Well, if you lived near Glen Burnie, Maryland, you’d be in luck. There’s an arcade here between Crab Town and a liquor store that has all the classics…Track and Field, Gorf, Punch Out, Popeye, Jungle King, World Series, 10 Yard Fight…maybe 100 games including about 20 pinball games. Cyclone being my favorite…with Ron and Nancy riding the roller coaster.
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[li]I’m not sure what it was called - but it was a fighting game like Double Dragon which began with the plot outline “The skinheads have taken Madonna hostage”. A lot of us were skins so we thought that was pretty cool. [/li][/QUOTE]
A quick google search of skinheads and Madonna reveals the game was called Vigilante. I must say that Track & Field was pretty cool too… in our arcade if you hit it just right it gave you free credits.
Gauntlet … man, I’ve never been crammed in so tight with 3 other people for so long in my relatively short life. Even when I was 10, it was HARD to get a full game going.
I loved playing the elf… once you got the hand-to-hand and speed upgrades you could just blast into the monster generators and then demand the food, or else you wouldn’t keep wiping the generators. 
Oh, and I’m definitely all about Spy Hunter and Knights of the Round too.
FD.
What!?!?!? The elf?!?!?! No way man, he had no armour, much like the wizard. The dude with the ax was the way to go.
What? The warrior in Gauntlet? Egads… he was WAY too slow, even with the speed upgrade. If you had the elf, you could get the wizard or warrior to cover you and zip on in to whack the generator. I had my ‘Gauntlet tech’ down pat back in the day. I played again there a couple months ago… barely made it out of the third level alive.
I loved that poor lamented dungeonkeeper’s voice.
“Valkyrie shot the food!”
“Elf, your life force is running out!”
“The wizard is hungry!”
Heheheheh… that was so cool. 
FD.
“Collect keys to open doors”…and I loved the sound when you spiraled down the stairs.
Yikes!
MISSLE COMMAND!!
Great game - I loved it so much I bought one. Real arcade game in the living room.
And one more ‘Blast From The Past’ -
Space Invaders
For the under-40 crowd, this game was insanely popular. In 1978-1979 there were arcades devoted almost entirely to this one game. There was a place near my home with FIFTY of them. One was was hooked up to a huge projector so a crowd could watch the player. Partly amazing, partly sad. 'Course, it was also the age of Disco…
Blackbeards family fun center in fresno, Ca Has a Virtua On 2. No BS, there are a handful floating around the west coast due to suppliers that also sell in markets where it was released who conveniently “forgot” they couldnt sell it in the US
Damn 8 years of amusement park experience, 5 of those in arcade areas…where to begin.
My first allowance killer… missle command
God I want one for my house games…
Steel Talons
Joust
Stargate
Stuff I loved but you rarely see any more
Space lords: combo pilot/gunner game great tournaments
Smash TV
How about the old timer Omega Race, loved that, Gyruss, gotta be the best music for a video game for many years.
Current Favorite: Crisis Zone, Time crisis meets full auto.
I have seen alot of games come and go over the years, as controls and cabinets became more uniform in connectors and other hardware the process of “rekitting a game” as a newer game became common. Thats why you often never see the old classics around. If you live in central Cali there is Oh WOW! Nickel arcades in fresno and visalia. Both run alot of older games as well as new ones.
If anyone has any technical questions about games I will be more than happy to do what I can to answer, I worked on and around them for alot of years.
Donkey Kong. Bliss. As far as I’m concerned, Nintendo has been on a downward spiral ever since.
Also, Pacman (wakka, wakka, wakka). I humiliated myself with a terrible score in front of a bunch of old kids (14 or 15) and spent the next couple of years on a quest to beat the machine (and my demons). I might have came close once or twice.
Joust, Galaga, Tempest, and Tron were also great. Also, Moonwalker? Moonrover? Y’know, the one where you hop craters & bolders, while dodging UFO lasers? They were like electronic crack to a kid my age. Not to mention Frogger.
Nobody else in my crowd seems to remember Satan’s Hollow but I still regard it as a frustrating classic.
By my late teens I was saving my money for booze, but I still played Double Dragon.
Cheers,
Hodge
That would be Moon Patrol I believe.
I also just thought of another game I miss <sigh>
CYBERBALL!!!
My all time favorite arcade game was Assault. It was made by Namco, I think. You were a battle tank doing all the typical things a battle tank should do. The camera view was fixed looking down to the top of the tank. It stands out so vividly in my mind because it was the first game I remember that used really good “mode 7” type scaling and rotation. It had an interesting two handle control scheme that really can’t be reproduced in a home system. Great game!
I also really loved Rolling Thunder (another Namco game), the first Shinobi (by Sega), Space Harrier (another Sega game), and Cobal (someone else mentioned that one too).
Ahhh, they don’t make them like they used to.
