The demo for the Simpsons arcade game was EPIC loud, as it featured Bart & Lisa doing a team-up fighting move and their screaming which went all through the my local mall.

Awesome list, although many of these I don't remember. I'd love to see you do a follow-up list of the Most Overheard Phrases in an '80s Arcade. I still hear Street Fighter in my head!

Oh yeah, Sinistar FTW! God I hated that guy...

I spent my formative years' afternoons in an arcade on the downtown strip of Chapel Hill, NC. "Barrel of Fun," a tavernesque arcade, free from redemption/ticket prizes, just rows of arcade cabinets, with an array of pinballs at the front, and an air hockey table centrally located. For ten years I'd ride my ten speed 5 miles after school, graduating to a car at 16, and spend my hard-saved lunch money on brass tokens. I ended up working there: I was the last manager when the store's lease was not renewed. The last night we were open, we stayed open until two in the morning, talking about our days in the Barrel. Just me, three remaining video games, and thirty or forty customers, some weeping openly.

Barrel of Fun, Franklin St. RIP 11/23/93.

I spent my formative years' afternoons in an arcade on the downtown strip of Chapel Hill, NC. "Barrel of Fun," a tavernesque arcade, free from redemption/ticket prizes, just rows of arcade cabinets, with an array of pinballs at the front, and an air hockey table centrally located. For ten years I'd ride my ten speed 5 miles after school, graduating to a car at 16, and spend my hard-saved lunch money on brass tokens. I ended up working there: I was the last manager when the store's lease was not renewed. The last night we were open, we stayed open until two in the morning, talking about our days in the Barrel. Just me, three remaining video games, and thirty or forty customers, some weeping openly.

Barrel of Fun, Franklin St. RIP 11/23/93.

Oops, I meant I'd like to see you do a list of '90s arcade game phrases!

Thanks for sharing, Palehoof. The death of the arcade represeneted the death of many of our childhoods. Although, I still do get a kick out of visiting the arcades at the Jersey shore each summer.

Sinistar at the top of the list, I am not surprised, utter classic.

Ah, Berzerk! Some of my fondest pre-pubescent memories have “destroy the humanoid” in the background. When Futurama used clips from Berzerk in the episode with the robot planet, it was orgasmic.

Great list.

I still have fond (bitter?) memories of the giant, floating, taunting disembodied volcano rock head from Victory Road:

"Come on! Show some guts! You can't escape me! Come get me if you can! A HA HA HA HA HA"

Palehoof, what a moving story.

I spent some of my youth in a videogame store. It was a strange place, like if the star wars cantina and the local kindergarten have conjoined, and drug dealers and serial killers shared the line for MK3 with whining kids such as myself. I was 10 or something, and there was this guy who worked there 6 days a week. He was twice my age, but I always tought of him as a pal. He taught me some raiden moves (back, back, forward - superman move, down, up - teleport and get punched in the face as you reappear) and never told me to fuck off as I annoyed him with my electronic entertainment issues, brought out to him in high-pitched, poorly articulated sentences.

The day I dumped my Dynavision (a nes ripoff, typical of 90's brazil) and got a brand new genesis, I ran into the store to share the news "AWMYGOD DUDE, I GOT A GENESIS!" and he congratulated me and we celebrated playing street fighter alpha on the arcade. That was my videogame pal, the guy who probably didn't really give a shit, but played out like he did, helping me going through childhood lameness.

i have the theme form the star wars arcade game as the ring tone on my phone.

the fore will be with you, always.

reminds me of sausage rolls in the agora at lunchtime

Sinistar still freaks me the fuck out.

Good god! Sinstar! Why! I didn't play it in arcade. (I was sadly born to late for them) But I owned the game on one of those collection things and basicly we placed bets on who would suck and die the least on that game..

Ok I disagree on 2 things on this list.

