What Are Your Favorite Arcade Memories?

I went to a real, bona-fide, actual arcade this weekend for the first time in years (the first time in America for several years, as in 2015, I had the pleasure of checking out a couple of arcades in Japan). It was fantastic. I punched a flimsy punching bag. I watched friends who actually played DDR back in the day get their DDR on. I saw some dude wreck the hell out of a DDR song on… I have no idea what the hardest difficulty is, but this was it.

When we asked him how he got to god-level, he just replied with, "I used to run track." Friends, I used to run track, and attempting what he did would destroy me.

I played a bunch of air hockey, and lost, despite my noble efforts. I played Skee-Ball! Best of all, I played a weird table-flipping game where… you need to flip a table as hard as you possibly can at the most opportune moment to do damage in the room. I got two top-ten scores on the all-time leaderboard. (Let's be honest, they probably wipe that thing every day—but let me have my moment.) Then a friend got the number one all-time score, and I was humbled.

There is so much joy in the idea of a place made entirely for public displays of gaming. I'm old enough to remember when arcades were a thing, a room you could find at every mall, a section of every greasy pizza joint, the most fun place at any hotel.

Sure, yeah, now there are Barcades and the like. And those are fun! But I prefer the old model, where alcohol isn't so strongly implied as the impetus for all the fun.

How about you, folks? What are some of your favorite arcade memories? Share them on the Waypoint forums.