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.
golden axe. only arcade game i ever played to the end.
i had a stack of quarters and other kids jumped in for co-op until one who was decent enough i just funded him until we beat it
went to a birthday or two where the parents rented one of those “free arcade rooms” where you got pizza and unlimited plays on like 20 cabinets
i really do think we need some kind of third space for social gaming again. obviously not designed to just rob you of money