I have a confession to make. I didn’t go to arcades when I was a kid.
Part of the reason why is that I’m a child of the 90s. I was born a whole decade after the arcade boom and bust, and by the time I was ten years old – at the turn of the millennium – most arcades simply didn’t exist in the public sphere.
Games themselves mostly lived in our bedrooms or basements or over at friends’ houses, on consoles we had or consoles we wanted, and the desire to pinch pennies (or quarters, as the case may be) for a weekly trip to the mall was just never ingrained in me.
Still, the arcade has remained a popular part of the American imagination, a formative youth place that persists in pop culture. What drives this nostalgia? Can I access some vital part of it, even though I missed it entirely when it mattered most? I decided to pay a visit to some places that promised the classic arcade experience to see what was up. This is what I found.