I believe for dragons lair it should be.. -cough and puts on a horribly bad girl acting voice- To defeat the dragon use the magic sword. -cough again- Ugh.. still haunts my memories.. Her last bit of advice to save her will be repeated again and again as your forced to replay the same part over and over in a horrid level of trial and error. One screw up for a long fight and your back at part one.. listening to her again...

and for gauntlet... Its the wizard! its always the damn wizard! never the warrior.. and what does he do.. he shoots the food.. he shoots the fucking food! Gah! This is why I wasn't aloud to play for a while after my friends all tried to play with me..

You forgot:

"Nothing can stop the Blob!"

"The White Queen welcomes you to die!"

When I think of Funspot (the King of Kongs arcade), the first sound that comes to mind is definitely Star Wars Arcade. They've got two of them. It's hard not to hear it at some point.

Although I know this is more 90's than 80's, I feel the need to mention:

"FINISH HIM!"

...about a half-dozen times a minute.

Kudos for the X-Men video game reference, too! I had almost forgotten about that! Although I'm pretty sure that was the early 90's, too.

There was a game called "Time Warriors" or something like that which had a sample of a long, loud scream every time you died, and it was the loudest thing you heard at our local Chuck E. Cheese's. My brother and I had to play the game as soon as we heard it. EVERY time.

Okay, so it was when you failed at the game, but after a weekend with a lunatic friend playing it and then repeating it over and over (at breakfast, in the pub, the FOUR HOUR drive back from the weekend), a quick nod to OPERATION WOLF:

'You Must Join The Hostages'

I am Sinistar. Beware, I live.

How could you forget the immortal line, spoken by a power hungry Elmer Fudd, from the intro to Altered Beast?

"Wiiiise fwom your gwaaaave!"

good list for to me the most annoying part of playing most of the games on the list sinistar being tops was the voices from the machines made me want to unplug them or rip the console from the wall at home.

Do pinball machines count? "Xenon" had some pretty sexy voice clips...

Q*Bert was also a pretty loud game at the time, thanks for including Wizard of Wor and Gorf, I have a soft spot for that early 80's synth voice

Ha great list... my most overheard phrases at "Time Out" at Westminster Mall was "FUCK!!!" and "the spound of a quarter being slide on the cabinet with a "Next game bro". Man I loved the arcade!

Most overheard phrase in 90's arcades?

TURTLE POWER!

Satan's Hollow had an infectious blipity theme based off of some classical tune I can't recall at the moment:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzinaOCGY3E

I seem to recall him laughing too, though that may be just my battle scarred imagination.

As soon as I saw the title of this I thought "Warrior... is about to die" - should have been number 1.

Although from the same game, I always loved
"Shots do not hurt other players. Yet."

Ieah, I admit I also thought the monotonic female voice in Pole Position also sounded sexy. It sounded like the chick was asking me to bang her. And it certainly positioned my pole.

Sinistar was so fucking rad. Evil bastard.

Ugh... Dragon's Lair's demo trailer played on a loop, over and over, nonstop, at the movie theater I was working at in 1989. I still hear it in my dreams.

I also got really sick of the Robocop game's "Protect the innocent, Serve the public trust, and uphold the lawww"

I worked in an arcade in the early 90s, and it was totally different by then. Everything talked; Even the skee-ball.

Palehoof, that story seriously made my eyes tear up. It reminds me of my own childhood haunt, the amazing Celebrity Sports Center in Glendale Colorado. That place was an absolute arcade paradise with 3 distinct arcade areas in its massive facade. It also had 80 bowling lanes and an indoor Olympic sized pool with three sweet water slides. Every great childhood arcade memory I have is from Celebrity. It was torn down in 1995 and there's a Home Depot there now. I feel sorry for all the kids who never got to experience its grandeur... Colorado lost one of the most awesome pieces of its soul in 1995.

I also dug the voice in Taito Championship Wrestling.

