I was just a little older than my daughter when I first started taking the coach to London every few weeks on a saturday. There were lots of reasons to go - back in the days when Oxford Street hosted the mightiest music stores (a colossal HMV, a couple of Virgin Megastores - and down the back streets the sort of indie music stores where staff would routinely scoff at your prospective purchases before ringing them up on the till).
The other draw other than filling my shelves with music was that London was one of the few 'travel-able' places I could get to that had real and actual amusement arcades.
Again, like the indie record shops these were usually tucked down back-streets, were usually universally seedy-looking places and jogging my memory about them and how old I was (and how possibly STUPID I was to wander in there as a teen with a pocket full of change to pump into my favourite machines), I can't imagine letting my own kid do the same.
Every year we also had St Giles Fair descend on Oxford, and they used to have a couple of arcades there as well (I wasn't at all interested in the rides back when you could go a few rounds on Defender or Scramble for a mere 10p)
Holidays as a kid were another opportunity to dip into these places. We used to regularly go on holiday to Weymouth (what folk these days would fancily refer to as a 'staycation' was our annual week away, usually in a grotty caravan park but always a stones throw away from a noisy arcade on the seafront or thereabouts).
Reading this article - Arcades Continue To Close Across Japan, Which Is Bad News (kotaku.com) - and thinking back to what the huge appeal was, even back when I started to own home machines that were capable of delivering decent gaming experiences, arcades presented a unique opportunity to play games that were never 'quite right' in their home versions in the early to mid 80s (things got vastly better once home machines hit 16 bit of course).
"Defender" was always one of my favourites. As tough as nails, slick, fast, noisy and thumpingly good entertainment. I remember one successful session where I managed to hang onto my 3 lives for around an hour's worth of sweaty and frenetic gameplay until the game's difficulty curve kicked me soundly between the big toes, and one by one those lives disappeared.
As the 80s came and went, other games like Paperboy (a huge fave) and Bubble Bobble were instantly appealing. Even when arcades switched their prices to a pound coin or two, I still found time to drop in and check out the latest games - and even the hoary old classic that you'd always find tucked away in a corner garnering little interest, but always good for a few rounds. When I was a student and moved to Brighton, with next to no money to spare, I still managed to visit the pier and check out what was going on (remember the huge 8 player Daytona USA setup they had there? I wonder if it's still there!)
Nowadays a lot of arcades have either closed (as the article above says, probably exacerbated by COVID) or people have simply moved on. Home machines nowadays vastly outstrip arcade games in most aspects, though some of the larger more interactive cabinets you still see really could only be replicated at home if you were a fanatical lunatic with endless cash to spend on motion-control rigs, steering wheel setups or a serious workshop to build your own custom arcade stuff in. There are of course those classic machines out there that are regularly available via auction or reseller sites (and I still think that I'd love to own a real Defender machine, despite having versions on MAME or even on the crusty old Atari 2600 (which was actually a pretty good version of the game despite the Atari's obvious limitations).
My kiddo is now interested in games (despite all my best efforts not to 'push' my interests on her), and we talk about classic gaming experiences quite often. It's amusing to try and describe to a teenager what it felt like to leap on the coach to travel all that way just to play in an arcade for a few hours, and what the appeal was of playing these games in the first place. Through MAME and emulation I can only really give her a skimmed impression of these experiences, and even with my own rose-tinted specs on I can see that modern gaming has evolved way past the point of these level-based (and quite often frighteningly difficult) games.
Still feel sad about the death of arcades though, so pouring one out for them, and wondering whether one day they'll enjoy the kind of revival that Vinyl is now enjoying with a whole new generation of folk.
Update: I visited Oxford's brand spanking new HMV t'other day and was delighted to see two cabinets in there, Pac-Man and Mortal Kombat. Both were VERY busy with youngsters playing them (yeah, MK for kids!!) so maybe arcades aren't quite dead yet.
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