I remember going to the arcades with a friend who was so good at gaming that some of these places banned him. There was one that raised the difficult to what is

I remember going to the arcades with a friend who was so good at gaming that some of these places banned him. There was one that raised the difficult to what is best described as 'insane' just because of him. We'd play a two-player game together, and at some point I let him play Street Fighter 2 or Mortal Combat while I shyly tried another game, in the safe knowledge that he was just a few arcades over. I still vividly remember going by myself because he couldn't join. It was terrifying, but because I picked a mostly-single-player game and I recognized some of the patrons, I managed. Unfortunately, because I was the only red-headed white guy there, there was a moment where as I was playing some guy thought it would be funny to put out his cigarette on my leg. That set me back for a bit. But I still consider that arcade experience as the first time I learned to venture out into the scary world, and thankfully the bad experience didn't set me back too much. After that came the Counter-Strike sessions at internet cafés and, with a gap of probably half a decade or so, being a student and actually hanging out in bars with my peers without an arcade game mediating all of it. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I imagine my next venture into the social world will probably involve table-top gaming or ping-pong. I'm just not that good at socializing without it being centered around something :). But man, it's rare that I get a wave of nostalgia this big. I had another rare one recently when I watched the Digital Ocean "Final Fight: DF Retro revisits the arcade original, every port, and all sequels" review (https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-retro-final-fight-the-definitive-retrospective https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-retro...). Final Fight and Cadillacs and Dinosaurs were the two arcade games that I remember being somehow significant (other than TMNT: Manhatten Project, but that was mostly because I at least knew of the TMNT. and to be fair it was an amazing game).