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.
Shadows over Mystara and The Simpsons game in the lobby at the theater downtown.
Popped a couple quarters into Arm Champs 2 at lazer tag and accidentally picked the hardest opponent. I held out long enough that other kids wouldn’t let me lose, so like 5 of us together beat it.
Went to Texas on vacation and absolutely annihilated the high score board on a Star Wars: Phantom Menace pinball machine.
This is now my favorite arcade game thanks to discovering it via emulation. We didn’t have a machine of it around here or I know I would have fell in love with it as a kid.