“Welcome to the D and D world!” shouts an exuberant digital announcer, as ten-year-old me drops a coin into the arcade machine. I position myself at the stick and buttons, ready to pick a class (usually a fighter but I would consider all the others) and bash my way through some Dungeons and Dragons: Tower of Doom. Its music and sword clangs and distinctive kobold screams are forever burned into my brain, and I truly cherish the year or so that both Tower of Doom and its excellent sequel Shadow Over Mystara spent lodged in my local nickel arcade in the mid nineties.
As the two machines made their slow sad trek from the prominent front window display to the dark musty hallway at the back of the arcade where the “old” games went, I had little reason to panic. Capcom was famous for porting their arcade games to home consoles. Their Street Fighter II conversion to the SNES was legendary, causing a real buying panic and becoming one of the first truly successful mainstream console games with a premium $70 price tag. Final Fight hit Nintendo’s 16-bit system at launch and is still one of my favorites, and the slightly more capable Sega CD got a more content-complete version with better music, animations, and gameplay tweaks. I thought for sure that these two amazing Dungeons and…
