other people must have this too, right? here are some examples. These are obviously mostly childhood/adolescent memories but everyone here already knows im old as shit so i’m not concerned about dating myself.
Propcycle: That one arcade at Disneyland, I think in Tomorrowland? Probably the only place I ever actually saw one in real life. Another game I associate with this place is Crazy Taxi, even though I definitely encountered that at other places too.
S.T.U.N. Runner: the arcade of the roller rink in my home town, Roller King, which apparently still exists today. I would not be surprised if they still had this game there too.
Hammerin’ Harry: The suburban strip mall arcade where a lot of my friends had birthday parties growing up, where everything was set to free-play for the duration of the party (heaven). This one stood out to me because I don’t think I ever saw it anywhere else, but another game I associate with that place is the X-Men 4 player game (the most popular one at all those parties).
VS Super Mario Bros.: This one was everywhere, but my main mental association is the arcade at the minigolf place outside of said hometown. In my memory this also somehow had Yo Noid on it but I don’t know if that’s actually possible.
Joe and Mac: Likewise not at all an uncommon game, but most of my memories of playing it are at the private tennis / swimming pool club thing some of my friends’ families were members of. i don’t even know if they had any other arcade games but this one.
Street Fighter 2: The laundromat by my house growing up and also a Jack in the Box on the other end of town.
the virtual fighter 2 and blitz 98 machines at my hometown round table pizza, the most consistent cabinets i saw growing up
the simpsons arcade game at the santa cruz beach boardwalk, beat the game for the first time on about five bucks (no clue if it’s still there)
the NY Gunblade machine that used to be at the water park that i would always play near soaking wet in a towel as the gigantic vibrating gun shook my whole body
the initial d machine at the bowling alley by my parents old house, a place that felt like you walked into a david lynch film no matter what time of day or night it was
stun runner, sf2, and those 4 player capcom brawlers take me back to the cedar knoll galleria mall arcade
DDR Extreme is the student center at the university of louisville then the garage of the place i rented a room at during university where the machine landed after the student center didn’t want it anymore and it’s owner, a friend of ours, needed a place to store it. we’d open up the garage door during parties so folks could free play. there’d usually be a crowd of hardcore DDR heads back there as my roommate was friends with most of the local bemani community. missing summer saturday nights spent with a backyard full of friends & the hum of j-pop and footstomps in the background
Not an arcade game, but I associate the NES version of Puzznic with a random VS System style kiosk in the Pacific Science Center in Seattle. (The other side of it had NES Teris IIRC.)
Metal Slug is a laundromat game in my mind.
The only F-Zero GX cabinet I’ve ever seen/used was at a theme park in Utah called Lagoon. Apparently it’s not there anymore, last time I looked it up.
Burgertime is the kind of game you find in chintzy nicklecade in the same corner as all the other neglected retro games.
My mom used to be a mall walker. She brought me to the mall with her some mornings as a kid. I’d play this in the arcade but mostly stare at it because it was probably two credits to play or whatever. This game will only ever exist at that specific mall in that specific town for me. It was the “yuck” mall too. Remember when towns used to get a new mall so the old one would to go shit? That’s the one we’d go to.
Radical Biker will forever be the student union at the university I went to. I played it plenty of times right before exams instead of studying.
usually it’s because that’s the only place I could find a cabinet but sometimes it’s because I played at that machine for years
virtual on - Sunnyvale golfland. the cabinet was pristine until one day somebody completely fucking ruined the second player joysticks and it became a single player game, ruining everyone’s fun
Para Para paradise - milpitas golfland(superior to svgl in every way for like ten years). they had this at a lot of places but if you were into Para Para you went to milpitas
let’s go jungle - santa Cruz beach boardwalk. it’s a date game and the boardwalk is a place to go on dates
outrun 2 - full tilt ice cream in seattle. I don’t think their ice cream is very special but they have an outrun 2 cabinet and I hadn’t seen one in the fleshzone til here so it’ll always be associated with outrun 2
dance maniax - nickel nickel on bascom. when arcades were in the first stage of dying and nickel arcades popped up this was my regular goto. free admission for GORLS on weekdays and 35 cent dance maniax
street fighter 2 (regular sf2 not turbo yet) - danny’s market on pomeroy and el camino. it was a few blocks closer than golfland and I was still too young to be brave enough to play teenagers at golfland so I’d practice on this cab. turbo was out but the peace of rarely having an opponent kick me off the cab was worth it. going to golfland until I was like 12 was pretty hard. a lot of men are really excited to destroy children in street fighter. it’s fine id do the same shit
disc’s of tron - DISNEY QUEST. I rememeber looking this cab up cuz before every discs of tron cabinet had been cut up or they took off the upper cover cuz it’s so fucking huge and most people would remove pieces to make it more mobile BUT NOT DISNEY WORLD
there wasn’t a game I associated with it but Aladdins castle in Sunnyvale town center mall was always the platonic idea of an arcade to me. bizarre storefront that was overly thematic, owned by bally, darker than all the golflands because they all had like a dozen doors going to different parts of the courses and were never really DARK. I only went to that mall with my mom who never had time for me to go to aladdins but if I could sneak off for long enough id look inside
Also had a cab at our local roller rink, one of my brothers worked there at the time, as well, so we got free entry; though I didn’t attend as much as the others. Other classics of Lonestar Skate: a perpetually broken Sega Time Traveller holocab, Time Killers, your omnipresent 4p endless-spinning-steering-wheel Off Road, Lucky and Wild, SFA1, all the shitty digitized fighters, etc. Also, for a while in the city proper there was a place called Malibu Fun Center that we went to exactly once that had, like, gokarts you had to have a drivers license to drive, they for some reason had a Stun Runner cab in the arcade with a big FOR SALE sign on it and I remember being kinda delusionally convinced we could scheme/pester our father into buying it for us.
