Which arcade game made the strongest impression on you?

This is just outing people that are in their 40s.
- You could be in your 30s. Movie theaters had them as a way to kill time into the 00s sometimes. I believe a chunk of the Dreamcast library were arcade ports! I think? Idk
  
  Heck there's a small arcade in the lobby at my local multiplex.
- I've got family in their early 20s that would have an answer to this
  
  I was mostly joking. I know that arcades still exist but I didn't think it was super prevalent.

Dance Dance Revolution. I spent 5+ hours playing/watching/shadowing with my best friend at the local ice cream parlor for a year-ish. The time I spent made our friendship even stronger, was foundational for my love of exercise, and kept me from doing dumb shit like getting addicted to pills.
- Ibhad so much fun with this series. Fuck Konami

i play pinball not arcade, and my favorite machine is Red and Ted's Roadshow
Other greats are The Addams Family pinball machine and Theatre of Magic
also I played a Stranger Things pinball machine the other day, it was a new one but was surprisingly fun and actually felt like it was worth a dollar
- If only Red and Ted's Roadshow did not have that awfully racist Taxi-busting scene!

Mortal Kombat. Fucking love that game. I used to work at an arcade in a mall, and after close I’d hang out and play for free in the dark all by myself.
One night I was playing, again, by myself in a dark arcade with just a row of games on, in a dark empty mall. I was playing Liu Kang and had just beat the shit out of and fatalitied Kano on the bridge.
I’m expecting to go to the next level, instead this green ninja looking like Scorpion and Sub-Zero that I had never seen before drops into the screen. I had no knowledge of Reptile being hidden in the game, and it scared the ever loving shit out of me. My heart was racing, adrenaline pumping, and my hands were shaking so bad I got my ass handed to me in the next fight.

Hydro Thunder!
Arcade jet-fuel boat racing game with a bunch of crazy environments and shortcuts. All the machines seemed to have really overturned motors (or whatever made the seats shake) and it was awesome.

House of the Dead, it has a little curtain around it to make it dark and spooky

Time crisis, loved the first game so much in arcades i begged my parents for the ps1 version with the light gun. Never much cared for the sequels but the first games vibes are unmatched

Missile Command, classic cold war cope: make a game out of nuclear annihilation! Panic slapping the big ball trying to move the cursor. I don't even want to think about how many germs lived on that ball.
- Man I'm used to the Atari version, having a trackball sounds like it'd be so much better than the joystick but at the same time I just know the sensitivity would've been ass
  
  It definitely made it more chaotic but the trackball was a fun novelty. Arcade controls still have a cool appeal to me even with the same games available on home consoles. There's just something cooler about playing street fighter on an arcade cabinet.
  
  it was a very heavy trackball, or at least on the machines i've played. kind of hard to control, but very impactful design choice.
- I like that Missile Command's creator stumbled upon the futility of missile defense in the face of ever-growing nuclear stockpiles by simply making the game keep scaling up the difficulty until it becomes impossible to stay alive.
  
  THE END
- missile command fuckin rips. they don't make games like that any more

Two did. The Simpsons, and Turtles in Time.

The Simpsons, because my dad spent ten bucks on it with me at the local bowling alley just to humor me
Killer Instinct, because I’d drive to Carowinds every other weekend as a teenager to play it and ride roller coasters. It had Ultra 64 technology and a slick combo system that actually clicked with me

Playing at home doesn't count!
I have nothing to say then. Both in regards to being disqualified from this as well as a protest to your gamer-bigotry.
- This is about the arcade experience. If it counts emulation play, then there is no real difference between arcade play and just picking up your N64 controller.

Four player Golden Axe, and then the ~~four~~ six player X-Men game that needed 2 screens to display all of the action.
Of course they were designed to eat the maximum amount of quarters possible, but it was an amazing bonding experience with the boys after a hard afternoon of competitive roller-rinking. That's all we had back then.

Joust and Virtual-On
I think Williams' games in general really set the stage for the kind of sounds/visuals I like in a game, good crunchy explosions, flashy particle effects, excessive screenshake. Big fuckin' surprise I grew up to be a fan of Vlambeer lmao.
Virtual-On is just super unique and had a cool cabinet and its music fucking whips
- I found YouTube links in your comment. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
  Link 1:
  yewtu.be
  inv.nadeko.net
  yt.artemislena.eu
  piped.video
  Link 2:
  yewtu.be
  inv.nadeko.net
  yt.artemislena.eu
  piped.video
  Link 3:
  yewtu.be
  inv.nadeko.net
  yt.artemislena.eu
  piped.video

Im too young for the real heyday of arcades, but i guess air hockey was the first gameni really got good enough at to beat my parents

