What's your greatest arcade performance?

The most recent 'performance' I remember was (two actually now that I think about it).

1. Winning the Tron high score contest at CAX in 2010. I played for like an hour + and nobody else was even close to my score. 400,000 or so on my first life and I called the judge over to tell him I was just killing off my lives.

Well some guy comes in and beats it. Now there is like 1 1/2 hours left in the contest, and I came in and beat him with minutes to spare before the 7pm deadline. Something like 562,000 then killed myself off.

2. In the Richie Knuckelz Pole Position contest at CAX a few years ago. We were coming down to just minutes left in the contest and I started a race. I crashed on the qualifying lap and got like 200 for bonus instead of the 4000. I didn't crash the rest of the game and won by 10 points I think.
 
I posted this before in another thread:

Okay, here's my story . . .

Back in the early 80's (when some of you were born), my family would take our annual summer vacation. This year it was a Grand Canyon/Vegas deal. This particular year, we stayed at Circus Circus. Parents go gamble while the kids go play the carnival games.

Of course, I go straight to the arcade. I start playing a few games and notice they have this promotion going on - "Be an Arcade Champion - beat these "goal" scores and win the Arcade Champion Gold Medal." It's a big gold medallion hanging from a "Mr. T" like faux gold chain. I look over the "goal" scores and notice how low they are.

Anyway, I jump on Centipede and destroy the score. Call the game attendant over, he verifies the score, calls his boss, boss gives me the medallion, congratulates me, takes a polaroid, gets my name and score and puts the photo up on the "Arcade Champion" wall of photos.

Next, Missile Command . . . destroy the score, rinse and repeat awards ceremony. "You again? Wow you're really good at these games."

Next, Super Cobra . . . destroy the score, rinse and repeat awards ceremony. At this point the boss guy is getting a little weary of having to come down to award me another medal.

Next, Scramble . . . destroy score, rinse and repeat awards ceremony. Only this times it takes forever for the guy to bring me my medal. I don't know what they are doing, checking security cameras, calling Guido to kick me out . . . The guy finally shows up and he gives me some crappy little medal that says casino champ or something like that. He tells me sorry and they are out of arcade medals.

I go back to the room dejected because I was envisioning myself being the Mark Spitz of the arcade with 7 gold medals draped around my neck.

I know you kids are saying to yourself, "Who the hell are Mark Spitz and Mr. T.????" Google it.
 
I was around 11 or 12 years old so it would have been 1982 or 1983, put a quarter into Donkey Kong and before I knew it made it to the elevators level. I normaly died on level three so I was pumped. When the kids around me heard the noise of the spring on that level they started to gather around. The attention I was getting was pressuring me to go on and not disappoint. Somehow made it to the pie factory with many oooohs and awwwhs behind me and died. I felt like a rock star with all the groupies behind me. I'm pretty sure that was around the time I got in trouble for stealing quarters out of my brothers coin collection so it probably was a $5 dollar Donkey Kong game lol...

So what's your greatest arcade performance? was it a high score? getting to first base with someone? or maybe finding a game with a bunch of free credits.

What makes a performance great? Achievement of a difficult goal? Time put into getting a high score? How far you are "ahead of the pack"? Environment a score was achieved in? (ie: In public). Or just the subjectivity of the common consensus which overshadows your own opinion?

Darren Harris
Staten Island, New York.
 
Ugh you guys just reminded me.

I just remembered Twin Cobra.
I could get to the third "game flip", where the game resets back to the beginning but with harder difficulty, but I managed to do it at LEAST three times.

it was back in 1988 so I don't remember everything anymore, but I think I could get to the beginning of the 4th "flip", where the enemy tank bullets shot so fast, it was impossible to survive. I don't remember if it was the third or 4th though.

I'm sure there were plenty of other people who could do it, but I was a young kid. I didn't know anyone important, and none of the other kids in my city were as good at Twin Cobra as I was.
 
What makes a performance great? Achievement of a difficult goal? Time put into getting a high score? How far you are "ahead of the pack"? Environment a score was achieved in? (ie: In public). Or just the subjectivity of the common consensus which overshadows your own opinion?

Darren Harris
Staten Island, New York.

Can be any of those or just your best memory . As per many of the stories I took it to me some moment that was personally gratifying to you whether or not it involved a record score .
 
Back in 2004-05, I was at the top of my DDR game. My friend and I would meet up at one of the local casinos that had two DDR machines and we would pump tokens into them all night. We got so good, we were those kids that started doing songs facing backwards, spinning in circles, and using our hands. We would amass a crowd of about 15 people watching us by the time the song ended. Nowadays I am hard pressed to finish a song without breaking into a massive sweat.
 
Back in 2004-05, I was at the top of my DDR game. My friend and I would meet up at one of the local casinos that had two DDR machines and we would pump tokens into them all night. We got so good, we were those kids that started doing songs facing backwards, spinning in circles, and using our hands. We would amass a crowd of about 15 people watching us by the time the song ended. Nowadays I am hard pressed to finish a song without breaking into a massive sweat.

Wanna see this at CAX.

I once banged my wife after hours in the arcade when I worked there. I thought my performance was flawless and I won't listen to her telling me otherwise.

You beat me to it. I hear 'performance' and immediately think of other things I've done in the arcade than play games.

