Where did YOU play?

[Chris]

We've all found video games all over the place, but I'm sure we all have strong visceral memories of certain arcades associated with particular eras of our life or particular games.  What places stand out in your mind?

For me, it's something like this:

Shakey's Pizza: My brother and I would dump every quarter we could find into the PONG cocktails their.

Oz:  My first arcade, Oz was a dimly lit hole in the wall in the Puente Hills Mall (the mall used as Twin Pines Mall in Back to the Future) in Southern California.  It was distinguished by a big round window forming the O in Oz. This was still the 70's so a lot of the games were mechanical: projection-based shooting galleries, pinball, skee-ball, and all the early black-and-white classics; later they had a lot of vector games.  I played a lot of Battlezone here.  In this particular arcade, kids whispered of rumors of a game called Foxbat that was so advanced and realistic that the Air Force had confiscated it and was using it to train fighter pilots.

PJ Pizzaz: A forerunner of Chuck E. Cheese; pizza in one half, arcade in the other.  The one I went to near Puente Hills Mall was a split-level, very futuristic looking.  This was the only place I ever found Sub-Roc 3D and I played it constantly.

Starcade at Disneyland: Coming off of Space Mountain, you pass right next to this arcade, and they always had the latest stuff.  My biggest game memories here were Starship 1, Tailgunner, and of course banks of TRON machines when the movie came out.  More recently, it had a FULL SIZE X-Wing model hanging from the ceiling!  (Also props to the Main Street Penny Arcade which was full of great pre-video mechanical games.)

Redondo Beach Pier:  There were two arcades here: the Underground, which was (of course) underground, decorated with signs from the London Underground.  This was a huge arcade full of classics; it was a haven for "real" games at a time when arcades were being taken over by fighters.  I came here almost exclusively to play Rip-Off.  For other games, I would go to the old arcade at the other end of the pier which was huge; it had a Tilt-A-Whirl ride in the middle which I would always (unwisely) ride after too many trips to Hot Dog On A Stick.  Lots of mechanical games here and older videos; I played a lot of pich-and-bat type games here, plus they had two Hercules pinball machines, the only ones I've ever seen.

[postalp123]

Lets see:

My earliest memories were of the 7-Eleven down on the corner of my Detroit neighborhood: Trojan & Guerilla War

Then when my family moved to Westland, there was an italian bakery called "Captain Nemo's" and there I saw my favorite game of all time: Black Tiger. And also a Liquor store in the area introduced me to (IMHO) one of the best put together games of all time: R-Type.

From then on out, I have fond memories of the Chucky Cheese's, Showbiz's and especially the Little Ceasers Play places, a few standouts from the arcades there are as follows: TMNT, Aliens, The Simpsons, etc...

Eventually I looked back to a few 7-Eleven's in the area, and there I found "The New Blood" of arcade games: Street Fighter 2, Iron Man's Off Road, Bionic Commando.

And of course there were the Mall Rat days in Ann Arbor hanging out at the arcades: Area 51, X-men vs Street Fighter, DoA, DDR.

The "vs" series the with Capcom/Marvel collaboration caught my full attention for quite some time, many good competitions in those years, got most of my hand/eye coordnation from it, lol.

[monkeybomb]

Space Station:  A standard arcade in the Northidge Mall in the San Fernando Valley.

Flaky Jakes:  This place was an incredible restaurant.  They had a toppings bar for hambugers when you could dump as much melted cheese ass you wanted onto burger that was sitting in a small round trough and not a plate.  Coolest place I've ever been.  It's been gone for years.  Double Dragon and Guantlet were the big games there.

Shakeys Pizza:  You all know this one.  Ours had Excitebike and Elevator action.

Colecovision at home.  My dad was always tight with money at the arcade because he wasn't tight with consoles.

[somunny]

I  remember playing Dragon's Lair at a nearby liquor store aptly named "Liquor, Liquor".  There was also a great arcade adjacent to the local community college that had about sixty machines.  

Of course Chuck E. Cheese, Straw Hat and Fountain Skate all deserve honorable mention.

Ah, the good ol' days...

[ahofle]

Let's see...before arcades were everywhere:

- 7-Eleven: Star Castle and Spectar
- Local movie theatre: Space Invaders, Break Out
- Pipe Organ Pizza: Boot Hill, Atari Sprint, Space Invaders

Once the big mall arcades came around, I lost track.

