LACONIA, N.H. — You insert a token. With a joystick and a button you blast away at robots, spaceships and meteors advancing from all sides. Eventually your last man dies. Game over.

Expletives are uttered. The next player has seen all your moves. For good measure Pat Benatar taunts, “Hit me with your best shot.”

Spend a few hours here inside the American Classic Arcade Museum, perhaps the world’s largest public collection of classic arcade games, and you’ll lose track of not only the time of day but also the era. Red lights overhead create a perpetual Martian dusk. Eighties pop hits leak from hidden speakers as if some nostalgia-inducing gas. And though all of the more than 300 games are from 1988 or earlier, this is no collection of relics behind glass.

Over the weekend, as leaders of the modern video game world gathered in Los Angeles for the Wednesday opening of the Electronic Entertainment Expo, a group of die-hard players converged here for the 14th Annual International Classic Video Game Tournament to celebrate a time when successful gaming meant entering initials on a high-score screen. While the expo, known as E3, is about the industry’s future, the tournament, which attracted some 130 contestants, is a flashback to the days of Toto, leg warmers and “Pac-Man Fever.”