I was born in 1972, and came of age in the 1980s, which means that I am of the video game generation. Though my family started with the Odyssey2 before moving to the Atari 2600 and Atari 400 (membrane keyboards FTW!) much of my gaming took place in various arcades, or local businesses — pizza parlors, drug stores, bowling alleys, liquor stores and even a head shop — and they played such an important role in my life, I still have all kinds of very clear and powerful memories associated with certain games and the places I played them. It's good that I do, because arcades in America are vanishing like rainforests.

Come with me, for a moment, back to the days when a quarter really meant something, and take a look at some of those games and places . . .

Donkey Kong will forever be associated with Verdugo Bowling Alley in La Crescenta, because that's where I first saw it. In fact, I thought it was some weird bowling game because the barrells on level one look like bowling balls, if you're nine years old and in a bowling alley. Donkey Kong Junior, on the other hand, will always remind me of my Aunt Val's house, where my cousin Jack's outrageously rich absentee father had actually bought him a stand up Nintendo cabinet of his own.

Another Nintendo staple, Punch Out!!, takes me back to Malibu Grand Prix, a Southern California staple in the pre-lawsuit-as-lottery '80s where adults could race cars around a twisty track while their kids played mini golf outside or tons of video games inside. I was never any good at Punch Out!!, but for some reason when I played it at Malibu Grand Prix in Northridge, I could make it all the way to Bald Bull, which isn't particularly impressive if you didn't suck at it, but still makes me feel like I accomplished something. One time, I even knocked him down once before he turned me into moosh.

Centipede will always be tied to the smell of mojo potatoes and the din of some sporting event I didn't care about on a projection television at Shakeys Pizza in Tujunga, where this young couple in their 20s with really awesome '70s hair that was beginning to turn into unfortunate '80s hair let me play their last man at the cocktail version because their pizza was ready.

Ms. Pac-Man will always be associated with the head shop in Sunland, where I got to the pretzel level the first time I ever played the game while my mom was, uh, shopping, in that area behind the saloon doors that was just for grown-ups.

Super Pac-Man, Defender, Gyruss, and Mouse Trap drop me through the worm hole into Sunland Discount Variety, a sort of family-run grocery and hardware store that pre-dates minimarts. I can close my eyes right now, and hear the old mechanical cash register and whirring Slush Puppy machine (ten pumps of syrup, please.) I can feel the cool dusty linoleum tiles beneath my bare feet when I stopped on my way back home from the community pool over several childhood summers, the chlorine burning my eyes and lungs, always afraid that the old Chinese man who worked there wouldn't accept my soaking wet dollar bills from my soaking wet pocket, or would enforce the "no shirt, no shoes, no service" policy announced on the front door.

Crystal Castles, Demolition Derby (did anyone ever get to see more of that girl between levels?), and Journey conjure up images of a Bally's Alladin's Castle at the mall in Eugene, Oregon, during the filming of Stand By Me, where my mom took me on my days off. Burger Time and Tutankham will always remind me of the smell of chlorine and concrete from the basement-level pool at the Eugene Hilton where we lived that summer. Lunar Lander reminds me of this Holiday Inn in Redding, California, where we stayed during the filming of Stand By Me's train trestle sequence. It was another indoor pool, but this one had a tropical theme with a giant waterfall, and if you didn't mind a mild electric shock, holding your wet hand over the coin slots gave you free credits.

I really miss those days when Chuck E. Cheese's had more than an assortment of ticket-dispensing coin suckers, I could find arcade games wherever I went, and every mall worth visiting had both a video arcade and an ice skating rink. But the video arcade's days were numbered as soon as home computers and console systems started to catch up to their arcade counterparts. Sadly, in their efforts to keep quarters flowing, I believe arcade owners and video game manufacturers hastened their own demise.

Though the great Home Video Game Crash is widely accepted to have happened in 1983, It was in the early '90s that arcades started to really fall apart, as unique games like Tempest, Robotron, Tapper and Gorf were steadily replaced by games that were all essentially derivative of Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat. While it took entirely different skills to beat Vanguard than it took to beat Crazy Climber than it took to beat Galaxian than it took to beat Dragon's Lair, a fighting game was a fighting game was a fighting game. Jump and leg sweep, mash the buttons, and repeat. Oh! A fatality. Awesome.

In my local arcade, which was called The Enterprise (no relation) and then The Cone Factory (when waffle cones ruled the world around 1985) it started when the sit-down Spy Hunter and Mach 3 were pulled out and replaced with two identical Mortal Kombat machines. Don't get me wrong; those games were fun and I'll still drop the occasional quarter into MKII and see how far I can get, but did we really need an arcade full of them? Where's my Bump-n-Jump? Where's my Wizard of Wor? And who let the damn dogs out? Who? Who? Who?!

