I’ve mostly played arcade games for variety rather than mastery. I didn’t put “lots of money” into any one, and my dad quickly got us game consoles and computers rather than taking us to arcades to dump quarters per play. The ones I remember putting the most quarters in, I don’t even remember all of them or their names off-hand, but Joust, Defender, Ikari Warriors, Bosconian, Berzerk, Robotron 2084, Venture . . .

Most arcade games are designed not to really be finish-able.

Terminator 2 probably has a limited amount of scripted content.

I think Gauntlet has 100 designed levels, but if you complete them, it starts flipping those maps for later levels, and I read that if you get to 999, the next level is 8, or something.

How high a level have you reached in Gauntlet?

I kind of hate Gauntlet because it’s so much about endurance, and it lets you put quarters in to keep playing when you die, so any competent player could get to level 100, if they put in tons of quarters, and IIRC (?), you can’t really get good enough to not have to keep putting in quarters. And the gameplay wasn’t that interesting. So it seemed kind of like a pointless endurance money pit, to me.

@Zaku At home , in nes, I got to level 181 before my adapter melted. In an arcade I got to level 66.

For T2, at the arcade,I got to the final fight with the T-1000 and he wasn’t getting any permanent damage so I quit. Spent many roll’s of quarters.

I think if you melt your adapter playing Gauntlet, that might be enough to claim victory!

I thought Rescue on Fractalus was great. It goes up to level 999 IIRC. My friends saw that and one asked, “What happens when you get to level 999?”. Another friend answered, “You get to stop playing!”

(That gameplay video link above is 5 hours and 40 minutes long . . . feel free to stop watching before the end!)

Oh, and I haven’t played T2, and don’t want to encourage you to dump quarters into it, but I’ve seen the film, and it occurs to me that you probably can’t do permanent damage to a T-1000 by just damaging it, since it’s made out of liquid metal. You probably need to get it to fall into molten metal somehow.

@Zaku Yes. My idea exactly. There was molten metal behind him, but I spent way too much trying to figure it out. I learned how to quit from the experience.

Galaga

@Blackwater_Park There is a secret to wining Galaga. Defeat all but two of the lower classed enemy fighters in level one and dodge them 52 times and every enemy in the future will not shoot on you for the rest of the game.

Not cheating I made it to level 50. The game resets at level 250.

BattleZone!