Couple stand out to me:
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Seeing Virtua Fighter for the first time back in what 1993 or so at an amusement park and being wowed by the graphics, thinking it was photo realistic.
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Seeing Mortal Kombat 2 on a big screen CRT cabinet and thinking I was going to go to hell because of the violence (lol).
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Playing X-Men with my dad and his friend and his kid on a 6 player machine that had widescreen, very cool for the time.
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Pumping endless quarters into Aliens vs Predator (one of my favorite arcade games).
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Seeing some dude beat Tekken Tag which I could never clear and thinking he was the coolest.
Arcades were great. A dream of mine is to visit a game center in Japan and play some of the classics on an actual machine.
Street Figher 2 (obv), TMNT, The Simpsons....
I'm playing them now as well on FPGA hardware thanks to the scene out there working to reverse engineer the original hardware and preserve them. Still waiting for an X-Men port though.
Lately I've been discovering that a bunch of classic NES games were arcade ports and I never knew because I had never seen the arcade versions, like Contra, Bionic Command, Strider, Castlevania (Haunted Castle)....
FPGA is the way to go. I rebuilt my ancient TankStick with new innards and have been rocking the fuck out of the arcade list.
Still can't believe it does Saturn and N64. I'm 2 hours in Policenaughts as we speak.