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Post by toei on Jan 6, 2018 14:25:32 GMT -5
Just as game rentals were an essential piece of gaming at one time, so were the arcades. I figure we could use a thread to share memories of them too.
Fittingly, my first involves a small rental store that happened to have two arcade cabinets near the entrance, Samurai Shodown and the first TMNT beat-em-up. One day, after my brother and I went to rent a movie, we used our last two quarters to play a round of Samurai; we were young kids, maybe 6 and 8, and I'm sure we played like idiots, but it was fun. I was extremely impressed by the big, stylish characters, the power of the sword slashes; Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat were really cool, but this was something else. As we were playing, a young woman finished paying for her own rental, and turned to us. She said something like "next round's on me" and dropped a handful of quarters next to the controls before exiting the store. It probably wasn't more than a dollar fifty, but we were thrilled to be able to continue playing; it blew my mind that a perfect stranger could just be kind to you, like that, for no apparent reason.
The second involves an arcade section at a big movie theater liked to go to when I was 11 or 12. I was in my zombie phase and a big House of the Dead fan, but rarely had enough quarters to play for very long. One day that we were there with a bunch of kids, either on a school outing or somebody's birthday party, me and a friend started playing a new game that resembled it quite a bit, called CarnEvil. I had a ton of tokens that day, probably had converted all of my 10$ of pocket moneys, or maybe it was money I was supposed to buy lunch with. Arcade sessions typically lasted just a few minutes, but for the first time in our lives, we decided we were going to finish an arcade game. I think we made it all the way to the final boss, who may or may not have been called Token Taker (ha ha), but he was a beast, and finally we ran out. I never got to play that game again, and last I checked, it wasn't emulated properly on MAME (this might have changed, I don't know).
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Post by Xeogred on Jan 6, 2018 17:44:46 GMT -5
I think some of my earliest memories are playing Ms Pac Man at the dry cleaners. My parents knew the game better than me for once and were pretty good at it.
After that though, tons of great memories with Chucky Cheeses or Incredabowl (?), namely with beat em' ups joining in with other random kids for TMNT Arcade or the Simpsons game.
I remember being most impressed by some of the Star Wars games back in the day. And I really dug the Jurassic Park one where you sat in a jeep I think, with curtains blocking the outside. This was probably around the PSX/N64 era when graphics were improving a lot and arcades were clearly looking better.
My favorite racing series were the Rush games by far. For years I grew up thinking if I could own any cabinet, it would be a Rush game. Maybe the twin one, or Alcatraz edition. 2049 was cool as well, but I was a huge fan of the original.
Hydro Thunder was impressive for its time when the Dreamcast dropped and it was cool to see the massive cabinet for that a few times out in the wild.
Nowadays, there's actually a really good barcade here in KC that's been doing really well for years now. So it's probably here to stay! Mostly has all the old goodies too, a few MK arcades, Street Fighter 2, both TMNT Arcade and Turtles in Time, Killer Instinct (2 I think), and some others. It's a blast.
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Post by anayo on Jan 6, 2018 22:03:51 GMT -5
The only arcade I remember really clearly is House of the Dead in a shopping mall in 1997. At that age I loved R.L Stine’s Goosebumps and macabre films like The Blob and Mars Attacks. When we got home, my Dad helped me look up House of the Dead on our dial-up internet connection, where the Sega webpage told us the Sega Saturn version would be in stores soon. This sucked since I only had a Sega Genesis. I’d spend summer afternoons running around outside, fantasizing and reenacting the scenes I saw in the game.
I do remember when arcades were a prominent part of the gaming landscape, enough to observe the contrast of when they suddenly weren’t. But apart from House of the Dead it’s hard for me to remember many specific games in their heyday. Jurassic Park, Tekken, Die Hard Arcade, Ninja Turtles, and Carn Evil come up in my mind when I queue for them. The rest are just fragments. A racing game where you’re on a bike zooming down a hill. A Wild West themed shooting gallery game. A Street Fighter clone where one of the fighters is a football player with a helmet and shoulder pads. A light gun game where you’re shooting masked goons who’ve seized control of a ship at sea.
It’s a bit like how they put brightly colored candy at childrens’ eye level at the grocery store check out, or how they’d carpet bomb the airwaves with toy ads on Saturday mornings. Arcades were just a part of that commercialistic background noise. I remember being magnetically drawn to them, begging mom and dad for a quarter if I so much as glimpsed one. Sometimes they’d indulge me, sometimes not. But I can only remember a few titles. At that age I had such little control over my transportation and finances, so when I actually got a credit in the slot and my hands on the joystick the experience was so fleeting that it couldn’t make as much of an impression on me. As for home consoles, I could turn those on and off at will, play them for weeks and months, so I guess I formed a deeper memory bank for those.
