arcade Game on live. Had I played this game in the arcade and beat it, I would have had to take out a mortgage.

And of course the best Final Fight knockoff which never got a decent home release: The Simpsons. Marge wailing away on bad guys with vacum cleaner, Bart with his skateboard, Homer with his fists and Lisa with her....jumprope. *shakes head*

The fact that The Simpsons has yet to be re-released is fucking annoying. That arcade game was fucking awesome.

Got that right, it was the only good Simpsons' game. The fuck man?

Of course Turtles in Time was cool too.

Beat'em Ups and shooting games were my deal because I sucked at fighting games.

I still see decent-sized game rooms in bowling alleys, and I see golf games in practically every sports bar I go into, but stand-alone arcades are pretty scarce around here.

I have very vivid memories of a Galaga machine in the pizza place we used to go to. My dad would give me a couple of quarters to blow on it while we waited for our carryout to be done.

I also remember dumping more quarters into the Journey video game than was probably healthy for a kid my age.

Ah yes Golden Tee, every fucking bar has Golden Tee.

Perhaps the only really decent arcade around here has to be the one at the Santa Monica Pier. You may have seen it depicted in the horrendous mess that was Southland Tales.

Arcades. My home away from home for so many years.

Whenever we would take a family trip to the mall, I would be given $10 and sent off to Aladdin's Castle (Barton Creek Mall), The Gold Mine (Highland Mall), or Tilt (Northcross Mall. It actually had a different name originally, but I can't remember it anymore).

Aladdin's Castle was the most family friendly and had the most well rounded selection of stuff.

The Gold Mine was a narrow, dank, dark hole in the wall that had all kinds of weird shit. It was the first place I saw the original Street Fighter, with the big pressure sensitive pads that you had to hit instead of the familiar six-button setup. They also had the great Firefox game. Yeah, based on the movie. I told you it was weird.

Tilt had this wondrous game that nobody else remembers:


It was great. You could buy upgrade parts for your car at the end of every race. A real quarter-sucker once you got into it.

In college, I spent nearly every moment between classes at either Einstein's or Le Fun. Both were on the main drag across from campus. It was there that Street Fighter 2 ruled the roost, with massive crowds of college dudes playing for hours. Every time a new fighting game came out, the crowds would surge again.

The rec center in the basement of the student union had a bowling alley, pool tables, and a pretty great little arcade. I actually won an NBA Jam tournament there (Stockton + Malone FTW).

Here's a great little piece about Eintein's, its demise, and its sort-of resurrection: http://www.seganerds.com/2008/05/18/...-on-in-austin/

http://www.arcadeufo.com/ - Man, now I'm going to have to go check this place out.

Anyone remember this old school badboy?



Made famous by the movie Jaws. Actually played it a time or two. Probably the oldest arcade game I remember playing.

I took my kids to Disneyland last month. The Starrcade is open again I'm assuming it reopened when they reopened Space Mountain. It's not nearly as large as it used to be, but I got off Space Mountain and it put a gigantic smile on my face. I remember how angry my folks would get that they'd paid good money to get into the park and I'd be fiending for quarters to waste the hours away playing games.

Eyeball, I remember that Hot Rod game. They made that, and they also made Destruction Derby. Identical tables, I'm sure it was the same guys that did both. My local arcade had both of them.

That was what made my Star Wars Trilogy Arcade nostalgia so enjoyable. It was no less enjoyable to me at 18 than it was at 11/12 years old. My brother had Turtles in Time for the MegaDrive, if memory serves, Ed (for some reason it could only be got on the Isle of Mann? After Burner too!)

Without doubt, the franchise I've invested the most time and coin in is Time Crisis. In school, it was the arcade game for our group. The first for the PlayStation was a hoot. En route back from France on a school trip, serious funds were deposited on 2.