REALLY digging the Star Wars.

Talk about nostalgia.

My last quarter was probably late 1982 or early 1983. My family moved us out to Phoenix then, I finished my last two years of high school here. When we moved, I got a Commodore 64, and played all the games I wanted. Then on to PC gaming, but have been mostly console gaming since then. I have the Playstation PS5, but we use it more for watching videos/ movies more than gaming these days.

Mine was even farther back:
Pong
Air Hockey
Pinball

Endless summer days early to mid eighties riding our bikes all over town stopping to play the games they had at every drug store, convenience store, etc.  Leave after breakfast and didn't get home till the streetlights came on...

It was crazy.  7-11's would have a couple of games.  When I spent summers in TX there was a Fiesta grocery store across from where my dad worked on Spencer Hwy in Pasadena.  They called me the quarter kid as I would bug my dad for quarters all day.  Pole position and gauntlet took most of them. Texas tapes and records was also an awesome way to spend the day. Got my copy of License to Ill there for the boombox.

The Pin Ball Spot (just right of center, follow the red arrow downstairs).  Yonge Street, Toronto in the 1970s. At the far left, A&A Records and Sam The Record Man.

Spent a lot of time & money there. I miss those days

972 games listed

Robotron is my all-time favorite.  Defender would be a runner-up.

BTW, I have an older version of one of these Pandora consoles. These things aren’t difficult to bring along to a house party.

Possibly best for a guy’s night type party, as I’ve only known a few females from back in the day, who were arcade junkies, so the women might be a bit disgruntled at the guys ignoring them to relive those old days at the arcade, gathered around a game, to play, or watch the players.




Get the split controller setups. Don’t have to worry about elbow room. I got an older all-in-one 2-player version and ended up having to mod it (sawzall through the middle, installed sliders that allow extending the controls further apart + longer wires inside to accommodate extending the console/board).

We’re all bigger than we were at 13-14

The one linked above allows connecting 2 additional controllers to play the 4-person games like TMNT.

Operation wolf

I always make time for these and my ball hair is white.

There's an arcade in Tarpon Springs FL that you pay an entrance fee and play all day.  They have a load of the old pinball machines and arcade games.  It was cool to just walk around and see all of the stuff we played 30-40 years ago.

I have a working Time Pilot in my basement.  My father in law use to have a small vending company and my wife wanted this machine when he finally retired.

I still have a handful of Alladin's Castle tokens I'll never be able to use.

I still play arcade games every year on the Ocean City NJ boardwalk. It was a sad day when they took Spy Hunter out.

Amen. Jungle Jim's got plenty of my money. Still have old coin somewhere around here.

Last quarter I dropped was at a restaurant in Jacksonville around 2000. I'd like to have Galaga, Donkey Kong, or Tron here at the house.

The kids these days have no idea how much fun these places were. There was a Gran Prix Race O Rama in Fort Lauderdale, that had a go cart track and hundreds of different video game and pinball machines and it was packed all the time. I know I spent some serious money there in my youth.

Its a cool place, but there is something different, especially with pinball, when you are pumping the quarters in. You WANTED that replay score to get the free game.  Every ball counted.  With them all on free play, it takes away from that in my opinion.  I play theater of magic and funhouse there every time we go. My son likes it there as well.  One of the only places I have seen an original MK1 in quite some time.  Johnny Cage popping heads off all day long

The retro toy store next door is pretty cool too.

I credit Time Crisis, Lethal Enforcers, and other games with gun controllers for my ability to point shoot with real handguns so well.  No shit.

Those were the tits.

Loved that game

I built my own.  Still need to do a pinball machine and a full sized cab.

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i have thousands of games on 5 machines and then two pinball machines with hundreds of tables

no quarters are involved but i get a fix whenever i need one

Yup.

Played Time Crisis (wasn’t it featured in the 1995 movie Hackers?), Virtua Cop, Police Trainer, and my favorite; Area 51.

Had the Top 3 high scores on the machine, until someone beat my high score, and I discovered that unlike many (most?) games that reset your score when you fed more coins to Continue, Area 51 allowed you to retain your score when you Continued.

I saw the twerp who beat my score, and he simply kept feeding in coins until he beat my score, so I set about regaining my top spot, whereupon I discovered 2 things: the game could only show a maximum score of 999,999 (or maybe 9,999,999?), but the internal counter still continued (I.e. if someone stopped soon after hitting the max score, noting that the score was no longer increasing, but someone else continued playing and accrued an additional ~200,000 points, which the score counter would NOT show, the person who actually scored 1.2million points would be ranked higher, despite both players showing the same 999,999).

The other thing about the game, was that it had a “Shot Streak” counter, which kept count of the number of consecutive shots fired with no misses. When you finally missed, it would flash something like “17-shot streak!”.

Well, the high score spots also showed the longest shot streak the player accrued in the game, and I noted that the twerp’s scores never showed a shot streak higher than the teens, where I regularly had shot streaks in the 70-100+ count, every game.

So to reclaim my top 3 rankings, I did 2 things: I focused on my shot streak, THEN just kept feeding in coins until I estimated my real score was over 1.3 million.

I don’t think the twerp was aware that the game kept counting past 999,999, and since he was a far shittier player, it would have taken him a LOT more coins and time, to surpass 1.3 million points.

What he DID see, and what everyone else naturally assumed resulted in me having the top 3 spots, despite 5 of the Top 10 scores all showing 999,999, was my shot streaks.

My #1 score had a shot streak of 352. I’d played the game so much, I not only knew where the aliens would pop up from, I knew what all the bonus targets were (windows, lights etc.), AND how many shots it took to kill a target (so I didn’t inadvertently fire a fifth shot on a target that pops after 4 shots, which would result in a miss).