Here are some I remember fondly:
The Simpsons
TMNT: Turtles in Time
X-Men (6 player version)
NBA Jam
Cadillacs and Dinosaurs
Splatterhouse
Sengoku (very cool and underrated Neo Geo game)
Samurai Showdown

Marvel versus Capcom 2
This and Crazy Taxi 2 are the only arcade games I've spent a significant amount of time playing, unfortunately the places I played them at were dead so I only got to play with someone else if I dragged them there myself. I never learned any advanced techniques but I did and still do greatly enjoy rocking around with Roll/BB Hood/ServBot and the fact that they weren't in MvC3 prevented me from enjoying it.
- I never got to be a versus player, but the memes that came out of it were great
  Where your curleh mustache at!
- I loved playing the Shuma Gorath and Ruby Heart so much in that one.

The Simpsons arcade game. The beat em up. One of the few good memories with my dad is him getting shit loads of quarters so we could play through the game on a rainy day.

Carnevil, hands down my favorite machine.
- FOR REAL, Carnevil goes so unbelievably hard. It's very late 90's/early 2000's, but not in a way that ages it? More like a time capsule of the period.

For me it has to be metal slug 1 or strikers 1945 II

I don’t remember what it was, but this game where you played as a dinosaur and ate other dinosaurs to evolve into better dinosaurs in a time attack manner
That or the 4-player gauntlet game I played the last time I got to hang out with my elementary school best friend and his brother before they moved to Belgium

I have distinct memories of playing and watching the demo mode for Tech Romancer and Primal Rage as a kid lol
- The big ol dinosaur fighting game was irresistible lol

I mean the answer has to be Street Fighter II.
- Definitely a solid pick, though for some of the younger peeps I can totally understand having a stronger impression of later, higher-key titles.

So many, but the ones that come first to mind are:
bubble bobble
badlands
hard Drivin'/race Drivin'
DDR

One time my friend and I randomly found a Time Killers machine at a bowling alley. We'd have been about 12 or 13 I think. We were fascinated by it and spent every spare moment and coin we could find playing that thing. Most other kids were into street fighter and mortal kombat at the time. It was so weird and cool to find this obscure mystery of a machine that combined elements of both. Nobody we knew had a clue what it was. Apparently it isn't very good, but we played the crap out of it until it disappeared out of the lineup.
- I totally remember Time Killers! As an edgy kid I thought the violence was awesome but in hindsight it wasn’t a very well made game. It did have a certain charm to it though compared to other fighters of that time.
  That also reminds me of a game I remember called Pigskin where it was like vikings playing football and it was super violent.
  
  I think I partially enjoyed it because it was the only fighting game I could do reasonably well at for some reason. Should dust off my copy of Mame and see if it really is as bad as all that.

Daytona USA just looked incredible at the time. It still looks pretty good now.
- Yeah, I feel like the audio really carried the feeling along with the great visuals.

Big fan of Centipede and Tron but I'm not all that good at either lol
Didn't really play real arcade games much until I was old enough to go to arcade bars though
I played a lot of DOOM though as a little kid

Cyber Sled, and F-Zero AX.

I'm not sure, but the 6 player X-Men with the 3 screens was dope

Cadillacs and Dinosaurs

Deep cut:
Space Lords by Atari. Watching two people who were proficient in this game go at it was like some James Bond level shit. Not before nor since have I seen an arcade game with the level of strategic depth this game had.
Also, looked pretty cool for it's time.

Red Elf needs food badly!
- Warrior shot the food

Y’all ever played this old ass dinosaur racing game called Dino Dash at like Chuck E. Cheese? That was it for me idk why

There was an isometric-ish sword-and-sorcery hack and slash using 3D models (or digitized models) that I've had stuck in my head for the longest time and I can't identify it. I mainly remember getting stuck fighting, like, a dragon boss that sat at the top of the screen and made you take cover from its breath behind tombstones like it was Dark Souls.
I also really love the Die Hard arcade game.
- It's not one of the Gauntlet games or Golden Axe, is it? Now I wanna know what it is.
  
  I think it might have been Gauntlet Legends or maybe Dark Legacy, thanks!

Trog's credit sound scared the crap out of me when I was a child! Don't unfortunately remember much about playing it, but later emulating showed that it is pretty interesting Pac-Man on steroids, at least with four players.

Ms. Pacman. I didn't have a console of my own for a chunk of my childhood, so all my gaming was done in arcades. It's also a game my dad and I bonded over after church. I hated church, but playing pacman in the grocery was a nice followup.

The 194X series that also came in the same cabinet as Metal Slug. That shit rocked

Dark Escape 4d...
As a horror shooter, it has this feature where your points are reduced, depending on how scared or more accurately, how rapidly beating your heart is...
Besides that:
Let's go Jungle
It's a decent FPS arcade game

Wangan midnight maximum tune