What is your all-time favorite arcade game?
I played more than I can ever remember but for me it was Dragon’s Lair.
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You’re doing a bit, right? I only played Dragon’s Lair a couple of times, but I definitely remember it living down to its reputation as a cruel trick designed to separate kids from their quarters, what with the higher than usual price to play and the memorization-based gameplay. Pretty though!
Funnily enough old arcade games came up in a tabletop session I played in a couple days ago, which reminded me that I liked Donkey Kong 3 - it’s kinda bizarre, you’re a gardener spraying Donkey Kong with pesticides to keep your vegetables safe, but it was pretty fun!
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Atari Star Wars, the 1980s vector game. I owned a working stand-up Star Wars cabinet for a couple of years in the making-money-hand-over-fist early 2000s dot-com days. I wish I coulda kept it, but I moved around a lot and they’re the size and weight of a refrigerator, not easily moved. I bought and sold mine for around $2,000, and they appear on eBay these days for for two to three times that much.
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I wasted a lot of time and money at the arcade. Some of the more memorable (to me) were R-Type, Assault, and a few years before that Xevious.
I kind of hated Dragon’s Lair, but it was entertaining to watch others play.
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Street Fighter 2, of course
One of the first Wal-Mart supercenters ever was In Conway, Arkansas. I attended college there when it was new. We would go there, buy snacks, and then play their Street Fighter 2 machine. Good times.
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Golden Axe is my all time favourite. It’s also the first arcade game, which had an ending, that I beat. And it didn’t just say ‘You win,’ it had a cool ending sequence where all the characters came out of the machine and ran along the street.
Final Fight’s up there. The most mayhem you can have in that kind of game but still very controllable.
In the pre-fighting-games times, some of my favourites were Bank Panic, Elevator Action, Pooyan, Mr Do’s Wild Ride, Time Pilot.
Favourite game I only ever played once in real life was Astron Belt, which was the first laserdisc game, and one not based on what we now call quicktime events. Being in its cabinet and the sounds were terrifying. I found Dragon’s Lair’s audio similarly terrifying, even without being inside a fake spaceship.
-Wade
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Mortal Kombat II. I bought one for my office about 10 years ago; it’s in storage now. It took me until then to finally beat it (ignoring the console ports), but it was so cathartic!
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Dragon’s Lair was my game - I put more quarters into it than I care to remember but I could often play a perfect game. My local arcade used a label maker to put high scores on all their machines and I had the high score for nearly a decade until the machine was removed. 
Other favorites: Star Wars, Qbert, Hard Drivin’, After Burner, Missile Command, Gauntlet, Golden Axe, Time Pilot, Tempest, Double Dragon, Discs of Tron, Spy Hunter…
I was lucky enough to play Thayer’s Quest a few times but the machine wasn’t around very long.
Edit: Ooh, I forgot S.T.U.N. Runner, Super Cobra, Race Drivin’, Dig Dug…
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Have you ever watched the 2007 documentary “King of Kong” about a pair of adult Donkey Kong enthusiasts who compete for Donkey Kong high score. Despite the ridiculous premise, it is a well produced and highly entertaining documentary.
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I’ve not seen the documentary, but I know about Billy Mitchell’s suspicious high scores and litigious nature.
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I never really played in arcades since I didn’t have a lot of spending money but i did have a lot of computers at home. But my favorite game on the 2600 in terms of amount of time spent playing it was easily Defender.
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Adventure was my favorite Atari VCS (2600) game. Defender was fun too - I was better on it than in the arcade because in the arcade you had to press a button to flip direction instead of using left and right on the joystick. The joystick for arcade Defender only registered up and down.
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I’ve been playing arcade games since the 80’s and still play today so picking a favorite is hard. But because Dragon’s Lair was mentioned, I’ll tell y’all a story. I got to have an animation class with Don Bluth in 1999 and at the end of it he offered us all a sketch our favorite character of his. I was like, “Dexter from Space Ace” and he paused and said “oh it’s been a looooong time”. I told him I didn’t care if it was accurate or on-model, I would be happy to have a sketch.
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Arcades round here seem to disappear before I had the chance to really get into them. Often played them in odd places: Phoenix at a hotel, Galaxians at one restaurant, Moon Cresta at another, Space Invaders at a rollerskating rink, various ones (like Gyrus) at a bowling alley.
