Those Were the Days is a weekly article in which Gamervision employees share video game-related memories. If you’ve got a story of your own to share, please do so! We love hearing from the community.

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The year was 1998, the place: Los Angeles, California. The City of Angels. Lalaland. The Dream Factory. I was living in, of all places, Hollywood and working as a writer. During my first few months there, I made very good friends with the owner of a pizza shop near LA Community College by the name of Vito. Vito was also from back East, and he took an instant shine to me and my (at the time) girlfriend since we a) were big fans of his New York-style pizza and b) we would  bring people to the shop weekly in groups numbering dozens, and it was a real boost to his business. It got to the point that we started seeing Vito and his girlfriend socially; going to movies, hitting bars, and just getting to be really good friends.

On the same block as Vito's pizza shop, there was an arcade. It was a pretty good size place, with a nice mix of pinball, cabinets, and the occasional driving simulator. During the course of the summer, we learned that Vito had a deal worked out with the owner of the arcade. Vito gave the guy free pizza for lunch, and in exchange, the guy gave Vito all the tokens he needed when he came to the arcade. When we got wind of this, my girlfriend and I became insanely jealous. Vito, seeing the envy on our faces, talked to the arcade owner and convinced him to extend the freeplay treatment to us, if only for the afternoon.

We made our way from machine to machine, not really "loving" anything, but certainly loving the feeling of pockets full of tokens. Then we stumbled upon the Lost World game. If you've never seen it, the Lost World arcade cabinet looks like a driving simulator, with a bench and two curtains. The game is a first-person shoot-em up, and has the players blasting their way through Isla Sorna. The gameplay formula is very simple: shoot at the screen, shoot off of the screen to reload.

We sat down with about a dozen tokens between us, ready to see if this would be the game that hooked us in for the day. Twenty minutes and three levels later, we were deep into the game. The thing about the Lost World is that you end up dying a lot, and when you die, you have to put in your fifty cents to continue. On a normal budget, we would only last about five minutes, but with the tokens bulging our pockets, we decided to play to completion.

About a half hour into our conquest, I realized that our token supply was becoming very depleted. It was a bad situation - we were down to our last four tokens, and neither of us were able to get up to get more without abandoning the other to be devoured by velociraptors. I was peeking my head out of the curtain like a prarie dog, hoping to find the owner and beg him for more money, for more life.

The next thing I know, a hand reaches inside of the machine and starts feeding tokens in. Looking across the machine I see the owner on my girfriend's side, plunking handfuls of credits into the game. He had seen my panic, and literally came running across the arcade to bail us out.

Fifteen minutes later, as the helicopter lifted off and we watched Isla Sorna fade into the ocean, the three of us felt a sense of shared accomplishment. We had all played our part in killing all the dinosaurs. We celebrated with a pepperoni pizza.

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