I think I’ve managed to play Moon Patrol every decade since the 80’s. I think the last time I actually played an arcade cabinet version of the game was in the early 2010’s.
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Random trivia:
I mentioned Discs of Tron above. In the beginning you move around with the joystick and aim your disc with the spinner, but if you get far enough into the game you get the ability to aim up and down as well in three dimensions! This works by pulling up or pushing down on the spinner itself. This is a really cool feature and I feel like not a lot of people knew this.
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Are you talking about Buster Bros.?
I even peed my pants once because I had a choice between continuing to play or going to the toilet.
Now, that’s dedication. I’m impressed! 
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Exactly that. The one game that literally made me pee my pants. Not even Amnesia Dark Descent managed that.
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- Final Fight
- Street Fighter
- Ghosts n Goblins
- Solomon’s Key.
Yes, it’s a ranking.
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I forgot about Stompin’, a floor pad precursor to dance dance revolution, where you stamp bugs to prevent bugs from reaching a piece of pie in the middle of the screen. I’ve only played it in one arcade, but it was soooo much fun. Stompin' , Arcade Video game by Bally Sente, Inc. (1986)
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The podcast Valley Hit had a running bit about how bad Dragon’s Lair is and how it was only a game for rich kids because it cost twice as much. I don’t think I’ve ever actually played it.
My local arcade took tokens instead of quarters but on Sundays you got 5 tokens for a dollar so that’s usually when my dad would take me. I mainly remember playing Rampage from that era. I was always the lizard. I don’t think I ever actually played with other people.
Oh and Spy Hunter. I found a lot of people my age think of the song Peter Gunn as “the Spy Hunter song” because of that game.
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No one mentioned Shinobi?
https://bitvint.com/pages/shinobi
That is my all time favourite, though Final Fight comes close 
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Never heard of it. I’ve never been accused of being rich before. I saved all my money back then to blow on D&D books and arcade games.
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(nod) Yes, that is the correct thing to do. Your priorities are absolutely in place.
(I know it’s hard to tell, but though I’m being humorous, I’m not being sarcastic)
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Maybe my memories of it were buffed more by imagining what the other levels were with other kids. I remember buying the hint book on school book day and being very popular for a bit!
I also remember finding it in a bar in January 2020, going to http://www.dragons-lair-project.com and studying the final room, and saying “OK, if this COVID thing is serious, at least I got Dragon’s Lair solved. Ha ha.”
Oh. Games? Ones not mentioned yet (or I missed it) are Mappy and Robotron. Fun gameplay, colorful graphics, neat sound. Super Burgertime is a personal recommendation as it was way more fun than I remember Burgertime being. Better controls, graphics, etc.
I also liked Journey a lot. The 8-bit versions of some of their hits still stuck with me. Years later I remember playing on an emulator and saying “what IS that song in the Steve Perry wave? It’s really good and I don’t recognize it.” It was Stone in Love & YouTube critics and nostalgians seem to back up my claim. The game playing “Separate Ways” when the band gets together for a concert and the overzealous fans rush the stage and take their instruments back is pretty hilarious, too.
In the “I know it wasn’t perfect and don’t care” department there’s 10 Yard Fight, where you lead a last-minute touchdown drive. On the top level, the strategy is to throw an interception against good coverage formations. This pushes you back 20 yards, making bad coverage more likely, making it easier to get a first down and 10 seconds added on (if the clock hits 0:00 you get the full 10 seconds IF you get a first down.)
I also enjoyed when your characters cried or scratched their heads when they failed to qualify in Track and Field, and I remembered Cliff Hanger (laserdisc game) well enough to actually buy a DVD version of the discs and try to win it. I was shocked to find they were based on an anime movie! Though it made sense as there did seem to be odd cuts/repetitions. Once I learned they were based on the movie, though, I wondered how Lupin/Cliff would survive the game’s multiple death scenes! They seemed pretty final.
The loopy levels are creative. I slightly preferred Do! Run! Run! but I don’t think it quite has DWR’s variety. The others were an acquired taste for me once I didn’t need to pour quarters down a machine.
I remember crashing into the final-boss ship just to be sure I could complete 2001. It was fun learning how the guided missiles flew around on later stages.
Wooooo! I remember getting $5 for lunch money when my team went downstate to University f Illinois for an academic competition. I blew most or all of it on NARC. Yes, it was a waste. No, I don’t regret it.