My 3rd place score had a 171 shot streak, and my 2nd place score had a 2xx shot streak (I’d continue accruing points past 999,999, according to the best streak, so it appeared that the streak was the determining factor for ranking, so the twerp who couldn’t hit a streak higher than the teens, wouldn’t think to just sit there all day feeding coins into the machine to beat my rankings. When I hit the 352 shot streak, I’d estimate I kept playing until my actual score was somewhere around 1.5 - 1.7 million).

I remember hearing someone look at the scores and go, “WTF… 2 names with 5 999,999 scores in the top spots”, then their friend going, “DUUUUUDE!!! Check out that shot streak!!! THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY TWO!!! W… T…F… I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a shot streak more than 20 or 30”.

Yeah, I got really good at point shooting, with those games.

The last quarter I remember putting into a video game was an old Missile Command game a friend of mine had.
I fixed it, and tested it.

You know if you open the coin door, there's a switch you can trip to send a coin signal.

Digital Pinball machines?

Pics please!

Yes to Cyberball!

Consoles of convenience do not do the 4 player, 90 degree cabinets any justice.

I remember seeing the arcade owner do that. Can’t recall what issue we had, I think the game glitched/froze, and we told him.

He reset the machine, opened the door, and jiggled the wire about a half dozen times (looked like a metal tripwire). Sweet! 6 games for 1 glitch!

Funspot in Laconia NH has hundreds of arcade games.

The fixed pricing makes arcade games cheaper than they ever were in the 80s

I built my own full size machine, setup for 2 players w/ 6 buttons each + a trackball & spinner. It can handle just about any vintage game control layout, I've got a little over 900 games on it but I should probably curate & clean some of those out.
It's got coin buttons for each player, but I want to add a proper door & coin mech at some point. There's an indescribable quality about feeding a coin to these games

*I still hit up the local arcade / pinball joint (Pinballz), as nice a job as I've done building my own rig you can't beat playing on the proper original hardware.

I remember going to Wonderland nickel arcade in San Diego when I was a kid. What an awesome place that was.

arcade1up has time crisis...

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Arcade1up-Time-Crisis-Deluxe-Arcade-Machine-4-IN-1-Game/3495501117

no pics handy but one is an arcade1up and one is an atgames

you can "hack" into any arcade1up pinball and add their other two machines worth of games (star wars and marvel) plus some from zen and some other place i've forgotten.  it's easy too, even i could manage it

https://www.kohls.com/product/prd-5753575/arcade-1-up-williams-bally-attack-from-mars-10-in-1-pinball-machine.jsp



my atgames in an HD and you can find them for around $800 but they're transitioning to a 4K version right now so i'd wait for deals on those to come down before buying one, the 4K is about $1500 right now

A simpler time….

2 pages & no Gauntlet?

i got you

https://electronics.woot.com/offers/new-arcade1up-mortal-kombat-ii-legacy-edition-arcade-machine?gclid=Cj0KCQjw_qexBhCoARIsAFgBleucEr8xkrEb1PIEqhGuffnHCFGGQVC74lak3ezG2AtFPHSDL2b5OdMaAtF5EALw_wcB

Yep


Now ai play COD until 4 in the morning

Hellyeahbrother.jpg

Defender was my superpower.  I could play for hours on one quarter. I was meh at  everything else.  I played at a Gameroom up until my freshman year in College.

The last game I put a quarter in wasn't too long ago. The local mellow mushroom had a Galaga.  I played it to show my pre-teen daughter how to play.  Well, maybe it has been a while. She's a college graduate now

Is it a lucky quarter?  Don’t mix it up in your pocket.

My man! I was in Seaside in August if 1997 on vacation.

Nonetheless, arcades are alive and well in my area. Some great, some not so great, but they exist. Most are free play with admission. Barcade in Manhattan was coin op as of 2019.

I have a few pins, a shuffle alley, and a Stargate (Defender 2). Stargate never gets played and I should probably sell it.

I really want a Tapper.

My best friend and I spent so much freaking money in quarters trying to beat the TMNT game.   I'd get Donatello for the extra reach and he'd go with Leonardo.  Other kids would come up and help us for a bit until they ran out of quarters.   It really was the ultimate co-op arcade game.

We finally beat it one day after several summers of trying.  Saved up like $100 in quarters each to do it in one playthrough.

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Damn, that's hardcore. I never beat it until I bought the Xbox 360 version with unlimited continues.

One day your mother put you down, and never picked you up again.

There was an arcade game called shadow dancer or shinobi - a Sega side scroller where you were a ninja with a white wolf.
I was already an adult when it came out.  I thought I was a ninja badass because I was into working out, martial arts, and had done an enlistment in Ranger Bn.  I never really got that far on a few quarters on the arcade game.  I also had a white wolf hybrid my new wife had for me for a birthday present as my dream dog for whatever reason when I was like 22,  that tiny pup grew fast and large.



She bought me a Sega Genesis my next birthday with that shinobi shadow dancer game.  I never beat it.  And sold the Sega and games when we moved a few years later,  we were a typical broke young married couple.

Over 20 years later I used to deploy and be on planes a lot.
She and the kids got me a psp to play movies on.  They also surprised me with a Sega collection game UMD.  The wolf game was on it.  That dog lived to 16 years old and had recently died.  

At some point, we are talking like 17 years after the game came out, I had the new pup, and a year after he died, I actually beat the game.  It was very nostalgic and satisfying.

When we were dating we would sometimes get pizza at a little place near where she used to ride her horse.  It had a galaga game.  She had played that game since she was in grade school now and then.  Pretty much the only game/arcade she was ever into.  I surprised her on the anniversary of the day we met like 35 years ago with