Weirdly enough, I remember store demo displays for home consoles in almost photographic detail. My first time playing Sega Saturn (Bug, Panzer Dragoon 2), Playstation (Tekken), and Nintendo 64 (Mario 64) are all very clear in my mind over 20 years later. Maybe it’s because these were portrayed as something you were supposed to take home with you for keeps, whereas with the arcades it was understood I’d have to leave it behind at the airport or the mall or the bowling alley with no guarantee of ever seeing it again. Maybe that’s got something to do with why my mind formed clearer memories of home consoles.
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Post by Ex on Jan 6, 2018 23:14:42 GMT -5
Great thread, and I've really enjoyed reading the responses so far. I'll add some of my own experiences:
1984 = Pac-Man at a laundromat while my mom did laundry. I remember loving it, but not being good at it. Those damn ghosts!
1985 = I don't remember where I was, but I remember playing Dragon's Lair in an arcade. As a six year old, I had a hard time understanding how I could control a cartoon. But, it made an impression, as I still remember the experience. I remember constantly dying too, and thinking the game was unfair, but the quality of the presentation stuck in my mind.
1986 = A small arcade near where I lived had Moon Patrol. I never saw anyone else playing it, but I loved it. I played it all the time as a seven year old. I managed to get rather good at Moon Patrol, and eventually had the top score. I was proud of that, but since no one else bothered playing it, the point was moot.
1988 = At a Chuck E. Cheese, I got to play Altered Beast. I was okay with it until the part where your character transforms into a werewolf. As a 9 year old, I was a bit frightened by that, and walked away. However, two years later, I got a SEGA Genesis, and Altered Beast was a pack-in. I remember being very impressed at how accurate the Genesis version was to the arcade version (and I was no longer spooked by the transformation cutscenes).
1989 = Konami's TMNT beat 'em up, it was amazing. I was 10 and TMNT was huge, playing as Donatello was a dream come true. I never saw anyone who wasn't smiling while playing that game.
1991 = Played the Konami's The Simpsons beat 'em up in . Major joygasm as The Simpsons were so hot at that time. I was crazy about Bart when I was 12 years old, so playing as Bart was too cool. The cartoon worthy graphics blew me away. I remember people laughing at this game's antics, everybody loved it.
1991 = Played SEGA's Time Traveler FMV game, which also used a holographic display to show the gameplay. I had already seen FMV games before this, but the hologram aspect was amazing. Folks would just stare and gawk at it. Too bad the gameplay was "meh".
1992 = A friend and I went head to head in Atari's Steel Talons. It was a 3D combat helicopter simulator, polygons and all. The cabinet had two cockpits in it, where two players flew independent 'copters. I remember destroying my friend by out maneuvering him and filling his rear with rockets. Unbeknownst to him, I already had experience with 3D flight simulators thanks to Falcon 3.0 (DOS game). It was very gratifying winning, as he was four years older than me, and I had always felt intimidated by him due to that. There's an audibly spoken phrase in Steel Talons when you start it single player on the first mission; "This one's a milk run kid, let's see how quickly you can do it." That phrase has stuck in my mind ever since that day. Weird, I know.
1994 = Killer Instinct released, and a local gas station had it. I remember skipping high school just to get to play it, as Killer Instinct had been so hyped in magazines I was reading at the time. The graphics really impressed me, but I was disappointed with the gameplay. It wasn't worth skipping school for and risking ISS.
1999 = I was living in a small town then, and at a local diner they had Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes of all things. I remember having a blast playing it with a girl I was dating at the time. I also remember being surprised at how good she was at it (kicked my butt about half the rounds). But then I realized that since she worked at a music CD store next to the diner, she was playing said game often on her breaks... ah-ha! Anyway, Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes was a great fighter (still is). Well that all seems like a million years ago now. Bittersweet nostalgia.
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CFFJR
HRG Curious
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Post by CFFJR on Jan 7, 2018 7:17:04 GMT -5
A friend and I used to bike to a local rental store (Video & Video Games, it was called) to dump an insane amount of money in to The Lost World: Jurassic Park. They had the upright version, rather than the big booth you could sit in (which was amazing then and continues to make me feel giddy and nostalgic any time I see it now) but the game was no less fun.
We went often and played that game obsessively until we mastered it, and then we played it again and again.
There was also a time my family went up to Blackhawk and Central City (gambling towns outside Denver) and I would always track down any arcade machines the casinos would have stashed around to amuse the kids. I got to playing Vendetta (Crime Fighters 2) with 3 other kids I'd never met and never saw again, but for the length of the game we were all best friends united by ass kicking.
Miss that about the arcade. The co-op experience.
Lots more of course, but these two just came to mind.
