Arcades dominated the gaming scene for decades before gaming consoles were available to the general public. Arcades allowed gamers to create a culture of community and camaraderie that is rarely found in gaming today. The satisfaction of beating someone, or the public shame of losing, is difficult to replicate on a casual level today.

To celebrate what arcades meant to gaming, we’ve compiled a list of arcade games that were popular and easy to find, but have shaped both the culture and gaming as a whole over the years. Do you remember spending time with these titles?

9 Dance Dance Revolution

A surprising test of courage

At the height of its popularity, it was easy to find someone who owned a dance mat and a few Dance Dance Revolution titles to do something fun when friends came over. To go to the arcade, the public here of all places, and play it to your heart’s content? Well, that’s a whole other beast to tame.

If you do that and hit the songs out of the park in Heavy mode, you’ll earn the respect of everyone watching you take on the neon monster. While this and other rhythm games aren’t as popular here, they’re still just as popular as they were before, in fact, they’re twice as popular overseas.

8 The Simpsons Arcade Game

A good licensed game?

Nobody expected The Simpson’s Arcade Game to become such a great beat-em-up. Nevertheless, it became a real phenomenon when it came out in 1991. You can choose to play as one of the four family members:

• Homer, with his swinging fists and his deadly belly punch
• Marge, who takes down enemies with her trusty vacuum cleaner
• Bart attacking enemies on his skateboard
• Lisa throws her jump rope with precision.

Alone they were strong, but their ability to team up and perform duo moves made them an indestructible force of nature, capable of rescuing Maggie Simpson from the hands of her kidnapper, Smithers.

7 Galaga

Easy to start, hard to put down

This game has made it into the lexicon of immortality. You can find it everywhere these days, as well as imitators that try to capture the flavor of the original but don’t quite manage it. Even the original console version of Tekken had a few levels on the loading screen to enjoy while you wait.

The premise of the game is simple: you, as the only force in the game, must take out all the aliens that appear from space in perfect formation. You complete five levels and think you’ve got the gameplay down pat, but then the aliens get faster and can outrun your shots. From level 10 onwards, you’re fighting for your life. It was a good time until you died.

6 Time crisis

Here you are the action star

Most kids (and let’s be honest, most adults too) grew up wanting to be the next Rambo or Terminator, facing enemies and going on chases. The next best thing was Time Crisis. In each game, you are an Agent of Vital Situation, a Swift Elimination Squad, or VSSE for short, tasked with saving the world from certain doom.

That’s not the important part here. What about the gameplay? Although there were plenty of shooters in the arcade, Time Crisis was revolutionary because it included a foot pedal that allowed you to take cover when you needed to. It created a level of immersion that you couldn’t get anywhere else.

It will take you

Marvel vs. Capcom 2 had gained a considerable following from its predecessors such as Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter and Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes. You were lucky if you could just walk up and play the machine without having to wait in line. Not to mention that the pressure to win is doubled when the line is building up behind you.

The game had the largest roster of characters at the time, with a whopping 56 characters to choose from, and the three-on-three combat made for unforgettable moments pulling off crazy combos with your favorite characters like Spider-Man or Mega Man. This single game was the driving force for Capcom to revive the hype with its later games, but without the arcade support, it just wasn’t the same.

4 Mortal Kombat

Ultraviolence in 16 bit

If you were one of those kids who couldn’t play games like Mortal Kombat at home or at a friend’s house, all you could do was hope you found one of these machines in the wild. Although there are more or less no arcades left in the US, with a few exceptions, you can still find this game in laundromats and maybe a bar or two.

While it wasn’t the first game to incorporate live-action actors into character animations (that honor goes to NARC (1988), it quickly popularized the look and inspired numerous fighting games that attempted to capture the magic of MK.

3 Space Invaders

The beginning of the arcade era

Space Invaders was a groundbreaking inspiration for future video games in general and for arcades as we know and love them. Instead of a moving character model like in Galaga, you act more as a defense base as you protect the ground and inhabitants from the descending aliens.

If you squint, you can spot some of the earliest iterations of the tower defense genre. While some developers have stated that they took inspiration from Space Invaders, there’s no hard evidence that it’s been officially labeled as such. However, the proof is in the gameplay.

2 Street Fighter II

The pioneer of the fighting tournament scene

For better or worse, the fighting game tournament scene wouldn’t be what it is today if Street Fighter hadn’t shaken up the gaming and arcade industries. Immediately after its release, groups of friends would host unofficial tournaments for fun, and it was inevitable that the game would serve as the inspiration for the first official tournament in 1992.

The game is known as the first game to feature a “combo system,” but that wasn’t intentional. No, it arose from a bug where you could completely stop your opponent’s attack by pressing buttons quickly. Eventually, it became a feature of the series and the DNA of all future fighting games.

1 Pac Man

If there is an arcade, Pac-Man is there

Listen, even if you weren’t into gaming back when Pac-Man was in arcades, you still wanted to try it out. The controls were easy to understand. There was no violence to scare people away. Its appeal to the masses was the key to its popularity. To this day, you can still find active machines if you look hard enough.

And that doesn’t even take the competitive scene into account. Pac-Man, along with Donkey Kong, was officially the top dog in the gaming tournament scene. People would watch for hours as the top players chased each other for the high scores.