I Trust Classic Video Games (And Apparently Lots of Others Trust Games Too)

Pew research shows 50% of adults play videogames ("Survey finds over half of adults play video games" - AP).  Now will you believe games are mainstream?  

One can begin a discussion on video games in many ways.  Using the term “games” or “gamers” already starts framing some feelings in some people.  Many women don’t consider themselves gamers and yet they play sodoku, cross-word or even online checkers with a fervor unmatched by many men.  But Generation X has an especially soft spot in their hearts and memories for those particle-board and glass-wedged cabinets that often stood, sentry-like, inside the odd public hangout or in gaggles in a neglected room in a local mall.  The classic videogame probably ate more quarters than it produced in hours of fun- but it was worth it.

For my part, game machines provided a sort of geographical dependability that eventually meant I actually associated certain experiences with particular games.  It’s not unlike the way hearing that one song by that one band always recalls that one summer.  In some ways the associations were very important, in others less so and just happenstance.  Pole Position will forever be associated with the local ice cream parlor we used to frequent in Yorktown, VA.  Whether I had the quarters to play it or not, every time the kids piled into the car and we were carted down for a weekend treat, I at the very least watched and turned the wheel.  Ditto for my associations with a table-cabinet of Ms. Pac-Man at the local Pizza Hut (once paired with Tapper, which is the only time I’d ever played that game in arcade form).  There was a pugilistic kangaroo game and Popeye that we played waiting for movies to start at the old theater, long-since torn down.  And there was the sketchy laundret whose unusual and sometimes leering clientel were worth the trip if only to play Double Dragon on a lazy day.

The most useful association was in the Norfolk, VA airport.  In an arcade in the waiting area there was one of the few first-generation Star Wars sit-down arcade machines, complete with headphone jack and quarter-eating difficulty.  There were many bleary-eyed mornings and evenings spent sitting, if not playing, in that machine.  My father traveled quite a bit, and when my mother and I would wait for him to arrive from overseas, the arcade was a useful place to entertain a boy.  (Less entertained were they by my want to go in and blow quarters as we were saying goodbye and seeing Dad off.)  But as I grew older and I traveled more and more with them, I began to view playing that cabinet and others as a kick-off to adventure.  6am flights begun with a dry breakfast in the lounge, escaping my parents who dolefully read the paper as we waited for our flight, I would get in a few games and it would spawn daydreaming that helped me endure long flights.  In fact, when at Bonnaroo several years ago they had several of the same machines in a classic arcade tent; sitting in it I instantly tasted cold coffee (having stolen a sip from my dad’s cup) and recalled the many trips begun with a few horribly played, but massively enjoyed rounds of X-Wing battle.

It’s worth pointing out that I’m actually pretty awful at videogames, particularly the old arcade ones. When I was growing up you essentially played new games three ways:  early on, you picked up a magazine half full of code, you came home and typed in all that awful code and you played the absurdly basic game on primitive hardware (and if you didn’t have a tape recorder to save it, next time you wanted to play you had to type it all back in); soon enough there was a mature home market for games, from cartridges to floppy discs and so on, the best of which in my opinion were the text games with the awesome packaging; and lastly, and probably most mind-blowing for the time, you saw a videogame machine just sitting there, being awesome.  The latter was sometimes a minor life-event.  I can remember where (if not exactly when) I saw Dragon’s Lair for the first time.  I know I once played the bizarre video/pinball amalgamation Baby Pac-Man a few times, even if some of my friends didn’t believe me.  I can remember being creeped out by PinBot’s startling phrases when no one was playing it.  And I can remember playing Spy Hunter on what was likely the only arcade game cabinet in all of San Candido, Italy – a small mountain town where after hikes we would retire to the game room where I’d play ping pong with my Mom and burn a few Lire getting shoved off a virtual highway.

For a brief moment in the history of videogames, there was even a certain amount of status conferred to those who had seen or played new arcade cabinets.  Before the arcade gaming industry went totally belly-up post-recession, especially if you didn’t live in a major city, often the contents of your local arcades would dictate everything from what mall to visit to what Saturday was spent begging to visit that one place where you knew they had the game you wanted to play.  The first spotting of Dragon’s Lair or Space Ace is a good example for some people (especially since those Laserdisc machine broke so often it was as rare to see one working as it was to see one at all).  One particular trip with my parents to a conference my father was speaking at, I was lucky enough to venture to the hotel game room several times and not only SEE but PLAY a game we had only read about in the gaming magazines up until that point: Street Fighter II.  Returning home I regaled my friends with tales of the machine, it’s button-mashing fury, the many characters and the frenzy of players I witnessed.  I was a prophet, for a month or two.  Until there was practically a Street Fighter II machine in every arcade and it became clear that while I was a fabulous scout, having seen the machine first in the wild did not imbue any special ability to play it.  But in a day long, long before social media would have allowed me to snap a pic and send thoughts of gameplay around the world from the location, witnessing a game like that first meant something, at least to us, and I was its brief bard, the chronicler of its existence like the first to discover a species of Gibbon.

-Dean

Comments

[Bradley]

Okay, I'm going to have to respond to this on Wednesday. Your blog makes me have to pencil things into my schedule.

[video game cabinets]

this really makes sense about video games. love the man!