Biggest wastes in my personal gaming history: TMNT arcade

This is going to be a time capsule for a lot of you because I would imagine that many of you were not alive or if you were, you would have been very very young.

But this is back in the days of when arcades were still alive but were dying a slow death as home consoles became more and more powerful.

The games that had more than two concurrent players were few and far between and when you saw an arcade game that had 4 joysticks, you really wanted to try it out.

oh and just in case you have no idea what the title is

TMNT = Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

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Looking back with today's eyes, this game was an obvious rip off or as we called it at one point a "quarter muncher." It was entertaining sure, but the game was specifically designed so that you couldn't really "git gud" at it and certain parts of every level would throw things at you that you couldn't possible escape unscathed. I don't know what to call this sort of game but there was a lot of them back in the day. Perhaps Double Dragon got it started, but they all kind of functioned in the same way.

Taking on a single opponent wasn't challenging but at times you got stuck into an attack animation and while that was going on, one of the many other opponents would move behind you and smack you. You were going to take hits, the game made certain of that.

Adding additional people to the game in the way of a friend that was also playing with you could simply add more enemies as well so while it was more fun that way, there wasn't much point or barring that, there was no real advantage to having 4 turtle ninjas on the screen at once. It was also kind of difficult to tell which one you were at times.

Regardless, this game was a lot of fun given the very limited choices we had at the time so I dumped a ton of money into this game. Well, "a ton" relative to the amount of money that I actually made back in 1989.

I would later find out by a guy that worked on pinball machines (what a strange and cool job to have ) that almost all arcade consoles have varying degrees of difficulty that the arcade owner could play with in order to try to optimize the amount of money a machine would make. If people were playing for too long on a single quarter, you would jack it up a bit, if they stopped playing because the game seemed unfair, you lowered it a bit. The entire objective was to have people putting as much money into each machine as possible and the owners had the tools to play around with this.

These machines were very expensive, so the owners of the arcades needed them to turn a profit and this could take a long time.

I didn't take very long on me because I recall one day dropping over $20 (in quarters mind you) into the machine on my own (what a nerd!) and still didn't defeat it. I wanted to see the end of it and to this day I can't really imagine what that might have been like

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Apparently it just does some really lame animation and tells a story about how the turtles were triumphant. That's not so mysterious now, is it?

All in I probably spent around $50 in quarters on this single machine and let me get a calculator out to see what that would be in today's money: It's just over $135... wow, when you consider that at that point in time I was just doing something like mowing lawns for $10 or so a couple of times a week, Konami did a very good job of relieving a young teenager of his funds.

There were so many games like this and even though a lot of them were tricky theft sort of games like this, I do still miss arcades. It used to be such a wonderful experience to go into a new arcade and see what they had on offer. Don't get me wrong, I am very happy the home gaming industry surpassed them, but I can't really think of anything we have these days that brings about the joy (and loss of quarters) that an arcade used to have on people.