Another Chapter in Gaming Comes to a Close
OK, that sounds more dramatic than the reality of the situation – video arcades have been a dying breed for a long time now, but a few recent articles have caused me to reflect a bit on my own history with arcades and their impact on my life.
(you can see the the articles here, here and here).
There is a good reason why so many folks in their 40’s and 50’s are clueless about gaming – it is because while the industry was really forming up in the late 70’s and early 80’s they were in high school and college with a overflowing load of schoolwork, friends and hobbies. Whereas people in their 30’s were the perfect age to benefit from the ‘console as toy’ craze and get an Atari or Colecovision or later a NES or Genesis, me and my peers had Pong and pinball machines … and later got to be teens during the advent of the arcade.
Of course, some of us were fascinated by technology and were programming on PDP-11’s and on tape-based minicomputers before we were even able to get our hands on an Apple ][. We were a minority – as depicted in movies, being tech-savvy put you on the social ostracization hotlist! But arcade games were a perfect fit – they fit in nicely alongside the pinball machines in malls and bowling alleys and other spots, but offered us something that was similar to, but much cooler than the text adventures and Star Trek game on the mainframes. And playing them occasionally didn’t mark you as a geek, as everyone was up for a round of Breakout or Space Invaders!
That is all pretty standard stuff -coin-ops in the mall and bowling alley and movie theater are pretty much the norm for folks looking back at their arcade game history. Wil Wheaton recalls his favorite games in convenience stores. It is reading all of these articles that has made me realize just how lucky me and my arcade game-loving friends were: because by the dawn of the 1980’s, we were fortunate enough to have a full-blown, stand-alone arcade: the Canton Entertainment Center.
Though it apparently perished in a fire in the 90’s, the basic building still remains – it was built out into a sort of mini-strip mall at some point after we had left for college. It featured ~20′ x 30′ of game space, with one end raised up a step. At full capacity it probably fit ~25-30 machines, so it was not the massive space that some arcades grew into over the years. But from the very beginning it was focused on video arcade games. When it opened, the lower section had all pinball games and the upper area had arcade games like Pong and Space Invaders and Tank and Asteroids. There was a change machine and an office window, and not much else. The machines used coins rather than tokens, and the people who worked there were passionate about the arcade and really made an effort to keep everything working and everyone happy.
As time went on into the early 80’s, the pinball machines slowly left to make room for things like Football, Battlezone, Bezerk, Defender, Missile Command, and Pac Man. Pretty soon the place was packed with machines and was doing a decent business despite being isolated on a minor highway far from any malls or fast food or other hotspots. People came there just for the arcade games, and the recently opened D’Angelo sub shop was a great beneficiary.
Many of my favorite games got fed plenty of coins during those days – Tempest, Robotron, Joust, Tron, Discs of Tron, Star Wars and Sinistar.
My biggest memory from that arcade is that for the spring and fall that were part of our junior and senior years in high school, the CEC ran a promotion: each Thursday in the Canton Courier they would print a coupon good for $1 in ‘tokens’ at the arcade. Of course, the ‘tokens’ were still quarters at that point, and the weekly local paper cost 25 cents, so as enterprising students a bell went off in our heads: here is a way to play games and make a profit! So right after school the group of us would pile in a car and head to the convenience store near the mall in Canton, completely buy them out of stock on the paper, and head to the arcade!
We would exchange coupons for quarters, and start playing. Of course, if you went and played a single game for 30 seconds and came back looking for more quarters they would get suspicious, so we knew we needed at least 10-15 minutes between cash-ins. The goal was to get good enough at games so that you could only use 25 – 50 cents of each dollar. We each had our games we excelled at playing, so we would gravitate towards them. I could keep Sinistar and Tempest and Discs of Tron going for a while, but had others that I just enjoyed playing. At the end of the day we’d each have enough left over for a trip to McDonald’s or Wendy’s … that is when it would have been under $10 for the five of us to get meals! Quite often we’d have enough to pay for a movie that weekend as well!
