"Dirty" Arcade Machines At Non-Arcade Places

The last Bombcast where the guys mentioned seeing specific games like Double Dragon only at places like pizza places and bowling alleys made me think back to my local skating rink that, until relatively recently, was not renovated since the late 70s. It was carpeted everywhere that smelled old, the lighting was very low and seedy, there were several places where gum and spit were present, and the walls were brown bricked.

It also had about 5-6 arcade machines when I went there on field trips in the 90s. Of the ones I remember were Cruis'n USA, Terminator 2, and Galaga, but some of the machines were broken half the time or I was too poor to play them, trying to find spilled quarters under the machines.

What machines were like that for y'all? Which ones do you remember from your skating rinks, bowling alleys, pizza places, and the like?

My dad use to play indoor soccer and the place he played at had a few machines, but the only one I remember playing was The Kung-Fu Master Jackie Chan.

The skating rink I grew up around (and broke my wrist at) had a cabinet for a game I can't remember the name of. 2D sprite-based (and this was the early 90s when that wasn't an art choice) and you played as a small ninja in a side-scroller. There was a lot of wall-bouncing.

The diner up the street from my house had a Robotron: 2084 cabinet in its little front entrance area. I would get to play it during the few minutes it took for our food to get served. In retrospect, I somewhat associate Robotron with the smell of beef barley soup.

The skating rink I went to a few times had a choice selection: Double Dragon, Elevator Action, Dig-Dug, and maybe Moon Patrol along with a couple others. Better, though, was the local corner store my dad and I would stop at after he picked me up from after school care. They had an Ikari Warriors 2 machine (which kind of freaked me out, honestly) and a pinball machine (Fire!).

I saw a Chase HQ one in a chippy in about 2008. I don't think it was plugged in. I've probably only seen a handful of arcade machines out in the wild, to be fair. The local food court had Super Sidekicks (might've doubled as a Metal Slug cab) and my parent's local pub has a sit-down cocktail cabinet which is like a 60-in-1.

The roller rink I grew up with had a dedicated arcade area. It was up on a platform - I'm sure kids and adults took spills getting up and off that platform. It had tons of games - I remember my favorite being Spyhunter, made more difficult by your stupid skates constantly slipping on the gas pedal. Outside of the roller skating rink smell of popcorn, vomit, and cigarettes, these machines worked just fine.

Our local bowling alley had a full arcade on its second floor, as well as laser tag. Things were kept in pretty good condition. They were the only place within a 50 mile radius with the Capcom D&D game for the longest time - I have memories of walking out of the bowling alley with blood shot, feverishly warm eyes from staring at that CRT for hours on end. At one point, the guy set the D&D cabinet to ten credits per coin and we'd lose a day there.

In college, we had a Blitz, Marvel vs SF, Marvel vs. Capcom, and some other fighting game machines in the student lounge. These were really well maintained - but I think the student workers in the lounge did a lot of the upkeep.

Pizza places in the 80's always had something. Back then, Pizza Hut was a sit down restaurant - you'd order your pizza, have your soda in plastic red cups, and have a huge wait where you'd have anxious kids. And Pizza Hut back then always had kids, as we'd fill out our Book It! pins.

TMNT and some sort of Sega racing game were requirements. Fudruckers, theatres, you'd see Time Crisis, TMNT, and street fighter. A lot of the times the CRTs needed help - or they'd have really bad burn in.

If you ever find yourself in the Chicagoland area, Galloping Ghost is a fun throw back to the 80's and 90's.

https://youtu.be/YyVgyaV16xM?t=130

I think the funkiest cabinets were at Disney Quest in Orlando. It closed in 2015, I think - some cabinets showed their age. Buttons that didn't feel great, both in functionality, and in a layer of dried up kid hand slime.

Two that always stick out for me for whatever weird brain reason are the cocktail cabinet of Pac Man at an early 90s Pizza Hut, and a regular standup cabinet of Centipede at... some place? All I remember was that the place was dingy and there was one of those magnetic puck bowling tables next to the cabinet. It's funny, the memory is so strong that I can still smell the friction powder stuff that I'm blanking on the name of from the bowling game, but other than that *shrug*. Restaurant, maybe?

I don't recall what the local skating rink carried, just that it wasn't much. Probably a Terminator 2 and a beat-up pinball table, knowing the era.

Oh! And typing this just dredged up a very early memory of being at a flea market (my grandmother would sell her homemade crafts there a lot, and I often tagged along). This was around 1990/1991, so I was about 4 or 5, and I remember they had one lone arcade cabinet in a room with a cigarette machine and whatever else. Problem is, I was the height of a 4 or 5 year old, so I couldn't see (or read) the marquee or the screen, only the speakers and coin slot. I remember thinking it was some kind of sound based game since I couldn't see the screen (lol)... unfortunately, I'll never know what it was, but I do like that one of my earliest memories involves a grungy arcade cabinet at a flea market, seems painfully on brand for me.

Outside of those memorable examples... I also remember a Chinese food place having a Mortal Kombat 1 cabinet, which was a pretty baller move at the time.

This has me feeling nostalgic (and I just mentioned MK1 anyway), so here's a funny early anecdote from an actual arcade: Street Fighter 2 and MK1 were the new hotness, and I had never played fighting games before, nor was I old enough to know genre conventions. So I played both cabinets by chance, and I still recall thinking that one was a total ripoff of the other, and I said as much to anyone who'd listen for months afterwards. Then both franchises blew the fuck up at my school, and I jumped on that bandwagon HARD, haha.

Too many to name. From the Mortal Kombat machine at a video rental place that everyone from my school used to go to on lunch to the Street Fighter II Turbo machine at the pool hall, to the Jurassic Park light gun game at the movie theater my kid and teen years were filled with memories of random arcade games.

My favorite, though, was a Cabal machine at a diner my friend and I used to go to with our parents when we were like 10. One day my dad got sick of my whining for quarters and just asked the guy how many he could change for us. He said as many as we wanted so my dad gave him a $10 bill and my friend and I took that bounty and beat the sucker for the first and only time. I remember feeling incalculably rich with ten whole dollars in quarters to play with. We were frickin' invincible that day, my friends. Nothing could stop us!

My local pool center had a few arcade machines set up in its own room. The only machines I remember were Street Fighter II and Raiden II. The center's been renovated and I haven't revisited the center since, but I imagine that the arcade machines were moved elsewhere.