Where did you hang out as a kid?

[ScottyMcGee]

I cleaned out some junk in my room yesterday and found tokens from an arcade that's been long gone at my mall. Woof. That struck a cord. I remember going to that arcade every time my mom dragged me to the mall. I played Rampage one time and this teenager walked up before I put the tokens in and said, "Mind if I join?" It was hella fun.

I used to go to so many indoor amusement parks/arcades as a kid but they've all ran out of business and were knocked down. Funmania was the most popular where I live - it even had mini-golf outside. Now there's just a Wal-Mart where it used to be.

But I think the one place I hung out the most was my own neighborhood. Everybody used to hang out and loiter on the streets until very late at night. We'd play manhunt or generally goof around. I noticed the teenagers in my block now don't do that. Losers. That's probably one of my very few biased gripes about the generation after me. *shakes fist*

[I REALLY HATE POKEMON!]

As a little kid I was either in my room or outside, sometimes a friend's house. Then...just my room.

[Valigarmander]

My house is right next to a cul-de-sac where me any my friends would usually play back when I had friends. There was a park in the opposite direction that I'd sometimes visit with my sister and brother.

[Apollo the Just]

^ Oh man. The house I grew up in was right on a cul-de-sac where I played outside with other kids. So many scooter injuries and illegal 4th-of-july fireworks were had there. My parents moved houses when I went to college, and it felt like leaving a piece of me behind.

[Marilink]

There were three parks within biking distance of my house, particularly one that had a massive downhill slope at its entrance. It was the farthest one, but we would go there and just go down the hill as many times as we could in a day.

[Deepfake]

Fun 'n Stuff was an arcade we used to go to on a rare occasion. Crav and I built a conglomerate series of interconnected platforms, bridges, and balance beams with the neighborrhood kids. It was both dangerous and the best kind of fun.

Went camping a lot with the family, which involved swimming in a flooded quarry at a certain campground. There was usually a rope hung in the trees that one might use to swing off the cliffs.

As a teen, I used to inline skate and snowboard frequently. I hung around town a lot, usually drinking Jolt and being a well-liked loiterer at the local fuel station. The cops still bugged me even though the manager encouraged me to hang around.

There was a bridge crossing a waterfall that friends and I would frequently hang out under. Sometimes we swam in the creek or just clumbed the glacial boulders that populated the area. We also used skateboards to go street-luging in the national park, although that required someone willing to drive back up the hill.

I got around and did a lot and lived a good portion of my life in the Local woods. I think I managed to dodge most of the helicopter-parent obsession with having a 'safe' childhood. Lots of places I liked and friends. I never would have grown up if I could help it.

[I REALLY HATE POKEMON!]

oh wow jolt

[ScottyMcGee]

This is going WAY back. I miss all those adventure places for kids to hang out at. I never knew what the technical term for it was. But those giant indoor playgrounds for kids. Like Discovery Zone and whatever. I forgot all the other names but Discovery Zone was the big one where I live. There was also something called Kid Museum where they had miniature setups for kids to play, like a kitchen or a grocery store or a fire station, etc. I guess all those places closed down because people got concerned about spreading germs through the ball pits or whatever.

[Random User]

I typically hung out in the community courtyard at the apartment complex I lived in.

[Marilink]

There were some pretty baller "Secret Spots" that my friends and I found in some of the more forested parks around town. Obviously, in retrospect, we were not the only kids who actually knew about these places, but we more or less claimed them as our own. Some unconnected railroad tracks in one park, an overlook by a pond that was really hard to get to, a spot by the river that you had to cross a fallen tree to access...we did a lot of that kind of thing. Finding places like that really fueled my imagination and love for adventure, and it's one of the reasons that I'm so stoked to find hidden nooks and crannies in the games I play.

[Random User]

Those secret places sound so much cooler than ours. Our only secret spots were like, a patch of dirt between two trees and an apartment wall, and sometimes we'd hang out behind a dumpster.

[ScottyMcGee]

I remember a "secret spot" in the first house I lived in. In my backyard on the far side there was a shady spot under some trees, but it looked mysterious because the branches were low and it looked like the entrance to a cave or something. It's hard to describe outside of how I picture it in my head. But that was my one secret spot as a little boy.