Having said that, I, uh... Have a key to Starfighters arcade here in Mesa, AZ... :rolleyes: :cheers:
 
mine has to be when my dad worked for aladdin's castle. It was great getting all the free tokens I wanted when he was working there.. he would also put credits on a lot of machines too...



my biggest moment was when I beat dragons lair on like the 3rd day it came out in my area at least.. everyone standing in back of me watching the monitor on top of the machine... clapping at the end.. ah those were the days..



Of all the posts so far, I find this one to be the most amazing. It took you only 3 days to beat Dragon's Lair? How many actual games played, would you estimate?
 
I was the only one in our small Finnish willage paying attention to the details in a game. Those days the games didn't have any instructions so you had to learn by mistakes and wathcing the games. I noticed:

Bomb Jack:
- P different colors gave different points
- the bar showed when P was coming
- hitting walls give points
- B appear when you get 5k

Psychic 5:
- you could decide what item you get by hitting empty if you missed one. I had to count for my friends after this.
- I was the first one to hit the witch actually. This helped alot when finishing a stage...

Golden castle:
- you could undress Irene and see her breasts
- you could get electric shield

Super Mario Bros:
- found the warp zones

...
 
You beat me to it. I hear 'performance' and immediately think of other things I've done in the arcade than play games.

Having said that, I, uh... Have a key to Starfighters arcade here in Mesa, AZ... :rolleyes: :cheers:

Are you propositioning me?
 
Back in 2004-05, I was at the top of my DDR game. My friend and I would meet up at one of the local casinos that had two DDR machines and we would pump tokens into them all night. We got so good, we were those kids that started doing songs facing backwards, spinning in circles, and using our hands. We would amass a crowd of about 15 people watching us by the time the song ended. Nowadays I am hard pressed to finish a song without breaking into a massive sweat.

I've got a few of those stories as well. I participated in an ITG tournament when the game was still brand new. I played in the "Stamina Survival" competition which was simply marathons back to back to back with no break and no bar allowed. I never touch the bar anyway so I kicked ass. I went for over an hour before I failed out; not to exhaustion, but because it was the Energy course which has crazy mods and I couldn't read the last song. Another player made it just as far as I did but after checking the timer we found that he failed 8 seconds before where I had. I came out the winner.
 
Can be any of those or just your best memory . As per many of the stories I took it to me some moment that was personally gratifying to you whether or not it involved a record score .

In that case one of my greatest arcade performances was my 900k+ point Ms. Pac-man game at Funspot with a huge crowd around the machine toward the end.

Darren Harris
Staten Island, New York.
 
When I was a young teenager I played Stargate for around 9 hrs...had ships, smart bombs & inviso off the screen. Killed myself close to 9,990,000 cuz I thought it would flip.

Now I can barely get 500,000.
 
Pizza-Face Dirtball Nerd FTW!

From the real BITD... BZ 3,016,000 (article) and 3,855,000 scores... "Atari" WRs at the time... Voyager I Arcade




Another good one (the game outa' nowhere, maybe had played a dozen times before, '82ish) was scoring just over 500k on Scramble and getting on the menu board high score board at Land of Oz Arcade up on UW Mad campus. The manager/windex bottle holder attendant was pretty pissed about that one, since I beat his score...

meh... good ol' Village Lanes Bowling Alley '84ish... about 10 mill on MC... Could have played longer

MC modern day... Surviving the pressure and staying fairly close to Bill Carlton on MC at CAX '09, both of us playin to a mill. Bill got there about 300k ahead of me...

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Speaking of MC... In the more modern day second crusade, here's my 926k performance on SMA. Of course, I just couldn't keep up with Jeff Blair...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKZz4sBWsdE

 
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A little more press (this article mentions my BZ 3,855,000 score)... helps when one of our group was doing his internship on the Cap Times... More on the fail-side, though. None of us got WRs. And none of us attended the Atari $50,000 Championship just down the road in Chicago... good publicity for Voyager I Arcade though...





 
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Rolling over Gyruss BITD, not too long after it first came out. I loved that game. I had people hovering around me and I felt like the king of the world. Now I can't even get to 300k.

Just lasting in Xevious what seemed like forever. There was no end to it, but it felt like it at one point when every single ground and air target shot at you from all sides (early form of bullet hell). Of course, it kept on. Well I got thru this one point many times and it felt like things looped.
 
What a fun thread!!!

I was a horrible arcade gamer, but I used to have my birthday parties at Malibu Grand Prix and Celebrity Sports Center here in Denver growing up, and for some reason, they both had a Hard Drivin' that had this weird little tiny red button on the coin door where you could press it and it would give you a free credit. I'm not smart in the coin door department, but my brother and I would play free hard drivin for hours on end, and then blow all our birthday party tokens on redemption games... I felt like I had uncovered the deepest secret, and we never told any of our friends because we didn't want everyone in town to know.

Another story that comes to mind, is when they first built a Dave and Busters on the North side of Denver, my dad and I went to check it out. I noticed that they were using the caste system for pricing - Normal credits would be like 3.5 per play and GOLD credits would be like 3 per play... I really wasn't a big D&B guy, but I did save that first play card I got and used it every time we went to D&B. After about a decade, after my dad and brother had gone through dozens of cards, I unlocked Gold status and laughed at them from the throne of my ivory tower while I got a few extra plays per visit for the same price.
 
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