When my wife asked me what I wanted to do for my birthday, I replied like any soon-to-be 47-year-old would: I wanted to go to the arcade. In Charlottesville, that’s Decades Arcade, which is full of old (and some new) video games and pinball machines, some dating back to the early days of the video game era (and in the case of the pinball machines, the 1950s and 1960s). Upon arriving, I went right for what I think is one of the greatest games every put into an arcade: Star Wars, which was first released in 1983 and has you piloting Luke Skywalker’s X-Wing through three stages in order to destory the Death Star. It’s clearly blown out of the water by a billion other games that have come out since, but for my quarters, it’s the most fun you can have in an arcade.

Prior to that day a week ago, I had only played the Star Wars Arcade Game a few times in my life. I was six years old in 1983 and wouldn’t have the chance to frequent arcades until my late elementary school and junior high years, which was toward the end of that decade. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the game had become a rare find in arcades that only had so much space and because the nostalgia for old games was a couple of decades away, often jettisoned older machines for whatever was new and popular. So I spent those years playing After Burner, X-Men, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Double Dragon, and Mortal Kombat. They had 16-bit graphics (which were the best in the early Nineties) and were way cooler than an old vector graphics game, although I’m pretty sure that if you put that machine in front of any 13-year-old in 1990, they’d get sucked in, especially if they spent any time standing around the Star Wars machine watching other kids play while they waited their turn like I used to do at Sayville Bowl. Come to think of it, I spent a lot of time in arcades watching other people play games or wandering around for a good hour or two because I blew all my money on sucking at Double Dragon. To this day, I’m more familiar with the demo screens of a number of games than the games themselves.

Still, I won’t be the only person in my generation to tell you that an arcade was one of the few places in public that felt like it was “our” space. The adults in my life had this weird hangup about teens “hanging out,” thinking that people my age were all ruffians and ne’er do wells who were going to engage in vandalism and a rampage of alcohol-fueled property destruction. You know, becasue without unstructured activities, the teen world of 1989-1995 was basically The Warriors. To this day, I can hear my father going on some diatribe about how he hated the idea of hanging out in public. I don’t know what he expected us to do–hold sales meetings?

Anyway, an arcade was a sanctioned hangout space because while it seemed like a structure activity, you spent more time hanging out and wandering because you never had enough money to stay video gamed up for two hours. Okay, there was always that kid who rolled up with $100 in his pocket (and was always an asshole when it came to playing the games), but I’m sure everyone was more like me, who had $20 at most (and that is if I was lucky) and had begged that money out of their moms because we’d already endured three agonizing hours of clothes shopping (okay, it was probably 45 minutes, but still …). Hence watching my friend or maybe some random other kid beat TMNT, which I did more than once at Time Out in the SmithHaven Mall. That arcade is no longer (althoug the mall now has a retro arcade) but in the early Nineties, it was still going strong and did its best to say as relevant as possible, even bringing in stuff like Virtuality’s 1000CS machine and the game Dactyl Adventure, a game where you stood on at platform wearing goggles and a controller and were told to “seek and destroy” by a very enthusiastic employee. What it amounted to was me wasting $5 stumbling around a world of polygon graphics that looked nothing like what I’d seen in The Lawnmower Man.

When I was old enough to drive, my friends and I found Castle Golf in Centereach, one of those mini-golf/go-karts/arcade places that I first encountered when I was on vacation. Hotels always had a few machines going and I remember an arcade located on Main Street U.S.A. in Walt Disney World when we went there in 1990, but the one that beat them all was Funspot, which I first visited when I was ten.

If you are not familiar with it, Funspot is a warehouse-sized arcade located in Laconia, New Hampshire near Lake Winnepesaukee. According to its website, it’s been around since 1952 and is the largest arcade in the world, claiming over 600 games, a bowling alley, indoor mini golf, a restaurant, a party room, and the “American Classic Arcade Museum.” It even makes an appearance in the classic documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters during Steve Weibe’s quest to dethrone Billy Mitchell as the all-time Donkey Kong champ. In 1987, the classic games were still just games (albeit slightly older) and were all over the floor at Funspot, which for a kid was an otherworldly experience (think Randall walking into Big Choice Video in Clerks). I remember it being enormous and having everything and defintely went to my parents for more money several times throughout the course of our time there, like some sort of overstimulated street urchin. It was there that I played hte Star Wars Arcade Game in its cockpit form and also discovered a similar Empire Strikes Back game. In that one, you piloted a snowspeeder through the Battle of Hoth and the Millennium Falcon through the asteroid field. I remember the Empire game being harder than the Star Wars one and spent a good amount of time going back and forth between them; to this day, Funspot is the only place I’ve ever seen the Empire Strikes Back game.

Funspot was great. It was awesome. It was amazing. And out of the six years I went with my parents to New Hampshire, we went there … twice. Despite my sister and I doing our best Bart and Lisa Simpson impression (canwegotofunspotcanwegotofunspotcanwegotofunspot …), most years, my parents would say no and tell us that we were going to spend the day at Weirs Beach. The tone in our voices when hearing that was so bitchy that I’m amazed we weren’t left behind while they went and had fun (and looking back, there were a number of times where I was a little shit when on vacation with my parents. I guess we all are at some point or another, but still …). Besides, it’s not like “Weirs Beach” was some desolate hellscape devoid of fun like the outlet mall. It was kind of like the Jersey Shore or Ocean City, MD: blocks of T-shirt shops, ice cream stands, a water park, a beach, and a number of arcades that were set up in what was more or less a huge garagea called Tarleson’s Arcade and The Half Moon Family Fun Center. I guess for people who didn’t want to watch their kids play games all day, it was the better deal; plus, it was in the same area of Lake Winnepesaukee, just five minutes away from Funspot.

And I have to stop myself for a moment because for years–decades even–I was convinced that Funspot was more of a pain in the ass to get to and further away that Weirs Beach. I never knew it was just five minutes away. Now I wish I had called bullshit 30 years ago and then maybe I wouldn’t have had to wait two hours while my sister and the other kids played at the water park before I could go play at the arcade (I hate water parks).

The arcade at Weirs Beach didn’t have as much to offer as Funspot, but like Funspot did have a random assortment of video games old and new, mainstays and randoms. You could play Contra, Double Dragon, or TMNT; but you could also play Ms. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, and some old-assed game called The Stripper, where you shoot at a target and a direct hit removes a piece of a woman’s clothing. The Star Wars and Empire games weren’t there, but I did get a chance to try the Return of the Jedi game, also from Atari. This wasn’t as fun to me as the other two because it was set up like every one of my Nintendo games–8-bit graphics with various stages. I mean, it was fun, but not as memorable and I remember being disappointed that it wasn’t like the other two.

Weirs Beach’s skill games made the trip worth it, though, as I played countless rounds of whack-a-mole, skee-ball, and Bowler Roller, the game where you slowly roll a bowling ball to get it to rest in a dip on a track. You’d win tickets that you could redeem for a number of worthless prizes (making it basically a junior casino) and we even did really well one year when my dad hit it big on Bowler Roller–he got into the zone for, like, an hour–and took home … honestly, I don’t remember what. I was successful with it a few times as well, but for the most part spent my time watching him and then wandering around and looking at intro screens to other video games.

Fortunately, at Decades Arcade, I didn’t have to do much wandering because you just pay a flat fee and they give you unlimited play for a few hours. I got past the first stage on TMNT, sucked at Burger Time, played a ton of pinball, and even destroyed the Death Star enough times to get my initials on the leader board. And I didn’t have to drive all the way to Funspot to do it.