[shardian]

-Grand casino in Hinkley, Minnesota back in early 90's. HUGE arcade with three of EVERYTHING. Best thing, 2 for 1 token ratio, IE, 2 tokens for each quarter. They also had a Galaxian 3 machine. That was totally sweet! I never understood why the adults in my family would rather blow their money in the "real" casino. 

-Gold Mine 1 & 2 at Huntington Mall, Barboursville, WV. I was fortunate enough to have not one, but two arcades in my local mall. They were both dirty, dark, and chock full of games. It was AWESOME! Many fond memories of selling lists of MKII moves and fatalities. 

Too bad that arcades suck now. All  crappy redemption games, stupid gimmick games, and driving games that cost at least $1 to play...and they all have a Ms. Pac/ galaga reunion for a $1 a pop. Whoopee!

[Chris]

Flaky Jakes:  This place was an incredible restaurant.  They had a toppings bar for hambugers when you could dump as much melted cheese ass you wanted onto burger that was sitting in a small round trough and not a plate.  Coolest place I've ever been.  It's been gone for years.  Double Dragon and Guantlet were the big games there.

Ohh, I LOVED Flakey Jakes.... Fuddrucker's is just a pale imitation!  Usually went to the one near Disneyland, and there was one near my house in West Covina for a very short time...

I didn't even think about movie theatres!  The only one that stands out in my mind was the Fox in West Covina, because it had a Death Race machine... I enjoyed that more than the movies, usually...

[Texasmame]

Great thread - I was thinking of starting this one soon. . .

New England Grand Prix - they always had the newest games before anyone else.  I remember Quantum, Cloak and Dagger and Rip-Off from there.  They were going under about 5 years ago and I went to see them about buying some stuff but it was already all gone.

Third World arcade - This was my main haunt.  Had 'em all, about two blocks from my house.  My favs from there - Stargate, Star Wars cockpit, Spy Hunter cockpit, Cosmic Avenger, Front Line, Terra Cresta.  I was a regular, needless to say.  It's now a campus bookstore for UMass Lowell.  

Also on that strip, right next to each other - Jim and Irene's (breakfast place):  Missile Command, Asteroids, Battlezone mini.  Still there, no more games, different ownership and name.

Jimmy's Pizza - Joust (this game ALWAYS reminds me of French Bread Pizza), Satan's Hollow and Cliff Hanger!  Same situation as Jim and Irene's.


Astro's Subs - Ah, the $3 hamburg special!  Defender, Jack the Giantkiller.  It's now a police substation!

Lastly in town, there was World of Games.  It was a two story, mondo arcade.  Ones I recall from there - Space Dungeon, Berzerk, Star Castle.  It's now a health club.  I actually went on a mini-raid there when I was collecting and got 5 games from the storage space upstairs a few years ago!  Pretty cool having the ACTUAL games you used to play when you were little!  The ones in that haul were Tron, Centipede, Mario Bros. Star Trek Cockpit, MACH 3 cockpit - $500 total.  

[Chris]

The ones in that haul were Tron, Centipede, Mario Bros. Star Trek Cockpit, MACH 3 cockpit - $500 total.   

$500 TOTAL?  You realize of course that we all hate you now...   Wish I had the space for a haul like that!

[johnm160]

My main haunts were

Aladdins Castle

Super Amusements

and the game room in Nathans.......How can you beat arcade games and hot dogs?

[NightGod]

In the little town where I grew up there was an arcade called Grandma's Place (everyone called the owner grandma since she was about 50...just ancient to teenagers =P) but that was open when I was about 8 and I wasn't allowed to go in there very often because of all the smoking and swearing. In fact, you were supposed to be 14 or 15 to go in without an adult. I do have some pretty vivid memories of playing Asteroids there a few times, though.

As I got older (Jr. High) it was the mid-80s and we had a small ice cream shop (name totally eludes me) where he had five or so games that rotated on a monthly or so basis and everyone used to hang out there. He even did monthly pizza parties where you paid like five bucks and got all the pizza and pop you wanted and they played music and we all hung out (the girls, too-it wasn't some creepy sausage fest LOL). They also gave out prizes of a free shake to whoever could beat a high score on a game during the party-looking back, that was probably just a ploy to keep you playing the games and not eatting pizza. Lifeforce and Gauntlet (woot getting good enough to play forever on a quarter) are the two I remember most. He had a pool table for a while, but some of the rougher teenagers started hanging out there because of it, and there wasn't really room for it in that tiny place, so he got rid of it within a month or so.

