Growing Up in Arcades

[tthurman]

Growing Up in Arcades

B2K24 exposed me to this site, but since he didn't post about it here (I don't think anyway), I thought I would   It's a trip down memory lane for sure, and one I'm sure will be appreciated by many here.  Even got some skee-ball in there for you stigzler

For those of us that grew up during the arcade craze however.......did we ever grow up?  

 

[Kustom Kid]

I will never grow up when it comes to arcades. When I take my kid I get tokens for him, and tokens for myself. That site is great. A lot of good memories for sure.

On another note, I watched this 8 year old girl crush Skee-Ball the other day. She drained 4 top corner shots in a row. I was impressed.

[hansolo77]

Ouch my heart.  We will never see this again.  1 or 2 greats in the country perhaps, but never like it was.  Malls practically don't exist anymore.  Our bowling ally has a little arcade in it, with like 4 games (2 always broken).  A row of skee-balls, 3 stupid little test-your-luck-by-throwing-away-your-token-in-the-machine games, 1 non-working pinball table, and 1 pool table missing 2 balls.  They don't even have a dart board.  They have a lazer tag room off to the side, but it's for reservation only, and they only open it for reservations 1 day a week.  Lame city.  The movie theater has better selection of games, like 7, and while they all work, they're all crap games that cost a dollar to play and have no replay value whatsoever.  There is a Chucky Cheese down the road, but it's always full of little rug rat peons getting in your way.  The mature version is Dave&Busters but I've never actually been there.  We did at one point have a HUGE arcade for adults only (had to be 21 to get in because they sold alcohol).  They advertised at one point to having 50 arcade machines and 15 pinball machines.  It was in a mall next to the theater.  But when I moved, I decided it's too far to drive (like 30 miles) across the the city to get to it so I never went back.  I wasn't old enough to go in before, and now it's probably not even there anymore.  It was a nice mall too, recently built to be a smaller Mall of America.  They had a Planet Hollywood there and had a BUNCH of celebs come to open the place.  But like so much stuff in our town, it's probably been run over by Somalians and Mexicans, and the place was probably refitted to be either a homeless shelter or a place for people to go to get food assistance.  I say that because that's what our mall near me turned into.  What once was THE place to go, now has just an empty mall floor, 3 out of 300 shops open, 1 is a DMV License renewal place, 1 is a Food Assistance Registrar location, and 1 is a large empty room they rent out for Gun Shows.  Seriously, that's it.  There used to be a Lazarus, Sears, JC Penny, a whole food court, every shop you could think of, 2 book stores, a toy store, and an arcade.  Now there's police tape on all the entrances except for the North side where the 3 shops are located.  You can still walk around the whole place, but there's nothing but drywall and security fencing where the shop doors used to be.  So sad.

[Kustom Kid]

@hansolo77 I'm not sure how far away they are from you, but there's at least 3 "barcades" in Columbus. One of my employee's went there last year with her boyfriend and hit 2 of them. She said they had a good selection of games.

[tthurman]

The Regal theaters here actually have pretty decent arcades in them, at least they do here.  Dave and Busters was a blast, and as much as I hated the whole "extended play" option, it's goes well with an arcade that has a bar in it.  The same cannot be said for your wallet however 

 

Not having gone to any others, I'd have to say D&B did a pretty good job trying to recapture that nostalgic atmosphere, but it's still not quite there.  Just from the videos, I'm convinced a place like Galloping Ghost is probably one of the few left that retain that unique feel.

 

[Kustom Kid]

A good chunk of us live in the Midwest US. What if we, sometime down the line, got together at Galloping Ghost. A GameEx meet up. It's only $15 to play all day. Just throwing it out there.

[tthurman]

That's a good ways for me, and this move is kicking my financial butt, but when/if some disposable income comes back around....well perhaps I can get my wife and her brother to go up for another game at South-Bend.  That way I could get to check out the GG, and hit up Al's Beef too, or was it Mr Beef....whatever, got to see how it compares to White House Subs, the only reason to go to Atlantic City in my book!

I used to tote three or four of these back to the room after having breakfast there, and I'm not even going to start explaining the flight home with a couple large Italians halved

The White House Special.....oh yeah