Well there is gonna be a lot of Replay Burners in here so here is an early reminder they apparently have been accused of shady shit regarding the crediting and authorization of the original players of their videos.
My favorite Attract modes, easily, were the ones which synchronized and combined different side-by-side cabinets (usually racing games) to make a multi screen demo. Sega was especially fond of this during the Nineties. They are hard to find on Youtube for obvious reasons but here is a subtle example from Outrunners.
My favorite attract mode ever has to be those confidently drifting and jumping cars from Sega Rally Championship with the most iconic bass line in the history of video games and that (retrospectively hilarious) thank you message to Lancia and Toyota because they did not have the time to properly licence the cars and just phoned them for permission. I believe the Twin version of the game was also able to combine the attract demo on two screens.
Gotta give a polite shout out to the perennial neighboring rival Namco and the low poly epileptic T&A of Rave Racer.
TracyDMcGrath already opened Pandora’s box with KOF. All of them are great but my favorite attract mode, especially if you consider the demo fight, is KOF’95’s with that banging intro track, the mumbled speech, those iconic stage intros and the cool little mini logo on the bottom right during the attract demo– a staple of that era of Neo Geo releases to clarify which game is showing on the MVS rotation.
I also love the little animation effect (just a simple palette swap) on the DEMONSTRATION notice of DoDonPachi’s attract mode.
A good attract mode provides a chance to fill you in on the story and characters. Here is Light Bringer interjecting those smooth slicing transitions between the in-game demos and the ever important character bios.
But a good attract mode is also meant to explain how the game is played and nothing beats those in game demos showing the actual panel and controller on screen. The best example I can think of being After Burner II.