I remember our parents took my younger brother and I campground camping one time…I cant remember if it was in TX or NC, memories unclear. We were early teens tweens. But very vividly I remember spending a bunch of the weekend playing 1000 Mile Rally and League Bowling in the game room cabin. The 1000 Mile Rally cab also had a standup+free-spinning-steering-wheel setup. They must have been set on freeplay because I doubt we would have been provided with the stream of quarters it would have taken to sustain.
FUCK this now has forced me to figure out the name of a specific arcade game i played in the waning years of the nineties
to my recall it was a super scaler-type off-road racer. the only place i ever saw or played that game was at this specific kinda seedy hotel in daytona beach, fl. they also had sunset riders and i played the fuck out of both of those games there. couldn’t get enough, begging for quarters at every downtime during our vacation. i really want to see/play that game again but i have no idea what it was called. all i remember is faux-3D over-the-shoulder camera off-road racing game. some upper and lower bounds: super off road ('89) is too early and offroad thunder ('99) is too late
edit: guess it technically could have been older than super off road but it definitely looked more advanced
Kung Fu: the lobby of the motel across from the Watergate
Altered Beast: the arcade in Niagara Falls
Ghosts N Goblins and Operation Wolf: the Third Street Store
1942: the Circa 1890 Saloon
Battlezone and Wheel of Fortune: Mr. Z’s Pizza
Knights of the Round, Mortal Kombat, (and much much later) Street Fighter 3: Roscoe’s Arcade of Champs
Fatal Fury 2 in the Neo Geo multi cab, Time Killers (and much much much later) that 4 player Guilty Gear: Wayne State’s student union basement
X-Men Vs Street Fighter: Tilt at Lakeside Mall
Final Fight: the Caesarland on 8 Mile
Samurai Shodown II cab in the first floor ballroom of my University of Chicago dorm. I had no skill and couldn’t afford to play it, I just watched it when nobody was around playing pool on the nearby table.
Mortal Kombat 3 cab in an arcade somewhere on the south side of Chicago where a friend demonstrated unexpected expertise in the franchise.
Street Fighter cab with the giant rubber-coated pressure-sensitive metal buttons, packed by would-be He Man older kids in a very large, kid-friendly, probably no longer there arcade in Seattle decades ago.
Captain America and The Avengers and a Darius ultra-wide-multiscreen thing in that same arcade.
Heavy Barrel I think maybe in a not very good pizza joint (Olympia Pizza) on top of Queen Anne hill, Seattle. That’s how I remember it, anyway. Jeez they’re still around, the restaurant I mean. They sponsored my…oh maybe it was a baseball team one year or something. I was absolutely terrible at baseball and feared getting hit by the ball. This was some other time not associated with that though.
Various clunky old maybe space-themed games I can’t quite remember in a spacious but weirdly ghetto open-sided and nearly abandoned dusty and shadowy high-ceilinged arcade I wandered into one sunny summer afternoon somewhere in the amusement park grounds at the Seattle Center ages and ages ago, the sun cutting deep across the dusty concrete floor. I have the impression that the entire park was nearly empty that afternoon, I’m not sure how I came to be there; possibly my parents had dropped my brother and I off to spend the afternoon at the Pacific Science Center on one side of the grounds. The arcade was quiet except for muted bleeps and bloops from lonely cabinets. Weird vibe.
TNK III in a like quaintly dark and rustic Germanic mountain village style tavern in some touristy little roadside town somewhere in uh maybe British Columbia or western Cascade Mountain region of WA state on a family trip as a kid.
Golden Axe and X-Men: The Arcade Game: one of the bowling alleys my grandmother frequented and we’d be made to stay in on days she was taking care of us.
KOF 97, 2000: The mall arcade that alongside a small bookshop was the only notable feature of the mall with the grocery store my mom used to shop at. This was soon after I’d just started gaining an awareness of SNK thanks to Match of the Millenium.
KOF 2001: The laundromat near my university, opposite the internet café.
Crazy Taxi, Mr. Driller, Rapid River, Daytona USA multicab, some Initial D, OutRun 2 SP, Gunblade NY, House of the Dead 4, and Top Skater at the downtown Seattle GameWorks.
Does anybody here have a local bowling alley that still has CRT monitors and plastic seating and airport carpet and the whole works?
I haven’t really thought about bowling since before covid, probably haven’t been since 2014?15?, and even then iirc we went to one of those now more common edison-bulb-restaurant + bowl kinda places, which I don’t necessarily hate on principle or whatever, I’m not here to bemoan the starbucksification of our proud institutions through weaponized mcm-lite interior design, that’s not what I’m here for, just thinking out loud.
We used to have an alley here inside the loop that was cleanish and un-updated, but that would have been over 10 years ago now? I mean 2014 that’s almost ten years already. 15? 20? Hard to say. Time is becoming increasingly hard to track. Scoping out all the places in the greater metro area on gmaps, seems like there are one or two out in the burbs that seem largely/somewhat un-renovated but also just kinda brown and don’t seem to have escaped like…every lane having sports tv broadcasts projected above the pins, etc. All the rest, even AMF/Big-Brand-Bowling places, seem to have bifurcated into like HGTV+Guy-Fieri-isms+Raw Thrills Gameroom or the $60/hr lane + cocktails situation.
One specific pizza place in my hometown had both thin, extremely cripsy crust pizza (My parents hated it, I loved it) and a few arcade machines. Bubble Bobble and Tekken 4. Me and my friend would go there and play the hell out of both, and it’s where I learned to love Bubble Bobble, only to grow up and find out it was even cooler than I understood as a kid.
I also just played yoshimitsu a lot and don’t really think abotu Tekken 4 much.
