That was a fun game. Once we learned the cheat codes to get free games/jump levels, we got very lazy at it & never got that good…
Tetris, on any platform. I could play endlessly at the top speed.
When I was in grad school in the late '80s, I got really good at Cyberball, which was essentially “futuristic American gridiron football, only with robot players and explosive footballs.” I was able to thrash the AI opponent, and rarely lost when playing a human opponent.
I was pretty good at Rampart. It was a weird combination of tower defense, puzzle, and strategy. The key to winning was mastering the repair phase.
I thought I was decent at Street Fighter until I met my friend’s college freshman roommate, who just happened to be the national Street Fighter II champion. We would take turns getting crushed by him for hours and hours. It somehow never got old. I was the only person to beat him a few times, but at least 99% of the time he destroyed me, like he did to everyone else.
Tapper and Arkanoid. People who were hanging around wanting to play next usually ended up wandering away after a while.
Not arcade, but old Commodore 64 games: I believe I am very likely the world’s best “Dino Eggs” player. I’ve been in touch with the handful of people who still play (mostly on emulators), and my high scores are literally thousands of points beyond what seems to be typical. Wish there were enough people and interest to do a tournament.
None, but there was a Soul Calibur 2 machine in the student union at college.
The SC2 arcade cabinet had something called Conquest Mode. In Conquest Mode, you’d make a profile and play in a kind of abstracted ongoing war against other stored profiles. The more you played (ie: the more quarters you dumped into the machine), the better the computer got at emulating your playing style.
It was a really neat mode, and made even more neat by the fact that the machine was in the student union so it had a relatively limited pool of players. You’d start to recognize certain profiles and form rivalries in your head.
I played one or two games most days after eating lunch, and I’d developed a kind of poking keepaway playstyle with Astaroth. I was pretty decent.
Every now and then somebody waiting for their turn or playing at a nearby machine would notice me and say something like, “Holy crap, that’s you? Your Astaroth is a real pain in the ass!”
I was the best there ever was at Great Swordsman:
Continuing the theme I was at least locally unbeatable in Karate Champ:
I wasn’t generally great at arcade games, but these ones I was a juggernaut.
1942, Pro Wrestling and Donkey Kong 3.
If pinball is allowed, then I was top scorer on the 1979 Harlem Globetrotters On Tour machine. Never needed more than one quarter and there were usually free games left for the next day…until the rec room chief got wise and started unplugging the machine at night.
Galaga was my game. Consistently got high scores and highest levels on most machines I encountered. The key for me was mastering the ‘challenging stages’. More points meant more ships.
There was a bug in earlier versions of the game where there was a way to get the enemies to stop shooting, but it took like 15-20 minutes to do.
I was good at the trackball version of Track & Field. However, my best game was Breakout.
Be honest - were you a “slapper”?
For those of you not familiar with the game, there were (at least) four versions of the controls. In the first three, you pressed two buttons as fast as you could to build up your speed. The first one had “normal” buttons that stuck out, but the strategy of “slapping” the buttons resulted in a lot of games breaking, so they added a half-circular “rim” to each button. I have a feeling too many people complained, so this was replaced with recessed buttons, and then the buttons were replaced with a trackball.
Lunar Lander, for the value of “crush” that means “Deliberately crash the lander immediately for sheer destructive pleasure.”
Buttons. The button rims didn’t matter to me as I am a three-finger-tapper: ring finger right hand, ring finger left hand, middle finger R, middle L, Index R, Index L then repeat.
Aye: the slappers were annoying. No technique; no finesse. The buttons just need to be pressed quickly, not pressed hard ffs.
Huh. Never experienced it or even heard of it.
I tried that game a few times and found it insanely difficult. I crashed every time, and I was trying to land successfully. I thought if the actual astronauts’ landing on the moon was even a fraction as difficult as that, much respect to them.
Reactor and Xevious
In college I was master of the Cyberball machine, eventually being able to beat any challengers. Great game.
I could play all the way through Ikari Warriors on one quarter, and play very long on Joust, Elevator Action, and Discs of Tron.
Missile Command. As you will remember, the defensive missiles moved slowly so that you had to time the launch so they intercepted the attacking missiles or bombs at the right time. Also, because the explosion lasted a few seconds, if you could make it explode at the right time and place, several more bombs and/or missiles would ‘run into’ the explosion, creating a chain reaction that could clear the board.
I got so good, I could move the aiming tracker across the screen (trackball!) using my peripheral vision and hit that sucker exactly right, while actually concentrating on the other side of the screen and planning my next launch. So my eyes and brain were working on a future problem, while my muscles were performing the calculated solution to a previous problem.
When the aliens do invade, I’m expecting a call.
I met a guy years ago who might’ve given you your money’s worth.
I was working at an arcade (Le Fun, on the Drag next to the UT campus in Austin). I was scheduled to open that morning, but when I got there I found it already open. The guy who was supposed to close had ended up staying open all night for one guy who was on the Great Swordsman standup. He’d started playing around noon the previous day, and was still going on his initial quarter. He’d racked up so many lives that if he needed to go to the bathroom he’d let someone else play… or just let it sit empty- he had so many lives that it would take him quite a while to lose the game even if he tried to.
Anyway, he was there probably about three hours into my shift, when he abruptly said, “Oh crap, I’ve got a test!”. He grabbed his bag and sprinted out the door.
I’d never seen him before, and never saw him after that day. Nobody knew who he was.
When I was at UT, 36-40 years ago, there was an arcade in the basement of the Union next to the bowling alley, and I spent endless hours there or at the arcade in Dobie Mall. In retrospect kind of a terrible waste of money and time, but I enjoyed myself.
Maybe it was me. I like Austin.