only time in my youth i encountered a konami simpsons cab was in a boardwalk arcade in myrtle beach south carolina. i don’t remember anything else about myrtle beach, tbh
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Konami’s Boot Camp: the State Fairgrounds pavilion
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you shoulda stuck it out at golfland, you’d probably be a street fighter legend by now. that was probably the most competitive street fighter arcade outside of japan.
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always gonna associate The Grid (2000) with a Six Flags over Georgia arcade (specifically one deep in the park, near the Superman: Ultimate Flight ride)
what a wild fucking videogame. they had a full linked cab setup and everything.
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Sometime in the mid 2000s there was a Hampton inn by knoebel’s (@gary i think knows what this is?) that still had a virtua fighter 1 cab in the teeny hotel laundry room. It was literally a closet with one set of machines. Why would you hang out in there to wait for your clothes? Anyway what a discovery, I was obsessed during the whole trip & probably annoyed my parents lol.
(It’s kind of weird thinking about how young I was but still having some budding form of the same knowledge & interest-level I have now. Like I remember knowing at the time how it was kind of a rare find and I probably wouldn’t see it again.)
The arcade in the bowling alley my grandpa always bowled with his league buddies had a brand new outrun 2 which I played a lot, if you’re wondering about my outrun 2 street cred.
Overall this thread makes me feel I was born a little too late and missed out on some good arcade times.
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my brother is pretty good. when i got older i got more into dance maniax anyway
also like, i dont wanna sleep on the dannys market scene either
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i was trying to remember knoebels’ name 3 days ago!!! thank you!!
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ultimate mortal kombat 3 with this laundromat in oconomowoc wi that no longer exists, we used to play that shit forever waiting around
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When I was in high school, we used to go play Q’Zar a lot. Like we would spend whole nights there. In between rounds of laser tag, for a good long while was a House of the Dead machine. We got good enough at it that we could usually clear it in two credits each two player, and I think someone 1cc’ed it once. We also used to play both guns with one person, which was great. It’s really hard for me to associate that game with anywhere else.
Eventually it got replaced with a Mace the Dark Ages machine, which was a total downgrade, but is another machine I associate with that specific place and time.
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i vaguely remember playing Galaga in some dusty pub once when i was a kid. my dad was a bit excited about it. that’s all i got sorry
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Initial D on a Carnival cruise I took in the Bahamas.
House of the Dead 4 at the local movie theater.
Metal Slug was everywhere, but I played those games so much that I can pinpoint which machine was where. 2 was at the bowling alley, 5 was the same Bahamas cruise, 1 was the local arcade.
Mortal Kombat 1 was at the hotel swimming pool area that I had a membership for. I mostly played it on Genesis, but when I think of the arcade version I think of the smell of chlorine.
I’ve played a lot of arcade games for the first time via barcades. I only played Prop Cycle for the first time last year and it ruled! It’s weird to play some of these games via emulation or home ports for years, and then to finally get the “real” experience in person. Probably the opposite way that most millenials/gen x experience arcade games.
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there was a top skater cab at what I’m pretty sure was a chuck e cheese or at least a chuck e cheese-alike in gilbert arizona that i was obsessed with
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I have way too many of these to list them all, but here are a few.
- Robotron 2084 and Cruis’n at Showbiz Pizza.
- Arkanoid 2 at Peter Piper Pizza
- Jungle Hunt at the other Peter Piper Pizza location
- Rastan, Super Mario Bros., and Side Arms at the local Circle K (at different times)
- Crystal Castles, Darius, Space Harrier, Forgotten Worlds, N.A.R.C., Gladiator, and many more at Golf ‘n’ Stuff
- TMNT, The Simpsons, and Street Fighter (which I only watched) at Tilt
- Vindicators at an open air mall that I visited only once and discovered the concept of pizza sold by the slice
- Pig Out at a convenience store down the street from my grandmother’s house
- Psycho Soldier at a truck stop, which was a half-remembered mystery until someone on Insert Credit identified it for me
- Xevious and Time Soldiers at Pancho’s Mexican Buffet
- Strikers 1945 at the union building at my college
I was trying to place Klax and Smash TV somewhere, but I guess it feels like I played them everywhere.
