At the dawn of the 21st century, when the video game systems hooked up to our living room TVs far surpass anything we could have dreamed of in the 80s, there are entire generations of people (yes...we're that old) who never spent a Saturday afternoon hanging out at a video arcade. Even my wife, who is a mere seven years younger than me, is far enough removed from the early days of video games that she never planned a day around an arcade visit either.Back in the day, there was nothing that got me quite as excited as hanging out in a roomful of video games. (I was a geek back then...I didn't have many "excitement" options.) The peak of the video game boom hit right around the time I started high school. Back then, there was an arcade in every shopping center. And if you weren't near a shopping center? No problem! Pretty much every commercial establishment had at least one video game. On my walk home from school every day, I ran a veritable gauntlet of my favorite games. There was Missile Command (at a pizza parlor), Wizard of Wor (at a deli), and Pac-Man (at the convenience store). Needless to say, I never made it home from school with any quarters in my pocket.
