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.
I really liked Burger Time. I felt like it wasn’t mind numbingly hard and it was a good value proposition for a quarter. I similarly feel the same way about DigDug.
Spy Hunter was a revelation. But really hard.
Seeing Dragons Lair for the first time was mind boggling. But I sucked at it.
Street Fighter 2 definitely got me going back to the arcade.
Edited to add: look into the MiSTer FPGA project. I’ve had one for 5 or 6 years and it scratches an itch where most emulation falls short.
I remember seeing the intro to Super Street Fighter 2 with Ryu bobbing up and down then doing a hadoken and being wowed by the effects.