Likely Normal

There was no greater digital flex than seeing your initials blazing atop an arcade cabinet’s leaderboard. This wasn’t just three letters – it was your legacy, your digital immortality, your way of screaming I was here to every kid who’d ever doubted your joystick skills. Getting on that board required equal parts talent, persistence, and willingness to blow your entire allowance in one glorious afternoon of pixelated warfare.

The arcade high score list was the ultimate meritocracy. It didn’t care about your social status at school or whether you’d finished your homework. The only thing that mattered was whether you could outlast the kid who’d somehow managed to score 985,200 on Galaga (probably by selling his soul to the machine). We’d study those initials like they were holy scripture – who was this “ASS” character dominating every game in town? Is he Arnold Sebastian Smith or just what his name implies? Why did “DAD” suddenly appear on the Donkey Kong board?

The rituals were sacred:

1. The Quarter Queue – Your spot in line was secured by placing your coin on the cabinet’s bezel. Remove it at your peril.

2. The Bystander Effect – Your score always improved 300% when an audience gathered behind you.

3. The Initial Dilemma – That frantic scramble when the game asked for your initials and you blanked harder than when the teacher called on you in class

Modern gamers will never know the adrenaline rush of being one letter into entering something rude in three letters before realizing your mom was waiting by the exit. They’ll never experience the heartbreak of finally reaching the high score screen only to realize the machine resets its memory every night (RIP my Dig Dug dominance at the Pizza Hut in 1992). Today’s leaderboards are faceless digital lists – we battled for glory in public, with witnesses, where your triumph or failure played out in real time to the soundtrack of quarters clinking and the occasional “Oh, come on!” when the machine ate your last life unfairly.

Those glowing initials were our cave paintings – proof that we’d conquered something, even if it was just making a yellow circle eat dots for 37 straight minutes. And if you were really lucky, your name might linger for weeks, silently mocking every player who came after you. Until that one day when you’d return to find your score erased by some newcomer… and the cycle would begin again.