Of course there were places like Showbiz, Gold Mine and Aladdin's Castle (actually worked there for a few months in the early 90s), but those were anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes from home, so they weren't as big a part of my life as that little ice cream shop.

[Texasmame]

The ones in that haul were Tron, Centipede, Mario Bros. Star Trek Cockpit, MACH 3 cockpit - $500 total.   

$500 TOTAL?  You realize of course that we all hate you now...   Wish I had the space for a haul like that!

Heh, yeah total. 

The Centipede needed some cosmetic work and a RAM replaced, IIRC.  Mario needed a cap kit and coin door work, Tron needed a new power supply.  The MACH 3 worked perfectly and was in nice shape but I couldn't get it down my bulkhead (traded it for an Asteroids Deluxe) and the Star Trek cockpit was dead when I got it.  Eventually, got it to play blind but the damn G08 in it was well beyond my repair "expertise."  

See the link below for these and more pics.

It was great fun, brought back a lot of memories and, most importantly, got the "itch" out of my system.  No more interest in owning any more than MAME cabs.  

[joecitizen]

On the Coast Guard Base in Kodiak, AK, circa 1984 - 1989:

The bowling alley had Time Pilot '84, Moon Patrol, and Son Son.
Pizza shop in the base exchange had Joust, Yie-ar Kung Fu, and Xevious.

The only two I remember for sure at the arcade in downtown Kodiak were Ghouls & Ghosts, and NARC.

[WaRpEd]

Around 1980 to 1987 In Lakeland Florida we had a choice of place called Topper's ( read Chucky Cheese Lite ) Asteroids , Donkey Kong & Gauntlet 1.
Family Fun Center had a about 30 machines Star Wars Cockpit, Firefox Cockpit ,Battlezone, Night Stocker and Dragon's Lair. There was a Malibu Gran Prix in Tampa that was huge on games but now is mostly Go carts and flat track racing.
Man I feel old

[Drugstore_Cowboy]

Mr. Pool, 'Vegas' and Slots were my local arcades.

every Saturday morning I'd meet my mates, have a few games of Pool then go for lunch and then back to Mr. Pool for some gaming (Double Dragon II, Shinobi, original Street Fighter and Power Drift usually)

Vegas had a better selection of games but most were in generic cabinets with ---smurfy--- controls and crackly sound.

when Mr. Pool closed down I bought many of the PCBs from

[(+_+)]

Aaah, the nostalgia of it all. Thank god or whoever you want for Mame. 

[StephenH]

I played at Several Different Arcades over the years, partly due to the fact that I have lived in several cities in the past around the country.

When I was real little, I played at Chuck E cheese and ShowBiz.   
I also sometimes played the couple of games in resturants such as Pizza Hut in the lobby.   In another city, I used to play at Tilt in the mall.   I once went to Peter Piper Pizza for a birthday party, and they had lots of arcade games.   In my current city, I started out playing some at Yellow Brick Road and Bowl Weevil, and Family Fun Center.  I later discovered the Nickel Arcades, such as Wunderland and Nickel City.   I still play often at Nickel City, one of the last arcades in San Diego!

[Lewis Black]

The bowling alley in Huntington NY.  I must have spent hundereds of dollars on Tempest and Battle Zone.

[lloydcom]

Now thats a good question, as I was from Downey California we had:

Golf N Stuff: Home of the first Thayer's Quest Machine, Dragon's Lair and Space Ace, plus all the old favs like frogger and Donkey Kong.  Great crazy golf, a go cart race track and water slide which made it on the chips cop tv program.

Sega Centers:  Awesome arcades in Downey, Cerritos, Westminster, Old Towne Mall (plus others) Cerritos is where I first played Star Wars and waited in queue for 45 minutes to snag a game, Journey, Star Trek and the old classics.  Anyone still have the tokens?

Oz in Westminster - had the fabled Cube Quest.

