Old School Gamers are Hardcore!

For sure!

Computer systems were MORE expensive then and the games were unsatisfying to the point that arcades were still necessary for the hardcore gamer. And in those arcades, you could easily drop $50 on a single day when you spent time on a new game. And the arcades had game IN COLOR and not black and white or bright green and dark green.

Whenever I visit my pals in SoCal, we go to a place called Howie's Game Shack. I can play CoH all day long, on a great rig, for $9. Impossible when we were kids.

Don't shoot your eye out Trem, and we used to use those to pow pow all the squirrels in the trees. *Note no squirrels were actually hurt in the pow powing of the cap guns.*

pow-powing leaves deep wounds...on the inside. Poor, poor squirrels.

Think of the squirrels, zap.....THINK OF THE SQUIRRELS!!!!

oh yeah: on topic:

My house was in the golden triangle of arcade games when I was a kid. We had a gas station a block away with 3 boxes on rotation, another one a block in the opposite direction with 2 on rotation, and a laundrymat a block in a third direction with 10 - 15 games in slow rotation. The clerks at hte gas stations probably hated me since they couldn't sit outside and smoke "cigarettes" while I was ther for 3 hours at a time. The skating rink was a little closer to my house, and I practically lived there from 84 - 90. I was just talking to a friend of mine who's about 25ish and a touch too young to remember the golden age of arcades. I miss the giant room full of dozens and dozens of games many of different and exotic titles. ROC, anyone? Mr. Do franchise? Zoo Keeper? Rush'n Attack? Gunsmoke? (the last two are late-arcade "golden" age--like 85/86) What I really loved was the variety and the fact that there were *always* games I'd never heard of. So many of them were lousy, but there were more than a few hidden gems.
On top of that I remember the day I got my 2600 clearly...partly because I got a 2600, and partly because my dad slammed the (extremely heavy) door of my mom's 76 camaro on my leg (I was 7 or 8). I also remember xmas when 84 I got my C64, the single greatest gaming console of all time. My grandfather's neighbor was a C130 gunner and a member of a little air force hacker group and had HUNDREDS of copied/cracked (or as cracked as they needed to be back then) games that he let me borrow. I soon fell in with a tough crowd: modems and fantasy RPGs.