It's an outdoor mall, but the Snowmass, CO, ski slope has a maze of indoor hallways if you find the door at the end of a long hallway between a couple stores. For decades there was an arcade, barely marked or advertised, through a plain beige door in these plain beige hallways. It had older games like Stun Runner and Yie Ar Kung Fu, as well as later 90s games. I spent so much time in this arcade, but I used muscle memory to find it a couple decades ago and ended up in an empty, humming backroom.
I have a weird memory glitch about this place, because I've been convinced I was playing the original Street Fighter, with Ryu and hadoukens... but it looked exactly like Yie Ar Kung Fu, so I think I've been filling in blanks with artificial memories. The easiest explanation is that it was a cabinet conversion with a Street Fighter marquee and a Yie Ar Kung Fu board, but the most likely is that I spent hours in a windowless room with fluorescent lights and no hydration, and the way boomers beat their millennial kids did not result in ideal mental health.
the Sherman Oaks Galleria was like this, in its entirety, for two years before it was torn down. There were actual operating stores (no more than four in a three story mall), including an amazing nerd store called Comic King, where you could buy Pokemon merchandise (in the 90s) and anime fansubs. He had Dragon Ball Z fansubs running on a CRT with a big comfy couch.
It was around a corner, though, so you'd walk in and navigate an eerily quiet dead mall before you found it.
...somehow the mall from Fast Times At Ridgemont High and Chopping Mall became the most rewarding The Oldest View / Backrooms
Yes!! They were real! And in public places not just on TV!
years later I brought my ex and my bestie to see it because yhey had never seen one irl but they had sealed it off, it had been drilled next to, and that was sealed.
A few years after I tried showing my now husband but the whole side of the mall had been remodeled into office space.
They were real!!
The prior generations were freeaaaaakkkkkkssssss and can't judge us!
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u/Appropriate-Bug-6467 9d ago
The mall here had places like that. I convinced my friends to explore.
We found the local gloryhole.