by Aeroprism » Mon Jan 7, '13, 7:21 pm
As a little kid, I used to go to this strange arcade managed by those nice, bearded and tatooed men who used to give us 5 quarters for one dollar. The sweet, innocent 10 years old that I was did not know but, I was a participant in the process of money laundering for the local biking gangs. Oh well. All we knew was "Wow, these guys can't do math!" So we took a 20$ bill borrowed from my friend's grandfather, got it turned into 25$ of quarters, pretended to play a while. Then we left, got the quarters magically turned back into paper money at some random store. Rince, repeat. We could easily get 20$ each plus the original 20$ that we gave back.
Imagine that. 1986, you're 10 years old, you have TWENTY DOLLARS to your name. What CAN'T you do?
Good times.
Those were the mid to late 80s, I used to play Wonder boy, Rolling Thunder and such.
Then high school came, we had an arcade right in front of our school. I was very good at Street Fighter II and I was a beast at Superman. I could easily beat the game with one llfe.
These days, "arcades" are mostly bunches of machines found in theater's common halls. Those are mostly DDR and other games involving mechanical devices and movement. The "pure video game" arcade is outdated as home consoles can now do far, far better.
Anyways, I have very fond memories of my kids days spent in arcades. I was oblivious to all the smoking and drugging done by other kids and teenagers. There were the machines, and there was me. Everything else was superfluous.