Pop Culture League Challenge: First Quarter....My First Arcade Memory!



Well, here we are again. Another week and another write-up assignment from the Pop Culture League run by the cool (and collected) owner of Cool and Collected. I was first to submit last week's submission but I'm kinda late with this week's for some reason.

Anyhoo......

This week's topic is First Quarter aka your first arcade or video game memory.....

Well, setting aside my experiences with home video game consoles i.e. Atari, Commodore Amiga, Nintendo and such, I'd like to take everyone back to my good ol' video arcade days in the good ol' 80s.

For as long as I can remember, I owe it all to one of my older cousin for being such a cool sport by bringing me to one of the most famous and legendary video arcade game spot in town when I was 10 years old in the '80s. You see, back in the good 'ol 80s here in Kuala Lumpur capital of Malaysia, we were lucky enough to have several video games haunt in town although some were supposedly frequented by juvenile delinquents and suspicious characters at the time. Many of these 'leisure centres' have dark tinted glasses too, so having an older 'brother' tagging along with you at your local arcade makes perfect sense because no one wants to mess around with a 'big brother'...right?

And guess what, that favorite arcade of mine from the 80s is still operational!

Well, I initially wanted to make a quick stop to this particular arcade I'm referring to as my current office is somewhere near it. My idea was to snap a few pictures to prove to everyone that it is alive and well. And by the power of the arcade gods, when I last step inside the arcade a couple of years ago, they still have several of the games I played in the 80s! These timeless classics such as Pac Man, Super Contra and a few others really brought me back down memory lane. But I was gutted when I discovered that they didn't have Double Dragon installed in any of the many arcade machines anymore.

A quick search though Uncle Google found me this....perhaps one of the few pictures still available online of this wonderful childhood den of mine (no idea whether this is current or taken some time ago but it's the only picture I can find):


Personally I think the whole visit-your-local-arcade trend died a slow and horrible death when the likes of 'modern' game consoles made their way into our homes in the late 80s. But having spent my childhood in countless arcades in the 80s, well, nobody can really take away those memories. So here's to the dark, loud and obnoxious smelling places we call 'heaven' at the time......good times!


Read what the other Pop Culture League members have to say about this topic here.



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