This actually happened. Not quite as it’s portrayed, but the three of us exchanged some emotional text messages the day we discovered our local arcade (Future Worlds) had been closed down.

Because Future Worlds was so close to our high school we went there a lot. I remember the hunchback kid who first mastered the air combos in X-Men vs. Street Fighter because he’d evolved his posture to suit standing at arcade machines. I remember the 13 victory streak against a group of Catholic school kids, who said some unflattering things about Jesus in their anger. And the day the Dance Dance Revolution arcade machine first appeared that later gave me the infamous title “that dance guy from the arcade.”

Each of us has similar legends about that arcade. Whatever store takes its place won’t be able to Febreeze away the stench of adolescent, or scrub off the wall those unflattering comments about Jesus. You can burn the earth on which Future Worlds stood, salt the ashes, and put that tiny, loving, militant, old Chinese woman who ran it out of business, but you can’t make Future Worlds disappear — we own it.