I've been watching You Tube Videos of people telling Arcade stories so I figured, ah well might as well start a thread about Arcade memories. Here are few of mine. 1. I'm in an arcade called Dream Machine Probably 1990-1991 I'm playing skee ball and this fat fuck walks up to me and starts calling me Urkle, Doesn't bother me I just go on as usual. Me and my friend Carl walk around a bit tell his mom about the fat fuck and she says just walk away if we saw him again. So I'm playing Final Fight and I hear "Hey Urkle" again. and he starts hitting me up side the head. Think I'm walking away? No I drop kick the kid using the machine for momentum and the kid flies across the arcade and I continue playing like nothing happened. 2. Asain kids and Tekken seem to go hand in hand But around here there was this one little asshole Armenian kid who was Godlike in Mortal Kombat II. However at a church Bizzar I faced this shit in Super Street Fighter II (I used to frequent Armenian functions due to being 1/4 Armenian) I take this kid on I figure "OH he's the Mortal Kombat prick I'll beat him no problem" Well I lost and I'm fine with that...Until his cunt of a grandmother (and I never use language like this EVER) spoke up and said "You can't beat (name I can't spell or pronounce becuase it's Armenian) He's the KING!" If that old bitch isn't dead now (this was 15 years ago) I still want to find her and END HER. It was the most smug rude thing I ever heard an old lady say. 3. MY GRANDMOTHER feeder of tokens she would feed money to me while I played TMNT and beat it with a revolving number of strangers. other times in the Arcade she'd go sleep in the pole position machine while I did my thing. Her health wasn't the best but my Grandmother took care of me. She passed away 12 years ago this week I believe. She's pretty much the only reason I don't totally hate Armenians. (see story above) and YES the Kardashians are pretty much how Armenian Americans are. I AM NOT SHITTING YOU
LOL my memories. My Grandmother was pretty hardcore. One time she contemplated playing Ninja Warriors with me
Haha. I was really drunk -- they just seemed to be great recollections. I think my favorite "memories" of the arcade are the ones that center around the fact that I could play games anywhere. A few minutes before I went in to a movie, at the water park, the convenient store, the mall, and of course, the arcades.
Growing up I had a ton of options, the odd two or three game places in my "hood" or I'd go downtown. One place in my neck of the woods was a D&D store with about 8-9 cabs in the backroom, for some reason this place had the nickname "Pack Shack" with us kids. No clue as to where the name originated from, it could be Pac Man related but I doubt it. It's LONG gone now but that's where I was playing Berzerk, Gorf, Tron, Moon Cresta etc... Downtown you had some big ones, and you began to recognize the guys giving you change would cycle through the different locations, bought my first weed in one, but I don't even know if it was real or not as I traded it to a friend for something I can't recall. Later on I would still tool by downtown, Fighting Vipers and I just clicked and I could kick anyone's ass using Raxel, saw a guy playing one of Sega's light gun games but using both player 1 and 2's pistols aka John Woo style I was impressed. I never thought of that before. The last one closed down a few years back and I took crappy photos of what was left, pretty sure I made a thread here about it. Arcades in Tokyo were different, brighter, LOUDER and more expensive !
Haha... yeah, I used to do that. I also perfected a shooting method where I would hold the gun still with one hand and spasmodically twitch back and forth with the other. Guitarists probably know what I mean. It basically turns any gun into a machine-gun. It wears you out really fast, though.
