It was an average but ordinary late summer day in 1999, I got myself all dressed up in my WWF Headbangers shirt and my usual arcade outfit so I can say goodbye to my mom and I take the bus to and from the Chicago Ridge Mall. I make my usual entrance at Aladdin's Castle as I always do since going there by myself on November 3, 1997. I deposited a couple of $20 bills to get my tokens to play games starting with Galaga which I been doing since 1997. But a voice in my mind telling me to play Gauntlet Legends, because it's the sequel of the popular Gauntlet video game series.
This game has 4 players just like the other Gauntlet arcade games except the console versions since it was manufactured by Tengen and released in July 1988. Gauntlet Legends, is a game where up to 4 players guide and fight their way to finding 12 rune stones hidden somewhere in the fictional world. In this session, I've chosen Warrior, the red player to start the game. In the first loop of the game, I was having a tough time finding the rune stones in just about every round, I couldn't figure out the shortcuts and hidden areas or anything. All I did was to go through the 1st loop hoping I could find all 12 stones halfway through my arcade session about a few hours in.
After completing the 1st loop, the game tells me that I found not that many rune stones in order to beat the game after the final boss. Then comes the 2nd loop and it was definetly crunch time for me, because the onlookers who were there at the arcade were either passing by and playing other arcade games, watching my trying to get all 12 stones in the 2nd loop, or both. Well, it's both. A few number of them watched me play, but maybe one or two of them joined in at one point, but their runs during the 2nd loop I was in didn't last. That night, I finally found the 10th, 11th and 12th rune stones in order to face the final boss and beat him.
I made it to the real final boss after all 12 rune stones are found. And after a total of a record-shattering nine hours, I beat the game just in time because Aladdin's Castle just concluded its business day and the mall itself also concluded its business day as well. This happens to go down as one of the longest-running sessions I ever had playing just one single game and beaten it before closing time.
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