Intruder ALert. Intruder Alert

A few years back, there was a band called Replicator playing in our local arcade. They happened to have a song entitled "Warrior needs food, badly", and, it just so happens, Gauntlet was placed directly in front of the stage. The singer got up and proclaimed "this song, is dedicated, to that game, right there!" Truly one of the best arcade-concert moments i've ever experienced.

@Ramone- Satan's Hollow was on this retro games title I used to play on the original Xbox- Midway Arcade Treasures. You're a little fuzzy on your memory of the game, it wouldn't make this list, but regardless, it fricking rules. Not sure about the music, but "Ride of the Valkyries" by Wagner, maybe?

Midway Arcade Treasures is just that- it has Gauntlet and Sinistar(a friend gave me the Atari 5200 cart of this years ago, I never knew what to make of it in the arcades as a kid, but I love it now). Also two "talkies" that should've been shoehorned into the list- 720, and Paperboy. Treasures, I tells ya! 1. 720- "Skate or Die!" was the warning, if you'd been dicking around, trying to pull off trick moves (aka actually skateboarding). If you didn't get moving, a swarm of bees would get you, which happened to a lot of my childhood friends by the way. 2. Paperboy! Lots of garbled voices in this, esp. drunken muttering from the neighborhood alcoholic, staggering down the street in broad daylight- hey, give him a break, being tossed onto the street from the looney bin by Reagan, after having his mind raped by the horrors of Viet Nam, I'd spend all the spare change I could bum, for a bottle of Night Train or for the ladies, Wild Irish Rose. I digress- Fun game, strange critique of suburbia by the designers, and if you had wasted your allowance on Garbage Pail Kid cards, yet still wanted to inflate underground monsters on Dig Dug, or "Go For It!" on Crazy Climber- (also should have been on the list), then go get a paper route, so you can earn qurters, then play yourself on this game, only excitingly!

Gorf and Wizard of Wor were both third-party licenses for the 2600 from CBS Video Games, but not deemed worthy of "Treasure" status. I think there was a Midway Treasures 2, but I'm no authority. I remember seeing Wizard of Wor on a circular dais in the middle of some mall arcade, hearing it talk, and being completely intimidated, yet intrigued. The game persists in fascinating me to this day- it had friendly fire as part of its gameplay- I think this should be noteworthy- you could play two-player, but if you liked, you could make it a sort of rudimentary Deathmatch, which was loads more fun.

LMAO... I can't stop laughing at the persistent fucker in clip 13... "I said BLAST OFF ya muthafucka!!!"

ROFLMAO...But admit it, those videos evoked nostalgia, right? They gave us fun and entertainment before but not as addicting as the current MMOs like World of Wacraft today.

The only thing that is appealing about MMO's is the fact that you don't always have to fight or try to win. It's a lazy man's video game. I played Wow for about 2 years and got off that crack and am never going back....EVER. Games like the one's on this list were difficult to master sometimes and presented an entirely different aspect of gaming that I fear has been lost on this generation. Nowadays all I see is first person shooters and guys with swords fighting extremely top heavy women just so they can rip her head off when some guy goes "FINISH HER". Don't get me wrong though, occasionally someone sneaks out a gem of a game but they are usually under appreciated and the company that made it goes on to make copies of other games.

What no skate or die from 720.. ??????

What? No N.A.R.C.?

In fifth grade, my school took a feildtrip to a bowling alley. There was only so many lanes to play and none of the popular kids would let us join because we weren't "cool" so one of the teachers paid for us to play Star Wars all night.

Thanks to you guys who posted the remembrances of arcades past; for me, it was the Gold Mine at the College Hills Mall in Bloomington-Normal, IL--but Logan, I now live in Denver, and my native-Denverite wife remembers Celebrity Sports Center fondly. As do all kids who grew up in Denver. Wish it was still there!

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Margaret

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We have started a bracket playoff for old arcade games on our blog. Comments and votes would be great! It's here:

http://whiteyandprofessor.blogspot.com/2010/06/whitey-professors-all-time-arcade-game.html