Piggybacking on HFN's post (welcome back, HFN!) and the discussion it generated, we need a place to discuss the place we used to go to get our video game fix. I'm actually surprised we don't have a thread dedicated to this already, but there's no time like the present.
I come by my love of the Arcade honestly. My dad was a pinball addict. Many times I heard my grandpa (RIP, Grandpa Don) tell the story about how they would go to Lagoon and within 30 minutes of walking through the gates, my dad would go missing. They could always find him at the pinball machine, either playing the game or in line waiting his turn. When he became an adult, his profession took him all over the country. Many times he would travel by car from place to place. Since he didn't drink and he didn't go whoring (we think) his favorite place to kill time became the arcade. Sounds creepy now, but it was slightly less creepy then. I digress. Sometimes we kids would get to travel with him, and if we had time between destinations, we'd always stop in any city we were passing through to hit up the arcade. Tilt, Aladdin's Castle, or some local mom and pop arcade. We played them all. I've probably played in arcades in 30 states. It was one of the best things about traveling with dad.
And dad was an arcade baller. I could easily burn through $5 in quarters re-upping for life in Altered Beast or Gauntlet before dad lost his first ball in pinball. He could make a single game of Tetris last for over a half hour. Dad sort of feels like he discovered that game, since he would play it in the arcade before anyone even knew what it was. It was actually the reason he got us our first Nintendo, because he was banking on them making a Tetris game for that console.
When the Red Cliffs Mall was finally built, it had a Tilt. Soooo many summer hours spent in that place. I pretty much had a paper route to pay tithing save for my mission and pay the rest to Tilt. The mall was a 45 second bike ride from my house, so I was there whenever I could be. Favorite games included:
Galaga
Star Wars
Qbert
Gauntlet
THe Golden Axe
Altered Beast
WWE Wrestemania (Ted Dibiasi was freaking impossible to beat)
Street Fighter II (Sho Ryuken)
Mortal Kombat (I never got as good at this as I did at SFII)
The Simpsons
The arcade is vestige of days gone by. And while our kids certainly understand the video game itch--they know it all too well--they will never understand how, before we all had a video game console in our house--let alone multiple consoles--that itch was still there. And the arcade was pretty much the only place we could go to really scratch it.
I come by my love of the Arcade honestly. My dad was a pinball addict. Many times I heard my grandpa (RIP, Grandpa Don) tell the story about how they would go to Lagoon and within 30 minutes of walking through the gates, my dad would go missing. They could always find him at the pinball machine, either playing the game or in line waiting his turn. When he became an adult, his profession took him all over the country. Many times he would travel by car from place to place. Since he didn't drink and he didn't go whoring (we think) his favorite place to kill time became the arcade. Sounds creepy now, but it was slightly less creepy then. I digress. Sometimes we kids would get to travel with him, and if we had time between destinations, we'd always stop in any city we were passing through to hit up the arcade. Tilt, Aladdin's Castle, or some local mom and pop arcade. We played them all. I've probably played in arcades in 30 states. It was one of the best things about traveling with dad.
And dad was an arcade baller. I could easily burn through $5 in quarters re-upping for life in Altered Beast or Gauntlet before dad lost his first ball in pinball. He could make a single game of Tetris last for over a half hour. Dad sort of feels like he discovered that game, since he would play it in the arcade before anyone even knew what it was. It was actually the reason he got us our first Nintendo, because he was banking on them making a Tetris game for that console.
When the Red Cliffs Mall was finally built, it had a Tilt. Soooo many summer hours spent in that place. I pretty much had a paper route to pay tithing save for my mission and pay the rest to Tilt. The mall was a 45 second bike ride from my house, so I was there whenever I could be. Favorite games included:
Galaga
Star Wars
Qbert
Gauntlet
THe Golden Axe
Altered Beast
WWE Wrestemania (Ted Dibiasi was freaking impossible to beat)
Street Fighter II (Sho Ryuken)
Mortal Kombat (I never got as good at this as I did at SFII)
The Simpsons
The arcade is vestige of days gone by. And while our kids certainly understand the video game itch--they know it all too well--they will never understand how, before we all had a video game console in our house--let alone multiple consoles--that itch was still there. And the arcade was pretty much the only place we could go to really scratch it.
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