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Revolution X at my childhood pizza place The Pirate’s Cove is the biggest one for me. the arcade was in a side room near the kitchen and it always smelled really strongly of cigarette smoke cuz i guess this was before indoor smoking bans. Arkanoid is another one from there - the sounds of the game still hit me really strongly. a bunch of others too.
the Pirate’s Cove ended up getting ousted out of the town partially because one of the employees, a local college student, got kidnapped and murdered by another one of the employees. still weird to think about
a few others:
the Pizza Hut we went to sometimes cuz i got personal pan pizzas from there had one of those cocktail Ms. Pac Man cabinets, which was the first place i experienced that game.
this place Frankie’s Pizza a few towns over was the first place i played SMB1 because it had one of those Nintendo Vs. cabinets.
also this hotel we always stayed at in northeastern Pennsylvania had Buggy Boy, which i was able to identify thanks to this forum, and the Nintendo vs. Kung Fu cabinet.
as an adult the only place i experienced the table flipping game Cho Chabudai Gaeshi was at the arcade in the Japantown mall in SF, which unfortunately i think no longer exists?
there are others i’m sure but those are the ones that immediately come to mind.
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Simpsons Arcade always reminds me of TimeZone in Bankstown NSW, which is probably the only place I ever played it.
Snow Bros and Pang remind me of Magic Mountain from Glenelg South Australia, the notorious eyesore that has since been torn down. I played enough Snow Bros there one time that some guy that looked like a Greek George Lucas said “you gonna give someone else a go?” and I immediately left. I think this was the first time I ever played Street Fighter II as well, which I had hyped up in my mind as the greatest thing ever, then when I played it I got trashed by Chun Li in within seconds and hated it.
NEO GEO League Bowling reminds me of the Elizabeth Bowling Centre, which had a cabinet behind the spot where our lanes usually were. I think I only played it a couple times but the sounds of the cabinet were always not too far away. I had a birthday party there once and the guy at the counter gave me a really scuffed up bowling pin as a gift with ANDREW HAPPY B/DAY ELIZ BOWL written on it, and whenever I look at it I think of NEO GEO League Bowling.
I think they also had Zero Wing and maybe some Macross game that was in Japanese?
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Oh yeah, just took the fam to one of these places a few weeks ago (in Dundalk, of course)
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G-Loc: at the Chuck E Cheese’s that all my friends used for birthdays in elementary school
GI Joe: at the Skate-A-Way, where all the rich kids in middle school would have their birthday parties. Me and my friend/guitarist Sasank would refuse to skate and just play this the whole time. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it anywhere else. It’s a “forward runner” like Space Harrier but your Joe is ground-bound, only the firing reticle moves up and down. Everything, I mean everything, blows up. Excellent property damage game
Samurai Shodown 2: crammed into a tiny closet with a snack vending machine in the basement of the student union at Franklin & Marshall College, where I went for many consecutive summers in middle & high school for CTY, an expensive program for smarty pants kids where you lived in a dorm and basically took a college-level class for 3 weeks. Computers were forbidden so this was the only way on campus to get any time with the holy Screen. Used all my laundry quarters to play it and just turned my underwear inside out. God help anyone who was trying to get laid at CTY.
Strikers 1945: at Hershey Park, where I went frequently in high school for band and chorus competitions. You could kick the front of it in a certain kinda way to get free credits.
Street Fighter 2: at the ice cream shop in Martha’s Vineyard-lite aspirational upper-middle class vacation town Eagles Mere in north-central PA, where some family friends owned a home and we occasionally went for summers. Every day my buddy and I would walk down to the village pizza place for lunch, then hit up the ice cream shop for dessert, then play SF2.
Tokyo Wars: at the gigantic and gorgeous arcade at the incomprehensibly massive Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut. One of my best friends, whose house I would visit for a week every summer, his dad worked for the tribe that owned the casino, so we got to go and get free reign of the place. The game is pure polygon fetishism for me, it’s Mega Man Legends meets Reagan-era military technology, it’s like it was made just for me.
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Did they ever get that fixed in mame? That was one of those games that was only partially playable for years like outfoxies.
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i think it’s worked since at least 10+ years ago? it definitely runs, looks and sounds fine at a glance.
there might be some detail to it only being partially playable i’m missing
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Like all the sprites were garbled last time I checked. My most recent attempt was fairly recently but I think the default mame version that retropie includes is long in the tooth so as to be lighter on the hardware. That’s rad that it’s finally fixed in the updated version.
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