Working on a mame cabinet. Just bought a x-arcade tankstick without telling my wife. She lost it and made me sell off all my old nes games. I'm glad they have threads like this, I found out the name of one of my favorite arcade games from when I was 6 Solar Warrior

As an 80's and eraly 90's child, I feel like the thing that killed arcades wasn't the NES I had at home, but that even with a dollar, I could play at most two games. And then some game like Cruisin' USA or Jurassic Park Pinball would cost $1.25, so I'd never even get to touch those. The mall arcade was always dead because kids would blow the entire wad their parents gave them on the first farking game and it would last all of 30 seconds for something you'd never played before and would never have enough money to try again. It's not like I would have gone and spent $2.75 on something else if the games still cost 25 cents. I might have hung around longer, brought more friends, or wanted to go back.
Hell, in my college days I remember finding a token for an old local arcade in a change jar. I knew I probably had it because 1 token wouldn't have paid for a single game, I'd quit the day with an odd number, and I'd never been back.

There was a barber shop in town that had a Terminator 2: Judgement Day machine. Free if you were getting your hair cut, as many times as you wanted without pissing off the barber.