If you were not alive in the 80's you probably don't even know how awesome it was to go to your local shopping mall and have a peek into the arcade and see what sort of new games there were.
For me it began at a local Dairy Queen that would routinely have 4 or 5 games parked against the wall.
A lot has changed since those days including the fact that Dairy Queens, the few that still remain, could probably fit inside your bathroom. But there was a time when arcades were a truly awesome place to go with a pocket full of quarters. Here are the games that took the most of my money.
Gauntlet
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This game was just the best. The fact that you could co-op with 3 of your friends, or strangers was something that had never been done before. Combine this with the fact that the levels were randomly made and this ensured that every time you played the game was going to be a bit different. My favorite character was the Elf because he could fire through the diagonals and was slightly faster than the other players. The Warrior was my least favorite because his power was that he could melee enemies to death but doing so resulted in you taking massive damage in the process.
I recall playing one day in that Dairy Queen with a stranger who had run out of quarters. I was just a kid and only had paper route money but I wanted him to continue to badly that I gave him some of my money. This is a big ask of an 8 year old that made maybe 40 dollars a month, but I did it anyway.
TNMT
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There were more than one of these and i am not even certain which one it was that again, took a great deal of my paper route money, sometimes right after I finished doing my paper route.
Again, it was the aspect of being able to play with a bunch of your friends that made this game so exciting and as you would expect the levels got progressively more difficult as you carried on. I played this game at multiple different locations and the difficulty was apparently something they could slide up and down and the ones that were all the way up would take a LOT more quarters to progress.
I actually completed this arcade game and if i remember correctly it took me around $6 in quarters in order to do so
NBA Jam
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This game was made special because you could do an entire season including the playoffs by saving your details in the local machine. I think it was your birthday and a 4 digit code or something along those lines.
In a sad twist of fate I had one game left to win the championship and went into the Sam's Club that hosted the machine in the lobby and walked in only to discover that the game had been removed. Talk about bad luck!
Also, this game was kind of rigged in the same way that games like Mario Kart are rigged. If you were getting too far ahead on points the other team would start to cheese you and would make any shot they took, steal the ball from you easily, and be "on fire" until the score became close again.
I was in high school when this one was released and I skipped classes quite frequently if I was on a roll.
Cyberball
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It was American football but with robots and I can't say exactly why this worked for me because there were plenty of actual football games out there with the names of actual players and teams that were essentially the same thing but instead of getting injured your robots would get pieces of them knocked off and in particularly tough tackles they would explode.
It was a ton of fun when playing against a human opponent because you would actually have separate screens so that you couldn't see the plays they were calling before the snap. Just like in real football, the wrong defense resulted in potential big yardage for who you were up against.
I'm sure there were many more, and I haven't even dived into pinball machines which I still love to this day and are also the only real viable arcade games that can be made anymore seeing as how traditional videogames are probably going to be just as good if not better on home consoles. But this was my youth and I am sure I spend hundreds of dollars over the years and I can assure you, my parents were not pleased about this.
You can get tabletop versions of Gauntlet, Turtles, and NBA Jam now. They're not even that expensive
Heroes of Hammerwatch is today's Gauntlet https://store.steampowered.com/app/677120/
wow, I'm so sorry
have you ever watched Hi Score Girl? it's an anime. considering this post, you will love it
watch this 2 min trailer. it's a romantic comedy btw
Heroes of Hammerwatch looks awesome and it costs almost nothing. I'm gonna have to to buy that for sure.