My first venture into the digital domain that is video games was a home version of Pong that used a controller with a dial. Today’s Fortnite obsessed generation would likely have a hard time believing that two rectangles ricocheting a small square between them could be fun, but it was life changing. Soon after I began to notice the arcade games that were making appearances in gas stations and restaurants and stores around my town. For just the cost of a single quarter you were invited into a pixelated playground promising princesses and points. While my parents waited for our table at Pizza Hut on Friday nights, I would beg for a few quarters to be able to sit and play PAC Man or Frogger, and then when they opened their game room, Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, and Pole Position. While my mother was in line checking out at Wal Mart I would rush out to the entryway and wait in line with the other kids hoping for a chance to play Asteroids or Galaga before she was ready to leave. A trip to the skating ring opened a whole new world with games like Galaxa and Joust and Ms. PAC Man, but nothing could prepare me for the digital deluge that awaited me.
Within a few years I was able to persuade Santa that my seven year old self needed an Atari for Christmas. Sitting in the darkness of the early morning hours of Christmas day, wearing only my Star Wars Underoos underwear, and playing The Empire Strikes Back, I fell in love for the very first time. A few years later I would advance from my puppy love for the Atari to the full blown obsession with my Nintendo. I got the NES and Super Mario Brothers on Christmas morning and played it non-stop until my mother made me walk away to go to my Big Mamma’s house for our Christmas night family gathering. The minute we walked back in the door that night I was glued to the television screen and did not move away until I rescued the princess sometime after midnight. The first of my friends to accomplish this feat I might add. Unlike today, you couldn’t take video games with you whenever you left home, but I soon discovered there were these things called arcades that could satiate my computer compulsion.
The arcade was to the pre-teen what Target is to a mom...the place to be that you can’t get enough of. Any allowance I was given, yard cutting money I earned, or spare change I dug out of the couch or found in a parking lot was hoarded like squirrels gathering acorns for the winter, just in case I got to go to the arcade. A trip to the Shady Brook mall in Columbia, Tennessee meant a chance to spend time at the Fun Tunnel arcade. If it was the Madison Square Mall in Huntsville, Alabama it was the Time Out arcade. It was in these electronic cathedrals that I was first exposed to Q-Bert, Track & Field, Zaxxon, Paperboy, Burger Time, and Rampage. Games we didn’t have in my hometown. If you stacked up the number of quarters I dropped into those games it would likely reach to the stars.
Speaking of stars, in those days my favorite tv show was an arcade game show on TBS called Starcade. This show essentially served as a “coming soon” commercial for arcades. I would watch this show to get a first look, and “how to” tips for games yet to be released in the arcades I frequented. Games like Super PAC Man. I can still remember how excited I was the first time I got to play this game where a “power pill” would “super-size” PAC Man. It had other games like Congo Bongo, Crystal Castles, Krull, Elevator Action, Popeye, Sinistar, Zoo Keeper, and the only video game that still fascinates me to this day...Dragon’s Lair. I still can’t comprehend how, in the days of eight, sixteen, and thirty-two bit video games, they were able to create a game that looked like a Saturday morning cartoon that you could play.
In the days prior to hyper-realistic home video game consoles, the arcade was the place where you got to flex your nerd muscles by demonstrating your skills against strangers. In those days it was all about the player versus player fighting games. Street Fighter, and later Mortal Kombat, would be so popular there would be a line ten deep with kids from eight to eighteen waiting for their chance to exercise their electronic excellence publicly. You might be a scrawny little victim of bullying in your local middle school, but if you possessed acumen with a joystick and buttons, you could be a legend whose name, or at least initials, would be immortalized on an electronic high score screen. You didn’t have to brag on yourself because everyone who walked up to that game came face to face with your supremacy in glowing lights. Nothing felt better than listening to the whispers, “Who is BAB?” and knowing it was you. You might cower in the cafeteria on Monday, but on Friday night you could be a king.
On the heels of the fighting game’s popularity came the exaggerated competitive sports games like NBA Jams and NFL Blitz. Suddenly a boy who couldn’t even make the fifth grade basketball team could dunk on Shaquille O’Neal from the half court line. Amazingly, in the days before internet chat rooms and message boards, sheerly by the word of mouth, arcade by arcade from state to state, you would learn about “cheat codes” that could be entered to unlock secret characters and nearly unstoppable skills. If you possessed those and were competing against someone who did not know them, you were essentially immortal.
There aren’t many arcades still in operation these days, and the ones that remain are mostly novelties that don’t draw the crowds like they used to. I blame it on the introduction of that abomination of a “game” Dance, Dance Revolution, but it’s possible it was the result of ultra-realistic home consoles and the ability to play games on your phone for free. Either way, sadly, the arcade has gone the way of the rotary phone and the typewriter. Game Over.
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