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Where did YOU play?

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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  :laugh:) 

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!.... :soapbox:)

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  :o I will cut him a little slack - we were the first kids in town to have the original Pong  :P
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...


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