As arcades became neglected and the games all blurred together into a beige collection of copycats, home consoles and PCs outpaced their cabinet cousins, and I had a hard time coming up with a good reason to even bother leaving the house. Who wants to go spend a dollar a minute on some fighting game when you can spend forty dollars once for a hundred hours of well-developed story and characters you can get emotionally attached to right at home? I'm bored out of my mind with FPS games now, but when they came out, Doom and Quake were new, and different, and fun. After I grew tired of them, I moved on to RPGs like Fallout 2 and Planescape: Torment, and I didn't miss the arcade experience at all; by the time Vice City came along, quarters were, for the first time in a decade, primarily used in parking meters.

But in the back of my mind, and on long lonely drives where a melancholy saxophone solo seemed to come out of nowhere to accompany me, I'd think about Tron, and Star Castle, and Mr. Do! and Zaxxon. I'd hear the jukebox playing Journey and Judas Priest and Asia and Van Halen. I'd smell the waffle cones and feel the quarters heavily banging against my thigh as they weighed down the pocket of my two-toned corduroy OP shorts, and I wouldn't miss the games as much as I'd miss the places where I played them.

If you're a Generation Xer like me, odds are you have at least one specific arcade you can recall, where you probably spent your weight in quarters every summer. Don't you miss it? Sure, it's fun to play games like Guitar Hero, and the computing power in one Xbox 360 probably exceeds the total computing power of everything combined in Captain Video circa 1982, but wouldn't it be great to walk into a real arcade and choose from thirty or forty different games, all of them unique?

I think the current generation of gamers, though they have access to more actual players than we did, are really missing out on the social and community aspect of the video arcade. Where I would spend my time haunting Discount Variety or the 7-11 with Super Mario Brothers and Gyruss, (and occasionally taking a trip to the Pac Man arcade in Pasadena, a video game Shangrila for those of us who grew up in Sunland/Tujunga) my kids and their friends just play online, and never even see the people they're playing with.

My kids' generation, with their online gaming and its associated sense of anonymity and unaccountability, aren't getting the same social workout that we all got when we were kids. When I played a two player game against another kid and I beat him, if I taunted him mercilessly and made explicit references to his mother's sex life and my role in it, he would have justifiably kicked the everliving shit out of me; so I learned that it was always a good idea to be gracious in victory and defeat. Contrast that with the foul and profane behavior exhibited in today's online gaming worlds, by players who are old enough to know better, or young enough not to care. It takes a lot of fun out of the gaming experience, and eventually results in something out of Lord of the Flies. This type of anti-social behavior spills over onto online communities and has been the subject of funny-because-it's-true comics by Penny Arcade and xkcd.

Yes, arcades were dark and loud and smelled funny, and they probably confused our parents the same way MySpace confuses me, but they were real places where we could escape into countless different worlds, and challenge our friends (and the occasional stranger) for nothing more important than getting our initials on the high score list (it's strange how so many of us had the initials ASS, XXX and SEX isn't it?) Because they were real places, staffed by real people, we had to conduct ourselves with a certain amount of respect, because there weren't rotating proxies and anonymous gamer tags to hide behind. It wasn't about spawn camping or kill-stealing or chat flooding or any of the other childish bullshit that makes so many online games and communities barely tolerable; it was about the interaction with our friends and the challenge these different games presented to us. I'm pretty sure it was about the fun, too.

I know I'm not the first parent to hit his mid-thirties and start demanding that the damn kids get off his lawn — I'm sure my parents were sad as drive-ins were torn down to make way for strip malls, and I'm sure they complained that we were playing in video arcades instead of riding bikes, and watching video tapes instead of going to the movies. I'm sure that my kids will one day complain that my grandkids immerse themselves alone in the holodeck rather than killing boars in the forest or charging into battle with Leeroy Jenkins.

But I do believe that this moment in time is unique, because video arcades are closing all over the place, and this enormously important part of my generation's coming of age will probably be gone forever, unless some billionaire (I'm looking at you, Mark Cuban) decides to open a chain of truly classic 1980s video arcades, complete with Journey and Rush on the jukebox, and dispensers that give us five tokens for a dollar. Hey, there was a resurgence of '50s diners in the '80s, so why not a resurgence of classic '80s arcades in the new millennium? Hell, it could even be a place where the damn kids today and curmudgeons like me could find some common ground.

I call first on Defender.

Wil Wheaton has Pac-Man fever, and the only prescription is more tokens.