Back in my college days, we had a Street Fighter II game in the lobby. Whichever was the first one with Vega and the other bad guys, but before all the new characters came out. Anyway, I used to collect quite a crowd when I played, getting through the whole game with Perfects using Vega and showing off all the nifty special endings. I was able to beat it with everyone else, but Vega was my favorite. Of course, half the time all you had to do was knock them over once and then slide kick them in the corner a half dozen times.
Back before that, I was quite the wiz at Golden Axe. Used to play the chick with the fire magic as my main character. Giant fire breathing dragon head magic! Plus, riding the drake things around and having them headbutt people was fun. Or those goofy little lizard-slug things that’d tail-swipe people.
I remember Knights of the Round. There was also a D&D side scrolling game where you could be a dwarf, cleric, magic user, elf… etc. I think I remember beating that one with my friend.
I’m not proud, but my friend and I put a lot of quarters in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Eventually, we’d just play it because it was a cheap game for us. One or two quarters to play the entire thing.
Finally, the X-Men side scroller with about six joysticks and that big three section screen. I mainly recall Nightcrawler’s ability was to teleport out and then you’d have to look all over the screen to try to figure out where in the hell he went. Oh, there he is – being beated to a pulp by five bad guys in the corner. I also had the tendency to forgot which character I was playing and wonder why Wolverine wasn’t moving where I told him to while Nightcrawler got the hell beat out of him again 
I think the game you’re thinking of in Moon Patrol.
Discs of Tron - A mix of the glove-ball and disc scenes in the movie, you bounce around on floating circles and toss Death Frisbees at an AI character who taunts and laughs at you. Great fun, one of those classic games where a simple concept turns into a complex game. One of these days I’ll remake it in full 3D (something the game has always needed, to better tell depth and height)
Bubble Bobble - Something so weird it could only be a Japanese import. Two little boys are transformed into dino-dragons and breathe bubbles (?) around cartoonish badguys, and then pop the bubbles to turn the monsters into food (??) to rescue their girl dino-dragons at the end. All done to a disgustingly cute and perky soundtrack. I love it
Other favorites already mentioned: Joust, Spy Hunter, Marble Madness, Dig Dug, Cabal, Smash TV and Operation Wolf. Being a flight simulation (and particularly heli) nut, I really dug Steel Talons, but it did poorly and was(is) impossible to find. Great being able to fly a heli with a full up cyclic/collective rig, even if the simulation is pretty crude by today’s PC-sim standards.
And the last arcade game I really enjoyed: Killer Instinct - okay, so it’s just a beat em up, but it’s an elegant one. One of the last (if not -the- last) fighting game that emphasized finesse over flash. Superficially seems rather trite, but it’s actually one of the more cerebral games of the genre (if that adjective can, in fact, be applied to fighting games )
Since then, I haven’t really bothered much…arcade games just stink these days. I stop in to a local arcade now and then to see if anything’s gotten better, and just see the usual stupid racing, fighting, sports, etc games that have spread like a plague. There’s probably something decent hiding in there somewhere, but it’s hard to sort it out from all the games whose only speciality is being very loud and very flashy.
I hear ya brother. All you see is 4 player racing that cost $1 a pop or some sort of fantasy fighting came with joystick/botton combos so complex, it takes 5 moves to kick.
Check out this free download. The ROMS for the ORIGINAL games are available from both legal and less-than-legal sources. Now if they only could simulate Fireball II, 8 Ball Deluxe and Black Knight 2000 I’d be set.
Well, give them credit for Super Mario Bros., at least. The first time I saw Mario jump out of the playfield and run along the score display was a jaw-dropping meta-experience.
You’re thinking of Moon Patrol, from Williams.
One more great arcade game nobody has mentioned so far – Tournament Cyberball. My brother and I used to sink so much money into this game, it wasn’t even funny.
And how about Race Drivin’? You haven’t lived until you’ve successfully climbed the super hill near the end of the track, then barrelled down at 100+ MPH, drove into the tunnel, and then climbed around the wall to dodge the tanker truck tat was blocking the road…!
Eight Ball Deluxe!? Now you’re speaking my language. That was definately the game for us. Ours was set to 800000 for a free credit. Lots of specials… everything where it should be. sigh
Good I love nostalgia. sniff
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We’re looking at buying a Gauntlet machine, but can’t find any information anywhere on how much is a reasonable price to pay. We’re in Australia, but don’t let that stop you from advising us. We’ve been offered a machine in apparently “mint” condition (as yet unsighted) for $AU4,000 - which is about $US2,000. Does this seem like a fair price?
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My experience with arcade games was fairly limited, as I never had regular pocket money as a kid, but I L-O-V-E-D Mr Do! The local ten pin bowling alley had it in their mini-arcade, and I looked forward to playing that machine more than actually bowling when we went there. I think it was a combination of the fact that it was easy to play, and rarely occupied (all the other kids flocked to the newest game in the place). Mr Cazzle is looking into getting Mr Doo for me at the moment. I just don’t know where we’re going to put these machines…!!!