The Arkade in La Mirada where I fell in love with Star Castle and lost my pocket money every weekend.

Bobos Arcade (Downey) which was THE place to be if you were playing hooky from school, also had gravitar contests and Reactor cranked way up.  Track N Field Contests.

Redondo Beach - yep both arcades the underground across from the marina and the other arcade downstairs full of Centipedes.  The underground had Eight Starwars and 5 Dragon's Lair machines.

Santa Monica Pier: All your standard fare before the terrible weather took out most of the piers and closed the arcade in the early 80s.

Shakeys Pizza Downey: Remember seeing original sprint and Rear projection driver game. 1975?  Later remodeled and its own arcade had Pacmans and Donkey Kongs.

Circus Circus Las Vegas: If not the Holy Grail of arcades - having everything you can think of at 25c a go 24/7.

Knotts Berry Farm: Roaring 20s - had dedicated Space ace and all the classics.

Buena Park Mall: - First Asteroids ever seen that if you hunted for the spaceship and was caught doing so - you were banned.  No seriously.

Disneyland Park and Hotel - Penny Arcade on Main Street - Remember playing Kick for an hour before getting Kick'ed myself.  The hotel had a basement arcade full of centipedes.

Lakewood Mall: Western styled arcade (name escapes me) prototype Dragon's Lair, and the best range of pinballs.

Jim's Pet Supplies (Downey) - the most bizarre place to play Astro Blaster!

Gee can anyone add anymore?

As you can see SE Los Angeles had the best coverage.

Now I'm in Blackpool UK and we have......

[MYX]

Here is a pervious link from other folks. Keep em comin. It is the history of our little addiction. 

[Brumaz]

1st post
Local Pizza Place always had a couple, but could beat whichever takeaway joint had the Moon Patrol cocktail in it! It swapped ownership around over the years and i followed it
Local arcade for bubble bobble +snow bros, along with raiden and Double Dragon. oh and a Fun House Pinball later on which i loved

[shardian]

Oh, another one. My mom managed a Pizza Hut when I was a kid. I sometimes had to go with her to work during the day, so I got to sit and "pretend play" the Vs. Uni system all day long. Everyonce in a while I did get to play for real though. Anyways, The default #1 high score in excite bike was A.H , my initials. So I always got to tell everyone I was the master of excitebike.

[MYX]

The default #1 high score in excite bike was A.H , my initials. So I always got to tell everyone I was the master of excitebike.

It was from all that practice in free play.

[shardian]

The default #1 high score in excite bike was A.H , my initials. So I always got to tell everyone I was the master of excitebike.

It was from all that practice in free play.

Free play? I wish. I was an expert "pretend" player as a kid. you know, the kid who is stuck at Wal-mart for two hours without any money while mom shops so he memorizes all of the attract modes for mortal Kombat and Cruisin USA, and pretends he is playing them. That was me, baby.

[ErikRuud]

Here is a pervious link from other folks. Keep em comin. It is the history of our little addiction. 

And here is another thread on the subject

[subcriminal]

I used to skip school with a couple of mates and bike down to Magic City or Silver City arcade's in Norwich UK and play Gauntlet, RoboCop, PacLand, Kung Fu Master and some StreetFighter II.
Other than that it was Pontins or Butlins holiday camps that had some huge arcades and would spend every evening in there on holiday. I'm also close to the coast so Yarmouth was a reglular, the arcades are still there and a few still have some classics tucked away at the back but it aint the same as it used to be The best one there is The Flamingo, then The Mint, I think Barrons is still open too. Good ol' days!

[fiscap]

During the summer of 1979, my brother and I spent two weeks with an aunt who lived in Lake Placid, NY. She was the manager of a night club called Sassafras and we would go into work with her a few days during the visit. When we weren't out on the lake fishing or swimming, we'd be messing around inside the club. She gave us full reign of the DJ booth until about the third day of playing nothing but Y.M.C.A. at full volume. That would be enough for just about anyone to cough up their entire bankroll of quarters to play arcade games. They only had three games inside the club - Pac Man, Space Invaders and Superman pinball, but it was enough for my brother and I to play hours on end.

