Happy Birthday PacMan!
Once upon a time, long before I used to scour pubs and restaurants for Golden Tee Golf, I used to ride my ten-speed with my friends looking for 7-Elevens or other similar convenience stores like the Little Sue store pictured below and we would spend our allowances and newspaper route money on PacMan, Ms. Pacman, and Crystal Castles.
I didn’t even know it was PacMan’s 30th birthday until I had to do a Google search and saw the playable Google banner. Now I can’t remember what I was going to search for. So if you haven’t played a free game of Google PacMan, you should.
Were there any coin-op games you remember playing that you would make a special trip for?
Different era but I remember always trying to play Lucky and Wild wherever I saw it. It was in a time when home consoles were starting to get really good graphics and accessaries so arcade games needed to do something cool. A game where you got to play as two cops in a car shooting everything in site, that was pretty fun and nothing like what you would be able to do at home. So anytime I saw it I would have to play it and make sure to go back so I could play it a few more times before they got a new game.
There was also a game like it when I was in Korea that I would always make sure to go an extra 1/2 mile (on foot mind you, I didn’t drive when I was there) to play with the working guns. Arcades are still everywhere in Korea (unlike America) and generally feature this game (which I wish I could remember what it was called!), DDR (Koreans are crazy good at DDR…), and some Japanese style racing game. Because they were so cheap at like 35 cent a pop (producers there get that you fill an aracade you are going to make your money back a lot easier then if you charge a dollar a pop and the arcade is empty… wish they would get that around here.) I was almost always the only American there, and also the oldest, but my computer was broken so I needed my gaming fix somehow!
Oh sorry was going to go on to say because it was so cheap I generally made the trek a few times a week, and would generally get a bite to eat when I was down there.
All my quarters went into:
#1 Donkey Kong
#2 Asteroids
#3 Defender
#4 Battle Zone
Now all I play is Gran Turismo 4 on PS2. Waiting for GT5 and maybe I’ll buy a PS3, but a friend of mine has a Wii and it sure is fun, so I can’t decide.