Moon Patrol has aged really well I think. I was playing it on some XBox compilation at a bar and some people clearly too young to remember the arcade boom were really curious.
Guilty!
Edited to add: Bagman! I still remember your convict yelling Hey-Huppa! and GRREEEEF! and AIYIYI in reaction to certain things and dropping money bags on the chasing cops – or positioning the wheelbarrow above the ladder and watching them fall. Everyone had stars swirling above their head after they fell too. Comic violence at its best.
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I remember coming home from the arcade and making a list of all the rooms in the game and diagramming out the room-to-room flow from memory.
I tried to tell someone at dragons-lair-project.com that there was behavior in some arcade machines that doesn’t match known roms, but no one would listen to me. 
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I remember that too! Always the ropes or the wall, drink me or the horses, whirlpools or the crypt creeps, falling disc or avalanche… I remember the first time I went forward in the crypt creeps instead of using the sword too! Here’s the full sequence … I forgot it now. BTW I remember going to YouTube to try to figure how to completely reliably pass the twirling boulders.
Also, Pengo. It had 2 different cool background music scores depending on the machine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8yRzNp0nGA and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvAF5_skFUE. The first, I remembered, the second, it seems more people did. The strategy was cool too – playing for survival or for stacking 3 blocks in a row, in the center or on the side.
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One I find nobody else remembers is Gun.Smoke. I discovered it at our local university in the summer of 1986, when I was 11. Not having a ton of quarters myself, I watched the big kids play quite a bit. There was one guy who could get to the third level.
It might have been the first game I saw with boss fights, and I was captivated by the idea of trying to hit the main guy multiple times while dodging the shots of so many regular enemies. It was also one of the first games I saw where you could continue from the same level by putting in another coin before a countdown ended–a great moneymaking idea.
Another memory that stands out is the full screen message telling you it’s a crime to play this game in Japan. I don’t remember any other game saying that!
It’s possible that I have wasted more MAME hours on this one than any other game.
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Sinistar is probably my favorite Asteroid-ish game. No idea if there’s better term for the genre. But due to the luck of the draw I never had regular access to a Sinistar cabinet until well after the end of the arcade heyday…there was one in the washateria near my apartment in the mid '90s.
Absolute most quarters spent on an arcade game would have to be Gauntlet, followed slightly by Spy Hunter. Because those were the two machines in the corner of the toy store next to the photo developer place I worked at in the local mall one summer in the mid '80s.
Only game that I think I played more (on an actual arcade cabinet) is probably Puzzle Bobble. A startup I was at around 2000 had one set up in the break room configured for free play.
I played Thayer’s Quest a few times on original hardware. And I remember thinking that it would be a better experience if I didn’t have to play it in an arcade. Because all noise from the other machines meant that the volume on Thayer’s Quest had to be turned way up, which made the audio sound like amplified garbled muttering recorded in a filing cabinet.
Fast forward a couple decades and I encounter the Daphne project, which is an emulator for LD games. Great, I think to myself, I can finally find out what the hell the guy with the beard and crystal ball is telling you at the start of the game.
Download everything, get it set up, start the game. And the audio sounds like amplified garbled muttering recorded in a filing cabinet.
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In my top 3 favorites of all time. I could play that game for hours. I loved getting the force bonus for not firing in the trench, the tower bonus for taking out all the tops, and not taking any hits in the tie fighter stage.
Then dragons lair as well. I own the DVD playable versions and also the PlayStation 3 versions that are both true to the original.
Tron was another favorite. I couldn’t ever beat it but I sure tried. The light cycles became too hard for me and I didn’t have the quarters to figure it out.
My original favorites as a kid were Asteroids, Donkey-Kong, Galaga, and Dig-Dug. I enjoyed the no-fire trick with the bees on Galaga. I have little MyArcade dig-dug and galaga on my board game cabinet (try not to see the irony of that)
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I co-owned one in 1988-89. It was in a student lounge on campus, which earned my roommate and I pizza money for a couple of semesters. He got really good at it.
I enjoyed many of video games in the arcade, but I’m not sure I have one all-time favorite. I never got good at any of them. I kept going back to pinball. High Speed 2 (The Getaway), Centaur, Bride of Pinbot, Theatre of Magic.
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