Cadillacs and dinosaurs all the way.

There's a pizza place just down the street from me that has a working old timey Donkey Kong. I have the high score and will probably keep it. I'm good at Donkey Kong and no one else plays it

Area 51 gun game at the bowling alley in my grandparents small town. During regular life our home consoles were the star (didn’t have to beg adults for spare change) but when we were stuck at that smoky bowling alley waiting got the adults to get tired that was the best time waster.

When I was young, during a family trip we stayed at a hotel with a rec area that had a swimming pool, a hot tub, and a Donpachi cabinet. I was a happy kid that day.

We also regularly went to a Pizza Hut that had a Raiden 2 machine. I'd always beg my parents for change to play, but I never made it past the first level (I was a dumb kid and bad at video games). The first stage theme still takes me back to those days every time I hear it.

Doing some deranged digital violence on the Mortal Kombat 3 cabinet at the Pizza Hut is a favorite memory of mine. The experience was, of course, made much worse by capitalism; those things were just designed to devour your allowance money. I think what I liked most about it was just that it was a third place where you could have fun with other people, and I was a lonely kid who craved that.

My mom would go to bowling league and she would watch me by handing me a pile of quarters and let me play fighting games. I didn't have a console for the longest time, so stuff like Marvel vs Capcom 2 and Ms. Pacman would be my main exposure to video games.

Three:

Playing MvC 2 by myself was interesting, but I don't like arcade controls or just standing like that.

Playing Virtual On was amazing with the cockpit layout. I wish it had a first-person option. But it was so cool piloting mech.

Finally the Simpsons game for the arcade. I played as Marge and loved how she swung her vacuum cleaner as a weapon in the beat'em up

Double Dragon, Golden Axe, Spy Hunter and (forgive me) NARC.

• Getting older kids (and adults) to rage-quit at the OG Street Fighter II was always good for a laugh. My own uncle had a meltdown because he couldn't figure out how to counter the Blanka flying claw-into-face chomp-into electric shock combo. As Ryu. Yeah.
• The original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade with the 4-player cabinet was awesome, too. I think I only ever made it past Bebop once, though. I remember being super excited for the NES port when it finally came out, because the other TMNT game on NES (and home computers) was such a disappointment compared to the arcade.
• I wish we'd had the X-Men and Simpsons ones; those looked like they were in the same lane as TMNT.
• There was a version of After Burner where the "cabinet" was a giant recumbent pilot's seat on a set of force feedback motors, and it would jolt you around when you banked the jet. That was pretty cool.

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also remember the roller rink and getting in a fight there

My friends used to go to the mall near our school on our lunch breaks and they'd play lightgun shooters (jurassic park was what they played alot of). I didn't have any money so I just watched them play.

When I was younger I have one time my dad took me to the movie place in a lake town, and we played through the entire Simpsons arcade game together. One of my few good memories with my dad. I don't think we actually finished the game, but we got really far in at least.

I did played in the arcades but it was just Moon Patrol everywhere and i hate it

Old millennial and I loved playing Altered Beast and Golden Axe.. later I really liked the x-men side scroller.. always played as Jubilee.

I remember a lot of places like walmart had arcade machines in the front lol, I remember pretending to play one (no monies) once in a while.

There was this arcade game which was a time attack sort of game except you started as a tiny dinosaur amd the more you ate you became cooler and cooler dinosaurs. Iirc the final form was a T-Rex and right before that was triceratops. No idea what it was called, but as a dinosaur obsessed young kid it was magical.

The four player gauntlet arcade game stands out because my two best friends were moving abroad and the last time we got to hang out our parents took us all to an arcade where we spent the entire time on that game with a 4th mutual friend.

Cruisin U.S.A. is where it's at

Also Crazy Taxi if you can find it

Also... arcades are having a major comeback, along with pinball machines. See if there's an arcade in your area, you'll be surprised!

I remember older teenagers (mostly boys) playing them at the roller rink, I wasn't so interested.

That double wide X-Men Cab was fucking sick. Also, I got my love of fighting games from putting way to many quarters into the X-Men vs. Street Fighter cab.

I got to play in some Japanese Arcades a number of years ago, it was really fun. SuperPotato has a bunch of CandyCabs at the top floor with all different old school games running in them. Only downside to Japanese arcades is you can still smoke on them.

When I was a kid, my dad would take me to the arcade in the mall and we would play House of the Dead 2 together. It's one of my most treasured.memories

Oh man, and that's not even getting into all the elementary school roller rink trips/soccer team pizza parties where I and the other bad children would slink off to the back play Metal Slug.

Shout out to Time Crisis, up there with HOTD for hilarious voice acting. Actually, pretty much every arcade game had that