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Post by foxhound1022 on Jan 7, 2018 11:44:43 GMT -5
I remember the local mall had a pretty good arcade that I would go to. My mom would drop my brother and I off there while she went for groceries and whatnot, because we would be a nuisance due to boredom.
That's where I played the X-Men arcade game, AvP, and pretty much all the latest and greatest fighters. I remember when Tekken 3 just came out; they had the cab with the sticks on a separate pedestal with the huge monitor, and it was awesome.
I also remember seeing MSH for the first time, and just being mesmerized by the frantic speed of it compared to other fighters of that period.
Oh, the local diner in town also had a UN Squadron cab that I would frequent.
Later in my teens, there was a small arcade that was literally a street over from my house, and that had a great assortment of games. Older stuff like Kung Fu, 720°, Donkey Kong Jr., and Pac-Man. Plus, that's where I was 1st introduced to Neo-Geo with Metal Slug, World Heroes, 8-Man, Savage Reign, and Baseball Stars.
Sadly, it closed due to the owner having health problems. Mr. B was genuinely nice dude who gave all the kids in town a place to hang out and have fun, rather than getting into trouble.
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Post by anayo on Jan 7, 2018 12:17:07 GMT -5
1986 = A small arcade near where I lived had Moon Patrol. I never saw anyone else playing it, but I loved it. I played it all the time as a seven year old. I managed to get rather good at Moon Patrol, and eventually had the top score. I was proud of that, but since no one else bothered playing it, the point was moot. 1994 = Killer Instinct released, and a local gas station had it. I remember skipping high school just to get to play it, as Killer Instinct had been so hyped in magazines I was reading at the time. The graphics really impressed me, but I was disappointed with the gameplay. It wasn't worth skipping school for and risking ISS. Moon Patrol - I think I saw this between 1997 and 1998 in a rec room at my nearby YMCA.That rec room had an arcade version of Super Mario Bros. too (the platformer with the mushrooms and fire flowers, not the competitive single screen one). I'd always ask Mom for a quarter, but we only passed them when we were on our way out the door getting ready to leave, so I never got to play them. Killer Instinct - I don't remember anything about the arcade, but I played the SNES version at my cousin's house (1997-ish) and I thought it was so freaking cool. The characters were really badass and I liked how you could kick your opponent off a building and watch them crash into a car below. The pre-rendered CG graphics looked so attractive back then, too. I only recently learned about the graphical differences of the arcade version (reference: DF Retro: Donkey Kong Country + Killer Instinct - A 16-Bit CG Revolution!). They did a great job making the SNES version look stellar for the time despite its much weaker power.
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Post by Ex on Jan 7, 2018 13:36:31 GMT -5
we were all best friends united by ass kicking Now THAT is something I miss about the arcade gaming experience. That sense of spontaneous communion. I don't think the modern equivalent of playing with strangers over the internet is anything remotely the same.
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Post by Sarge on Jan 7, 2018 23:23:50 GMT -5
There's a lot of memories there, but it's a bit late for me to go through all of them. A few early ones, though:
I think the first arcade game I remember encountering was the original Mario Bros. in a little cafe in a nearby small town. I was with the parents, and I don't even remember what we were in there for. I just remember being really young and fascinated by it, and I think someone gave me a quarter to give it a shot.
The other two I remember when my parents briefly owned a restaurant. I actually had to look around quite a bit to figure out what these games even were! The first was Kaos, which was a pretty old platformer-style game that for some reason I thought was Egyptian in my vague memories. I was kinda right; the game features the "Eye of Providence" in both the game and some of the cabinet artwork, so young brain was thinking "pyramids". I happened to come across this with a random article on HG101, and it was a pretty cool feeling to actually find it!
It took me even longer to find the other. I scanned a list of early shmups, but none of them looked quite right. Well, there's a reason for that. The game was Red Clash, and emulation for the game does not properly capture the colors as displayed by an actual PCB. I happened to come across a video on YouTube of someone that recorded from the actual board, and it had the color inversion that I remembered. Pretty sweet!
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jan 20, 2018 12:23:04 GMT -5
My memories of playing arcade cabinets are mostly from retail stores and restaurants. I did play games in the arcade too but most of the time my parents would try to convince me to play the ticket redemption machines instead because they saw the video games as more wasteful since you didn't get any physical reward for playing them (and this wasn't all bad I still have a love and appreciation for old school ski ball thanks to this ). I did manage to convince them otherwise sometimes, or was left to my own devices. Probably my most played cabinets were Spy-Hunter at a local burger place, Choplifter, Pac-Land and Commando at K-Mart and X-Men and Raiden at Pizza Hut. When I was a teenager the local amusement park drained my pockets with House of the Dead (the first game I ever beat in an arcade) and Daytona USA.
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