Another such memory is when I was 13 and had an after-school job as a paperboy. After my route each day, my brother and I would hit the local 7-eleven for a few games of missile command. We would both desperately try to get beyond the 4X level so we could see the different colored screens. I still remember on collection days going home and my mom yelling at us because she couldn't figure out how we came up short each week. We probably stuffed enough quarters in that machine to buy it three times over.

Those memories definitely fuel my enthusiasm in my cabinet construction.

[RandyT]

We had a pretty decent arcade at the local mall.  The name of the place was "Just FUN".  It was there for a long time and in the early days it had Space Invaders, Lunar Lander, the Cinematronics classics and a lot of pins.  In retrospect it was very "Wizard of OZ"-esque watching the monochrome games turn to color.  First Galaxian, then Astro Fighter, then Stratavox with the first speech (if you can call it that  ) 

I spent a lot of time there, but there were smaller arcades all over town.  By the time I was about 16 they were bringing an "Aladin's Castle" to Collegetown (A little commercial area just on the outskirts of Cornell University.)   This was the first large "themed" arcade I had seen and the theme was a kind of rough city street with neon and signs and fake building fronts.  My dad is a sign painter and ended up getting the job to go in and do the signage.  I worked with him quite a bit, so I got a chance to help out with the job.  I still remember painting the "graffiti" on the walls.  It was pretty cool to hang out in the arcade knowing that I had done some of the work on the interior decor of the place.  I went there as often as I could, but it was a little more out of the way than the others.  It was a great place though.  They had everything in there.

Growing up, I had every pizza joint, laundromat, skating rink, department store, etc. (even a few bars )  mapped in my brain.  I knew where every game in town was, right down to the Computer Space machine (a yellow one) in the bus terminal.

My folks liked to go to amusement parks for summer vacations, and the arcades at those places were real treats.  We also used to go to Roseland Park in Canandaigua, NY once or twice a year.  It was there I got to experience the long rows of the original 13' mechanical scoring Skee-Ball machines, and the antique mechanical games of years long gone.  The great thing about it was that they should have been in a museum (and probably are now) but they were all in working order and you could actually play them.

At 18 (1983), I joined the Army and played games at the PX when I got the opportunity.  That was the first place I saw "Kung Fu Master" and the DATA EAST name on a machine.  Germany was a little weird on the games front.  Gambling machines were everywhere, but videogames were harder to find.  Still there were usually one or two bootlegs thrown into the mix at the local seedy gaming parlors (good people didn't go into those places, or so I was told by my now ex in-laws) 

Aladdin's Castle is long gone, "Just FUN" is now a NAMCO Cyberstation and the pins went away a couple of years ago.  Nothing left but redemption, dance, racing, fighters and shooting.  The kids today will never know how exciting a time that was (To play videogames in my day we had to walk to the arcade in the snow and it was uphill both ways....All just to hit a ball that was shaped like block with a stick that was shaped like another block and that's the way we liked it!.... )

RandyT

[lhallmark]

I grew up down at the Jersey Shore (Seaside Heights) in the 70's. There were several huge arcades there that had all of the latest emerging video games as well as decades of pins and other games of chance. Our Father would throw us $10 and tell us to go over there and play while he was at the bar - probably some of the best parenting he ever did  I will cut him a little slack - we were the first kids in town to have the original Pong 
My teen years were mostly spent at the arcades in the malls in Clearwater, FL. Nowadays, I usually take my kids to several area restaurants with game rooms, Eddie's in Dunedin and Gameworks in Ybor City to name a few. My teenage girls play Frogger, Tetris, and Toki all of the time on the PC at home, my oldest even has them on her phone now! I have an old SF2 Dynamo cabinet I am in the process of rebuilding as a MAME/Entertainment Center that they say will never get done.

[Sinner]

My teen years were spent on the East coast of Canada, in Prince Edward Island...there are three places I can think of that I went for video games...the Charlottetown mall, Skate Country and Sam's Arcade/Convenience Store...there were many more places I went to play games, but those were the ones I hung out at...

Most of the classics remind me of one of these places...I'm sure most of us could hear the name of a game and it would remind of some place we used to play it...for me MS Pac-Man and bagit Man remind me of a ferry ride to the Magdalen Islands, Quebec...it's a 5.5 hour boat ride and I'd be on it at least twice a summer from the are of 7 to about 13...not much to do when you're in the middle of the Atlantic for that long...