ARCADE MASTER RACE GTFIH

Pliny Pete said:
Im old enough to remember when everything was an arcade
Ghetto corner store has some room in the storage closet, boom now its an arcade
All you can eat buffet has some space past those tables, boom now its an arcade
Mexican restaurant has just enough space for a tabletop Galaga game next to the bathroom door, boom now its an arcade
Everywhere you went, business owners were cramming arcade games into any empty space they could find to try and relieve us of as many quarters as possible
It was a simpler time and it was glorious!
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Laundry mats and pizza places always had good games.
 
Snubnoze707 said:
I feel like being part of the Arcade Master Race would require owning your own arcade cabinet.

I'm unfortunately not part of that race, however I have aspirations to own a Tekken cabinet at some point in life - Tekken 3, Tekken Tag, Tekken 5 (DR) would do. And not some Mame shit, a real one.
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Arcade 1Up doesn’t count, so no cheating.
 
Holic said:
I also learned a bit of psychological manipulation in my later years, via the use of Dance Dance Revolution machines (because of course).

Hanging in Lazer Park at Times Square one day, I noticed a consistent pattern with these dancing games. A group of people, usually girls, would approach the machine but nobody would go on it. They would then argue and eventually select one or two people to try it and that person/people would inevitably fail. Then they would all laugh and belittle the test subject even though they were the ones who put them in that situation in the first place. Then they would all move on. This happened pretty often during the week.

I learned that if you ran up afterward and showed the test subject how to play, you could flip the script and get the whole group fighting over who got to play next, and keep them on one machine for hours. It's amazing how you can puppet a crowd with just a few bits of info and a little observation.
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LOL i've seen this a bunch too! Can confirm..
In the Arcades I went to all the absolute rotters would hang around them to most nights, they attracted some right trash. They were all fucking amazing at it though.

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My Spot said:
Arcade 1Up doesn’t count, so no cheating.
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What about these?
My buddy has one with like 3000 games on it, hes always bragging on Facebook
Im a steal his shit one day

Legends-Ultimate-Arcade-Front-cropped-compressed.jpg
 
Arcades were making a comeback around here in the form of Barcades until Covid hit

I made myself one of those retropies to play arcade games but I am too lazy to make a cabinet for it
 
HHJ said:
TELL ME ABOUT YOUR ARCADE EXPERIENCES GROWING UP OMFG
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arcades were awesome.

as a fellow 80s ny child, i was constantly hustling (lemonade stands, selling cookies, got $ from a local gang that my friend's brother ran [in hindsight, i may have been a lookout a few times...], buying packs of baseball cards and selling the rookie cards to other kids/dealers, cans/bottles for .05, i sold random crap on the sidewalk...) and then blowing half of it at arcades.

also, my first active exposure to gambling, oddly enough.

and yeah, apparently some arcades were scary back then. i don't know if it was because of the gang (and i was a ballsy ass kid) or what, but i just never noticed or cared. and then i tried to get some other kids from school to go to one, and they freaked out. there were fights there pretty often, i saw a few stabbings. but it just never resonated me that it was sketchy, probably because i saw shit like that regularly and was already streetsmart. but the contrast from the arcades i went to and chucky cheese shit (where i went to a few birthday parties) was night and day. chucky cheese sucked. their games sucked and they were always broken/sticky/etc. all it was good for was going all wwf in the ballpit.

kung fu master, spy hunter (this game sucked but i thought it was awesome when i was like 5), gladiator, two tigers, rampage, gauntlet, punch-out, gunsmoke... thank god for double dragon. revolutionized everything. shinobi was amazing. played operation wolf a lot, too (if the gun was calibrated)

shit, in like 86 (year of the mets)... a pizza place a block from me had punch-out and ghosts n goblins.

90s arcade for me was basically just mk1-3 and ki, with an occasional x-men/simpsons/tmnt/time crisis or something. i didn't have much time (and thought vidya was basically for little kids then) due to having to be an adult at ~14. i guess it's no surprise that about a decade later, i was sick of adult life and decided to be a manchild forever. lolz

there were some "arcades" in philly in the last while, but they tended to be mostly just pinball. or dave&buster's.
 
HHJ said:
I miss that vibe. Like nothing was cooler than spotting a new game,and wishing you could take it home.
We have two bars in NYC that are called BARCADE that have like 20 or so old school machines. Thats something i never did back then was drink and play.
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when i was in portland, the only thing i liked was "ground kontrol," a barcade that had decent games and they were in good condition (at least, when i was there).

philly opened up a barcade, but it kinda sucked. they only had 2 games i was interested in (punch-out and double dragon), and dd was all kinds of fucked. the joysticks were bad, a button didn't work, and the screen had THICK grey horizontal lines all over it.

i actually forgot all about it, i have no idea if that place even stayed open.
 
HHJ said:
TELL ME ABOUT YOUR ARCADE EXPERIENCES GROWING UP OMFG
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I was born in 1980 and there were several arcades were I grew up. My mom owned a convenience store when I was a kid too. It was a smaller store, but she always had two arcade machines that she would rotate out threw a vendor. I could take quarters out of the til and play them if I wanted. It was awesome.

I also have a Bartop arcade machine that a buddy of mine built that I bought off of him. It runs off a raspberry pie and I also have NES, SNES, TG16, Genesis, Atari, and Master System uploaded to it along with a few hundred mame arcade titles. It's pretty slick all I have to do is download a game on my laptop then wireless upload it to my arcade machine.
 
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The pizzerias all had to have a street fighter or mortal kombat.

Getting challenged by chinese kids who were obsessed with the game with the scent of pizza in the background was my jams

Its crazy to think about the fighting game scene back then. Youd be playing,trying to beat the game,and some kid you dont know could challenge you right then and there,and try to fuck up your day. If you had enough quarters,this could go on all day. Kids today will never know that shit. One day like 2 yrs ago i went into a barcade and for shits and giggles me and my boy played each other in street fighter and i whupped him,and then some dude came in and spent 4 or 5 tries trying to beat me. I was like holy shit! 1992 motherfucker!!!!

"Yo,i got next!"

Alot of times those chinese kids didnt speak any english and never interacted with you unless it was this way,
 
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HHJ said:
The pizzerias all had to have a street fighter or mortal kombat.

Getting challenged by chinese kids who were obsessed with the game with the scent of pizza in the background was my jams

Its crazy to think about the fighting game scene back then. Youd be playing,trying to beat the game,and some kid you dont know could challenge you right then and there,and try to fuck up your day. If you had enough quarters,this could go on all day. Kids today will never know that shit. One day like 2 yrs ago i went into a barcade and for shits and giggles me and my boy played each other in street fighter and i whupped him,and then some dude came in and spent 4 or 5 tries trying to beat me. I was like holy shit! 1992 motherfucker!!!!
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but that was the best part.

a friend and i were really good at mk2-3 and ki. all we wanted to play was versus. the single player was boring. playing others was the best way to get good, and once you were good, the only real challenge. plus, it was the funnest, imo. quite a few times, i was playing for an hourish on just 1 quarter. plus, we'd often play for others' quarters (or real money [as in $5-20], when applicable).

the community college i went to had an arcade. it had ki, mk3, xmen vs street fighter (all of these were a little dated, but they were still packed)... some of my friends failed numerous classes because they couldn't get their asses out of there.

shit, this one guy (basically a mark) ended up getting expelled after having a meltdown in an epic losing streak.
 
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