Couple stand out to me:

  • 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.

  • Seeing Mortal Kombat 2 on a big screen CRT cabinet and thinking I was going to go to hell because of the violence (lol).

  • 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.

  • Pumping endless quarters into Aliens vs Predator (one of my favorite arcade games).

  • 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.

  • Findom_DeLuise [she/her, they/them]
    ·
    4 months ago
    • Getting older kids (and adults) to rage-quit at the OG Street Fighter II was always good for a laugh. My own uncle had a meltdown because he couldn't figure out how to counter the Blanka flying claw-into-face chomp-into electric shock combo. As Ryu. Yeah.
    • The original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade with the 4-player cabinet was awesome, too. I think I only ever made it past Bebop once, though. I remember being super excited for the NES port when it finally came out, because the other TMNT game on NES (and home computers) was such a disappointment compared to the arcade.
    • I wish we'd had the X-Men and Simpsons ones; those looked like they were in the same lane as TMNT.
    • There was a version of After Burner where the "cabinet" was a giant recumbent pilot's seat on a set of force feedback motors, and it would jolt you around when you banked the jet. That was pretty cool.