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Red

ITT your first arcade games

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I have some extremely good memories of my mom taking me to one of the local arcades when I was just a kid.  The earliest games I remember playing there (though I'm sure there are a few earlier) are:

 

S.T.U.N. Runner

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Aliens

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Ninja Gaiden

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These were all still pretty new at the time, so it must have been around 1990.

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I think my first memory of an arcade game was when I was six. My family brought me to a Chuck E. Cheese's for some kind of party and there was Super Mario Bros. on an arcade machine. I didn't do very well at it; although I understood that I had to jump on the goomba to kill it, I didn't understand that I could jump on or over the first pipe to continue, so I lost all my lives from running out of time. For decades I didn't understand why Super Mario Bros. was playable on an arcade machine when it was on the NES and emulation was still a decade away. It turns out Nintendo had an arcade machine in the late 80s that had a selection of up to 10 NES games.

 

I didn't get to play arcade games much as a kid, but they were what teen-me looked forward to most on the family's Labor Day visits to Reno. Tons of great quarter-munchers like Crusin' USA, Area 51/Maximum Force, Super Off-Road, the aforementioned STUN Runner, Jurassic Park (not the Lost World, that game was overpriced everywhere I went), Raiden, Simpsons Arcade, Tokyo Wars. One game I wish I played a lot more of during the arcade heyday was Gauntlet Legends/Dark Legacy, that game was stupidly dumb fun with other people.

 

*sigh* I do miss the arcades after they pretty much died out in the US during the 2000s. At least I got something to look for on Youtube tonight. :P

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Hehe. I'm a good Doomer and always been good at gaming in general (I had no problem clocking all three original Super Mario Bros. games as they came out in the mid/late '80s when I was still not quite a teenager) but I was ridiculously ordinary at Galaga. I swear, the best I ever achieved was about Level 12 or 13 in that game. lol

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Local bowling alley in a very small town when I was very young had these arcade games, so these were all my first. My brother and I played these a ton.

Simpsons Arcade

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Die Hard Arcade

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Captain Commando

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Time Crisis 2

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And an Ice Hockey machine

The Time Crisis 2 machine only had 1 player, so when we eventually moved to a big city the most impressive thing to us was when we went to an arcade and they had a 2-player Time Crisis 2 machine. We beat it that day.

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There was this Jurrasic Park arcade machine I once found. Probably my first and last encounter with an arcade machine.

It involved using a red and blue light guns, that's for sure, and the resolution was decent. It might have been that Jurassic Park III game, as it looks the most fitting. Can't say for sure until I see a video though.

I think it was around 2007-2010, when I played it.

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There is one place in my city that still has arcades and I used to visit it once in a while. It had mostly pinball machines (I loved those), air hockey, Pac Man, Shinobi, House of the Dead 2, Buster Bros and many racing cabinets with steering wheels, mostly Sega's if I had to guess (plus some on-rail shooters with pistol controllers). I had tons of fun playing there.

 

*searches online for that arcade-bowling place*

*finds out it closed in January of this year*

 

 Well, now it's just a memory.   :(

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Street Fighter II was the shit!

 

Also Galaga, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, The Simpsons Game, Area 51 and a whoooooole lot of pinball. DDR once in a blue moon. Back in about 2002 there was a huge badass arcade area at the Sanford flea market that had them all, it was rare to get so many badass cabinets in one spot. I can imagine it's a shell of it's former self these days (sheds a nostalgic tear) but when I was a kid I begged to go there constantly. I also bought a lot of my cartridges there back when I lived in Florida. Good times!

 

EDIT: Man, this thread makes me miss playing against random people in fighting games. A lot of people still play SFII online but there's something irreplaceable about playing in person!

Edited by Doomkid

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Street Fighter II Special Champion Edition on my brothers Sega Megadrive, I still love that game although I don't really play it anymore. M. Bison was my favorite character.

Edited by Avoozl

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9 hours ago, Red said:

Ohhh man oh man

 

lost-world-jurassic-park.jpg

Oh my god, i played this shit when i was 4 years old.

You gave me amazing memories.

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The oldest I can think of is Aliens, but I'm sure there was another one. Maybe Rampage.

 

I do remember this game sticking out in my memory because of how weird it looked and sounded, but never played it til I was older:

 

 

When Medusa starts winning she emits this terrifying laugh-hiss-rattle sound.

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I also played an Unreal Tournament arcade game at some point in the early 2000's. It was a giant box, and there was around 4 of them for multiplayer. You would fight against bots and if other players IIRC a standard deathmatch or a new game mode or two involving collecting floating balls (think Pacman).

Absolutely no information can be found about it and it all seems like a fever dream. Looking it up online only shows a couple other people posting about it on random forums, and now this post will likely be one of them.

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Some of my earliest gaming memories are pumping dozens of quarters into this at the hockey arena my dad played at.

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Nothing really stands out in my memory as my first arcade game, so I'll just say some I can remember as "the earliest I can remember." I can even remember specific instances, where I first saw or at least remember seeing games. But here's the weird thing since most of the games I remember are from 1982, either I remember things I shouldn't or they sat in arcades for years or longer.


Frogger - Chucky Cheese game room 2, around the corner to the left.

Zaxxon - right next to it

Moon Patrol - Chucky Cheese game room 1, when you first walk into it like 3rd game on the right

Robotron - same area

Q-Bert - Chucky Cheese game room 1, somewhere in the middle on the right

Burger Time - A hotel?

Choplifter - Holiday Inn

Donkey Kong - Laundromat

Defender - Local arcade (G-world I think)

 

There were 2 local arcades about 2+ roads away. I got mugged by another kid. That was literally the first African American I had ever seen and he pushed me down, stole my quarters. That arcade it happened in about 10 years later turned into gang shooting central its amazing the place is still in business to this day. Ah the memories.

 

Oh as for the other arcades.... out of business, completely. Only arcades I can find are either in theme parks or hotels and then its less about the games, more about the tickets.

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RoadBlasters was not only my first arcade game, but also my first arcade game in cockpit form. I mean, look at this danged thing and understand why this instilled in me a love for sit-down arcade machines since 1991. (Yeah, the game's older than that, but I was 4.)

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arcade machines were not really a thing over here in Sweden, at least not when i grew up. they used to have an arcade hall in the amusement park in Stockholm some 10 years ago, but it's gone now. i have no recollection of playing any arcade machines either there or elsewhere, sadly. :c

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arcmagicsword3.png

 

I was stoked when I found out there was a SNES version after it disappeared from my local supermarket, but it just wasn't the same.

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I was waaay too young when i first played an arcade game (since my parents had an arcade gallery in my house in the early 90's), but most likely it was either this one
 

 

Or this one, since i have faint memories of sitting in my father's lap to reach the handle to play....
 

 

The pole position machine it's still at my house, it works fine for five minutes before it starts to glitch out, but hey, turning that old machine really brings back some memories

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