Who here was a teenager in the 80's?

Born in December of '89 so basically a 90's kid. Can't help but envy everyone that got to experience the 70s and 80s as sentient beings...
 
Pure GenX here. Was 9 or 10 when arcades suddenly became the hottest thing on the planet. Mind blowing graphics at the time.

Funny to realize that now, after seeing just how far the graphics have improved, but novel game concepts have all but disappeared.
 
1969, here. God I was thinking about what great time it was when you did have to spend 24 hrs a day adulting. Running through the malls, hitting the arcades up and the candy counters.
 
16 in 1982. I had an afterschool job at ComputerLand, and 50 yards away in the same mall was a pretty good arcade. Back then I did not realize what a special moment in time that truly was.
 
I was born in the Fall of '71... so yeah, I was right in the middle of prime time of the Era.

We had several great arcades mearby back then... I'm a Concord Boy, so there was The Entertainer that had pool and arcade... there was also the Regency Game Palace over next to the Regency Theater yonder in Pleasant Hill... and down the road from there was a Malibu Grand Prix. Also had a Starcade at the Century Dome Theater(also in P Hill) that was tragically demolished a few years ago.

There was an arcade downstairs at the Sun Valley Mall too that changed names several times while it was there.

Later, after most of them were gone, we got a CEC here in Concord that still had old school Joy. In the early to mid 90s there was also an outfit called "The Jungle" that had tunnels, tubes, ball pits etc for younger kids... but the entire upstairs had probably 80-100 of our kind of arcade games.

We also had a skating rink and several bowling alleys nearby that each had anywhere from 2-3 games to a dozen or two... and then there were the "real" pizza parlors that had arcade rooms with several games usually. A real pizza parlor is just about as extinct as real arcades these days.

Growing up in the 80s was awesome. It was a time where entertainment was plenty(oh... I forgot to mention the drive in with its couple dozen games at the snack bar... and oddly enough... we still have our drive in... another rare fixture from days gone by... the only reason we still have it is because the new owners couldn't enact their plans to build a sit down Theater on the site because it's in the flight path of the approach to one of the runways of the little regional airfield just adjacent... because of that, the owners paid to upgrade to Digital Projection and still operate it today... though it doesn't have the same "feel" as it did back then, and of course, the arcade games are long since removed)

I'm sure I've left out a few places that used to extract the quarters from my young pockets(of my Levis 501 bell bottoms)... but there was no shortage of places around here to "lighten the load" of the heavy pockets we carried into any of those places.

And things had so much better a "value to fun" ratio... when I first got my license(I had a 68 Lincoln Continental with a thirsty 462 big block... but as was mentioned before in this thread... gas was about a buck a gallon... you could also go to see a movie for about 6-7 bucks... and that included your ticket AND popcorn and a pop.

Then I growed up, discovered life isn't always fun when weighed against responsibility.

It was definitely a fun time to grow up. Great movies(star wars, raiders of the lost arc, tron, etc) great music, and we got to witness many great things...

The ingress of home computers(I had an original greyTRS80 Color Computer 1, as well as a later COCO 2... which is still up in mom's attic.... along with the speech synthesizer cartridge that has the long obsolete SC-01 chip in it... been meaning to go retrieve that) we saw the introduction of pagers, then cell phones... and the birth/growth of the internet that has become a common fixture in most of our homes... along with the powerful computers most of us carry in our pockets on a daily basis... I know the ability to pull my phone from my pocket and get any information I need at any moment has become deeply ingrained in my daily life. The explosion of technologies in our lifetimes has been mind boggling.

In my opinion, not everything has been great. We've also born witness to the loss of alot of things from the days past that have disappeared in the name of progress, or been displayed as obsolete as those newer technologies have taken over. I think that is the motivation for alot of us to collect (other memorabilia as well, not just arcade games) and create our home arcades... it gives us a chance to remember our youth and the good times that have been replaced by "grown up stuff" in our lives.

Peace and good memories to all my friends here!

Dylan
 
Also from 1972, I think we had the best of times. Lots of left over awesome music from the 70s, but didn't have to deal with the disco crap. ;)

In high school through the best of the 80s, and through college when PCU was still a spoof movie making fun of the nightmare that college has become.

Not only did we see the tech revolution of the 90s and early 2000s, but most of us created it!
 
when I was in ninth grade our high school had open campus for lunch and there was a roller rink directly across the street that was open for lunch that served personal pizzas, fried burritos, nachos, stuff like that and had arcade games. when the lunch bell rang, we would full sprint to the rink to order lunch and play games, I remember they had a Spy Hunter, Track and Feild, Yie Ar Kung Fu and Dig Dug, they had more but those are the ones I remember, I played Spy Hunter every day. we could hear the first school bell ring indicating that lunch was almost over and that's when we headed back to campus, I never once ate lunch in that school cafeteria.
 
Mid-1960's kid here.
(...so I'm in my late 50's, but in "US years" that's only about 40 ! ) ;-)

Early Gen-X'er , and NOT a Boomer , ... contrary to what my kids would like to think.

I'm obviously biased, but I DO think the 80's were the best decade ever .
The dawn of Synth music, arcades and crazy hair.

I look at my kids today (18yr, 20yr, 22yr old) , and I'm SURE I had more fun in my teens than they did .

/ rant on
Cell phones and social media are their curse
/ rant off

I have arcades games in my basement, a working Commodore-64,
and a 40-year old stereo system that would blow the doors off anything they have now,
... and NO cell phone . (honest to God, I don't have a cell phone... )

Everyone thinks I'm crazy... but I'm pretty sure I'm more sane than most ! ;-)

Steph
 
Early 70s here. I was just at the right age during the golden era for girls to be interesting, but way too awkard for them to actually be interested in me, and therefore, arcade games (and consoles, and computers) were where i spent most of my time and interest and limited funds. As much as i love all of the modern conveniences, i wouldn't change a thing.
 
That sounds like it was nutty.
Where was that going on?!
when I was in ninth grade our high school had open campus for lunch and there was a roller rink directly across the street that was open for lunch that served personal pizzas, fried burritos, nachos, stuff like that and had arcade games. when the lunch bell rang, we would full sprint to the rink to order lunch and play games, I remember they had a Spy Hunter, Track and Feild, Yie Ar Kung Fu and Dig Dug, they had more but those are the ones I remember, I played Spy Hunter every day. we could hear the first school bell ring indicating that lunch was almost over and that's when we headed back to campus, I never once ate lunch in that school cafeteria.
 
1966 here. The height of the arcades was during my high school years...'81 thru '85. Practically lived at The Alladin's Castle in the Greentree Mall in Clarksville, Indiana. Left many a quarter there.
 
That sounds like it was nutty.
Where was that going on?!
Baytown Texas, Ross S. Sterling High School. after I got a motorcycle that open campus caused me to be MIA every day after lunch and I had to take summer school because of my absences LOL.
 
Really disappointed nobody has weighed in to say they were born in the early 80's, 'cause I had my finger on the trigger of this one:

View attachment 768529
Almost everyone here is about 10 to 15 years older than me.

I always thought that I was born 10 years too late. I was a teen in the 90s but really wished I had been a teen in the 80s.
 
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