My favorite was Galaga, you could allow your ship to be captured by an alien, then if you shoot it down then your ship would join the current one, giving you a double ship to fire at the aliens. Really cool.
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Some of my favourite earlier arcade games…
There were so many others from the mid-80s and on that were truly excellent, but one of my favourites was Magic Sword. Leveling up and choosing which companion to rescue and seeing them level up was so cool. It played like a side scrolling shooter, even though you just spammed your “swing sword” button. I loved it.
The one and only arcade game that actually deserved a parental warning...
There will never be another game like Chiller. I remember this being in a few arcades at the time.
And who could ever forget when this abomination was added to every arcade game…
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Gravitar, with Bosconian and Star Trek close behind, and an honorable mention for Defender/Stargate, because I actually owned a Stargate cabinet back in the day. A sandbox game for that elegant little ship from Asteroids? Yes, please, especially now that I don’t have to feed in a quarter every time I die horribly.
When I get out a handheld, and I’m in the mood for a quick arcade game, I find myself firing up Ms. Pac-Man half the time, and Bosconian the other half. When I fire up my Legends Ultimate, it’s Gravitar, unless I’ve spent too much time grinding on it lately, and want to play something else.
Does Adventure for the Atari 2600 count as “arcade?” That was my favourite Atari cartridge, though it had less replay value. The cartridge that I play a lot now that I wish I’d had back in the day is Activision’s Starmaster, which is a better Star Raiders than the actual Star Raiders cart that I had.
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Like I said in the Arcade timeline thread, I pretty much missed the golden age of arcades, so what of the classics I’ve played, it’s mostly been home ports or browser-based clones.
Though, some games in that classic, fixed screen, no real end state style that I used to enjoy a lot include:
Pac-Man/Ms. Pac-man
Tetris(among my favorite incarnations are the GBC version of Magical Tetris Challenge and the GBa version of Tetris Worlds).
Panel de Pon/Tetris Attack/Puzzle League(GB Tetris Attack was my introduction, Pokemon Puzzle League for N64 is probably my favorite version)
Not sure what the original is called, but there’s a classic arcade puzzler that has a Linux clone titled Frozen Bubble where you shoot colored bubbles from a catapult at the bottom of the screen at colored bubbles hanging from the ceiling, and if the shot bubble touches matching bubbles in a connected group of three, they pop and any bubbles unconnected fall down and the goal of each level is to clear all the bubbles on the screen before they reach the bottom…
So wish I could find blind playable games in this style as I really miss playing these kinds of games.
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I remember being a kid and my parents would go play squash at a local centre. It had arcade games at 20c a credit. I remember playing Double Dragon, Secret Agent, Ghosts and Goblins, Bionic Commando…
Later we moved towns and the new squash centre had Street Fighter 2, Mortal Kombat, Time Killers (where a well timed slice might remove an opponent’s arm or head)… Maybe $1 a credit then, but the games were better.
In my teen years we occasionally went to the one arcade in town that also had laser tag. I loved Virtua Fighter 2 (Tekken could get in the bin) and Virtua Cop. So many Daytona multiplayer sessions at birthday parties. Oh and that time where there was a tank game where you sat in a cockpit and the whole friggin thing shuddered and blew out your hearing with every tank blast…
Strangely that arcade had VR in the mid 90s, which is mind blowing in retrospect. Huge headset, chunky polygons and a weird floating gun for the on-rails shooter… But still an experience like no other.
I’d love to give my kids this same experience but it just seems impossible these days. The arcades aren’t the same now.
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I guess mine would be more like the older ones: Galaga, Kung Fu Master, Defender, …
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The arcade scene wasn’t as strong where I lived, but I have fond memories of playing Mad Dog McCree and losing all the time. But I was a kid having fun.
The “arcade” titles I mostly played on my home consoles. Game boy, game gear, master system, sega mega drive; those had the titles so I didn’t need to play the games at the arcades, even if the arcades had them.
Anyway, my most favourite arcade types are definitely pinball and light-gun shooters. Hands down, pass the peanuts.
EDIT - Oh, and that one where you have balls bouncing around you and you shoot upward to break them into smaller pieces, with various powerups, and they bounced ever closer to you. Played that a lot at an arcade machine in a mall. I even peed my pants once because I had a choice between continuing to play or going to the toilet.
…too much information?
…too much information.
I was a pre-teen.
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