This game was so perfect. One thing I miss about this era was the cacophony of various games as you walked into the arcade. All those machines blaring their sinusoidal siren songs at once. The audio design of Galaga was extraordinary and a huge part of its charm in my opinion, but to truly experience it, you really need to be standing at the machine, fully bathed in it, with a backing chorus of all the other machines chirping and crooning their tunes.
The mechanic where you have to potentially sacrifice one of your lives by letting it be captured so that you can try and get it back later for double firing is a stroke of genius. It’s the perfect balance of risk and reward to make things exciting.
If your in the US there are a surprising number of arcades around that are loaded with the classic games. Just Google and you’ll find them. If you are willing to travel then probably the best two are https://www.gallopingghostarcade.com/ (Illinois), https://www.classicarcademuseum.org/ (New Hampshire). There is very little parking at Galloping Ghost, suggest you take Lyft to get there. Plan to spend the day for either.
If your into pinball then https://roanokepinball.org/ (Virginia) Limited paid parking, take Lyft to get there. You can play everything in 4-6 hours.
All three are free-play, pay per head for admission, ok to leave and come back same day.
My arcade back in the '80s was in the mall (which has long since died) and only a few stores down from the Marines recruiter, so they were always popping in.
There are at least 3 of these in my city and unfortunately all of them kinda suck for one reason or another.
Two of them are basically just noisy f'ing bars with a lot of arcade machines you have to pay for and the third, which operates as per your description, has a lot of slightly-broken cabs and uses emulation for several of them.
But what's worse is that when you don't have to pay for it, it turns out most arcade games really suck.
But what's worse is that when you don't have to
pay for it, it turns out most arcade games really suck.
One disconnect, perhaps, is that early 1980s games tended to really be designed to be played for score rather than just "stay alive as long as you can"
Ms. Pac-Man and Galaga in particular have absolutely sublime risk vs. reward scoring mechanics. They're deadly boring IMO if you simply try and stay alive as long as you can, but if you play for score it gets interesting.
This isn't true for every game, and by the mid to late 80s games had fully transitioned into "stay alive as long as possible" quarter munchers.
One thing I really enjoy, as someone born in the late 80s and missing out on the arcade scene entirely, is experiencing the old games that I've heard so much about. I always try to hit up the local classic arcade whenever I'm out of town. It's fun to search for an arcade that finally has that game I've been hunting down to experience. For example just a month ago, I went to an arcade here in the Twin Cities for the first time, and they had both a Super Breakout (1976) and an Asteroids (1979). I've always heard about how eye-piercingly bright the weapons fire in Asteroids is, but never got to experience the real vector graphics machine until just last month. It was a treat! And Breakout has this huge, physical knob that you use to change game modes -- kchunk, kchunk. Great stuff, very memorable.
One day I'd really like to experience an original Pong :) But I think they're quite rare these days.
The shine does wear off if you keep hitting the same arcade, for sure. But it's fun to explore new ones in other cities, or new ones as they pop up in your hometown. And it's always great to bring along a friend who is new to the scene and show them the sights.
I've always heard about how eye-piercingly
bright the weapons fire in Asteroids is
Yeah! And the glowing phosphor trail! It just can't be described. And it really is a treat to be enjoyed while it lasts. Those machines (specifically the monitors) are all slowly dying and they ain't making any more of them.
Every time someone asks how's possible Twitch got so popular (or watching recorded videogames play on YT), I tell people how being in an arcade as a child in the '80s / '90s was.
I got good enough at playing Xevious that I could (i) play for 30 minutes+ on a quarter and (ii) people would give me the quarter to watch a good player play.
Those old arcade games almost always had a boomy, bassy sound that made explosions in particular sound amazing.
Emulators rarely capture this. My sense is that they more or less perfectly recreate the sound being output by the sound chips. But they are (understandably) not recreating the physical speaker drivers in the cabinets or other analog filtering steps (if any)
A retro arcade near me has all kinds of old machines on and running (and in freeplay mode!) and it is wonderful. Indeed it is an important part of the magic
I grew up in Lacey Washington, and our local arcade "Star Base One" was a wonderful place, with lots of video games, pinball machines, foosball and pool tables. There was a magical moment when the arcade first opened, when the attendant flipped the breaker and all the machines turned on at once. There was an explosion of light and sound as the machines sprung to life and started blasting their siren songs. I was often the kid waiting outside of the arcade for it to open, so I got to witness it a number of times, and it was always memorable.
