Played House of the dead video game at the arcade in K-star mall yesterday and realised what a fucking rip off arcade games are. I got 5 mins of the game for 20 rs. No wonder this industry went down the shithole in the US.

my first arcade experience was in a milk diary cum samosa-vadapav and other toxic fried goods nook where the proprietor had recently installed an 8-bit videogame machine with mario, contra spartan, twin bee, 1942, and some 82 other NES games.

It cost one rupee which was about how much I'd have in my pocket, and that'd give you three minutes, thirty seconds before the ghetto circuit kicked in a pause button. When you're playing something like Contra, which takes about 45 minutes to finish, a single unbroken epic win experience would cost you fifteen bucks.

I didn't have that kind of money.

My master hack plan was probably the most ingenious thing i came up with. There were other kids hooked as I was. But I was the first to figure it out. I realised that there were certain points in the game where hitting the start button wouldn't pause the game, like the point where the screen goes MARIO X 3.

So I'd time my jump when mario climbs the flag so that the screen would be exactly at MARIO X 3 when the pause button kicked in.

The first time I proved this hack to my friends, it ended in high fives and jubiliation.

In Mario, I could go to the third level, hit a duck and keep jumping on the duck in a repeat ping hack that gives you around 150 lives in a hundred seconds, and then you can pretty much play mario until infinity.

When the hack worked out for the first time, I bunked school for the next few days and go there with just 2-3 rupees and spend my entire school time playing mario

A guy from the building next to mine was also hardcorely addicted to the arcade, he shoved his boot into the coin slot area repeatedly until the whole thing became a bit loose and then you just had to gently tap that slot area to get the game started. The bruteforce hack lasted for a couple of weeks. The proprietor probably made less than five bucks in an entire week before he realised what we kids were upto.

I was fiendishly addicted to videogames as a kid

Arcade games are sort of a ripoff in general. Most of the machines here are one generation old at least, and the entry fees for the ones that look somewhat fun are always steep. I saw the setup for Tekken 6 in BLUR and had a go, only to find that it had been set to single rounds (instead of best of 3, which I assumed was par) and on high difficulty, which led to my being booted out in the third round. That's 25 bucks for under 5 minutes of play.

Fond memories of arcade gaming include one Street Fighter 2 machine near my granddad's place in Coimbatore where you had to pay 1 buck for a token (this was over 15 years ago) and if you were good enough, you could hang around indefinitely. I probably had quite a few Tamil curses flung in my direction, but I was too linguistically challenged to know, in any case.

I once scored a duplicate of that arcade coin box and pilfered game dollars and spread it around like a warlord chieftain buying allegiances with his generosity. Good times for a couple of weeks.

This was probably 16-17 years ago, you know when you're getting old when most of the sports stars with millions in ipl money are younger than you