Two of my favorites 1. Dad use to manage a bowling ally one time when I was young. Every Saturday me and my brother would go in with him before the place open and he would just hand us off the arcade keys. So we could go play what ever we wanted before the place opened. It was tons of fun. =D 2. Driving out to a place with my parents to pick up my own personal Japanese Candy Cab. It was nice getting it in person since I could check it out first before taking and not being shipped one that was dirty/damaged. I still have that cab to this day but sadly it got banged up a bit when I improperly moved it in storage and cracked some of the plastic, as well as damage from being in the back of a truck to make the move from california to montreal. =D
I have a lot of memories of going to the arcade as a kid. I'd go with my mother when I was a younger kid, and we'd play a lot of 80s games at this AWESOME place that had pizza and a pac-man like atmosphere (dark, with yellow and red rails and a mascot methinks, and a huge yellow slide and a maze outside). I remember lots of the games we'd play - Ghosts and Goblins, which I sucked at - Karate Champ, Elevator Action, Xevious, and this one weird Atari branded game called where you'd be yellow, red or blue and try to go up a tower in isometric rooms. Neat. They also had that AWESOME Star Wars sit down arcade, and a few cocktail cabinets that may or may not have been Galaga and Dig-Dug. Then, After Burner 2 arrived, and it was placed in the middle of the basement, like a holy grail. It was SEVEN tokens. Eventually, they got TMNT and The Simpsons and X-Men. Those were quite popular in that arcade. It was called "Diverti-Piazza" (which made sense in spanish, as Piazza was similar to "pizza" and "plaza" and "diverti" is close to the word for "fun"). It was row after row after row of awesome arcade games, and I would love for it to exist today. They had a whole row of pinball machines and lots of awesome skee-ball type games, like whack-a-mole and many mechanical arcade machines (one with a crossbow too!). Now, it's some weird christian cult centre. That was one of two big arcade companies in my city - it had two locations (the second one opened in 92 or 93, really close to my house - but by then the older chain called "baby kart" had turned into "moy" - which would eventually have an arcade almost in every corner). I don't know exactly how or why, but 'Piazza died out around the time Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat became popular. They had great games before... but now the rows and rows of arcades went to Moy, which still somehow exists at some locations. As an older kid, or a teenager, I'd go to Moy and play NBA Jam or Street Fighter. I even entered a tournament once, when I was 12 or so. ... and I was promptly beaten down by a 9 year old girl. Street Fighter 2 was HARDCORE in Guadalajara until KOF94 came out. That was our drug of choice. Everyone down here who went to arcades in the 90's knows at least a few KOF moves. But by then, I was in high school, and very much into RPGs, so I didn't go to arcades as often. I did go back many times when I was in college, but there just wasn't as much time or as many awesome games.
I've come to realize that the noise is a huge part of the arcade experience. Even if I had my own cabinet, there's no way to replicate the sounds from a dozen arcade cabs and pinball machines being played at the same time. The noise, and the fact that back then whatever you'd see in the arcade machines always looked a hell of a lot better than anything you could play at home. Arcades didn't seem nearly as cool to me when consoles and PCs became just as powerful.
Nice post 7Force... that's one thing you just can't replicate! The environment, full of sound, flashing lights, musky air! Ha, and the fact that Arcade games were at one time visually superior to home consoles... And more "Hands On". My arcade memories are just the standard fair, no random stories, just me frequenting a couple of local arcades in my earlier years to play CarnEvil, Time Crisis, Marvel Vs. Capcom, The Simpsons, and Top Skater. (Just to name some of my top favorites...) I wish for the days of Arcades strewn across the city... The only arcade game I really still play nowadays is the Original Metal Slug in a Neo Geo cab at a local food joint "Tommy's" Can get to the 3rd level on a quarter!!! (most the time) ;-) And? Was the result worth it?
There's recordings of arcade ambient noise from 1983, 1986, 1993 and other years - some dude made them and they're available online. If you play them on the computer and close your eyes, it's a really eerie sensation. They're the real thing. I have them, but I don't remember where I got them from.
I was at Dave and Busters tonight. What I saw was the most amazing Galaga player EVER. Dude did not die once and when I left him he was at stage 78
I think I have mentioned some of my arcade and so forth memories in the past. And the "noise" is one of those that you also miss from going to the arcades. Thanks for putting in a strange mood.
I've got a love/hate thing for my arcade memories. The love being the great games available in the early to mid 90's and the hate being how much I had to work for the money to fuel my addiction. Thank goodness for portables and consoles, otherwise I'd still be wasting money if there was an arcade nearby.
Most of my arcade memories involved a lot of pizza. They just seemed to go hand in hand. Whether I was eating Sbarro's at the mall arcade, or playing Rampage, Area 51, and Out Run at Godfather's or playing X-Men at Chuck E. Cheese's. Where there was arcade games, there was pizza. Sweet, sweet pizza...