The next year, over Christmas break from our freshman year in college we all headed back to CEC for a bit. They had put in real tokens, stopped doing the paper promotion, and generally become much less friendly and open. The arcade revolution was in full swing and the place was really crowded, and just didn’t feel like ‘home’ anymore. As I said, at some point the place was destroyed by fire, but I have never been able to find out if it had already gone out of business by then. Regardless, the place had already played an important part in my life and in my life as a gamer.
July 8th, 2008 at 9:02 am
Being one of those “in their 50’s” folks, I agree that I missed out on the whole arcade period. I’m sure that there were gaming places in the towns where I was getting my undergraduate and graduate degrees, but I couldn’t tell you where.
When I do run across an arcade machine, I feel no urge to get some tokens to drop in, either, and the same was true way back when it was real quarters. The platforming (arcade) style of gaming doesn’t really interest me, with its premium on muscle memory reaction times and a few “lives” that are easy to eat through in a few seconds, especially when first seeing a game or level or opponent.
I remember having an interest in Dragon’s Lair, as it looked so different and seemed to offer something more than endless 2D levels with moving platforms to jump between and objects to dodge and bad guys to defeat. But, alas, it was just the same — again being more memorization and speedy control fiddling. Another arcade game whose main purpose appeared to be to suck up quarters/tokens as fast as possible without providing much fun (at least for folks like me).
Video gaming really started for me in the end of the 1990’s, by which time PCs with Windows were getting solid enough that you didn’t expect to have to fiddle with the system’s settings and drivers to be able to play each new game. Here I could play these neat adventure games where I usually didn’t need to have fast reaction times, and (the best) didn’t permit you to get stuck, although some still had plenty of rapid death situations (save early, save often).
So, in the end, I don’t feel slighted at all at missing out on the arcade era.
Not too strangly though, my son really likes playing platforming games that still just don’t get along with me. The Wii’s ever-growing collection of dowloadable ports of older games are what he pours over, and we’ve let him buy a few, along with a few more GameCube “mega” collections. He’ll play an old Mario or Sonic game over and over again, through the exact same areas, trying to do just the right things. It looks like torture to me — like you are Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, but at least you know from the start that the goal is to reach the end doing everything “right”.
Of course, my kids like other games as well, but I’m also wondering whether it’s not so much that we in our 40’s and older were too busy with friends and “real life” stuff as much as an attraction to these types of games may require a view or mindset that only teens or younger kids are likely to have.
July 8th, 2008 at 11:08 am
I don’t know about the ‘require a mindset’ on a large scale – to an extent it is true, and is what I was alluding to in my first paragraph. I am in the vast minority in my peer group as a gamer, as I suspect you are. But at the same time, plenty of folks dropped money on pinball and the like, but arcade games were a fad like a pet rock until they were swept up into mainstream culture for a while. I still don’t think it was the games themselves – heck, I didn’t mention it but we had an early Atari in our house for a short while but played it so little that my dad sold it off and we said ‘yeah, sure, whatever’. Like you, I had fits and starts with gaming but my real serious time didn’t come until much later.
July 8th, 2008 at 11:34 am
Yeah I miss the early 80’s arcades. Lots of fun times and memories. –Cary
July 8th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
Someone made an MP3, several actual, of what arcades sounded like but I lost ’em in a crash. Anyone know what I mean? It was fun playing them and picking out favorites. What most people don’t remember is, especially in the 70’s, arcades were filled with smoke and beer. Most machines had burnt spots on them.
Anyway, to me it really isn’t a real arcade unless you can hear or see bowling or disco music and roller skates.
I had an arcade resurgence with Ikari Warrior and then Street Fighter 2. That was back when I could fuel myself with a Big Gulp or Slushy (hmmm, odd I immediately thought of the Simpson’s version rather than Icee or Slurpy).
July 8th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
That is what is transcendent about my experience – that in the midst of an age when arcades meant beer and smoke and roller rinks and bowling alleys, some guys in a little Boston suburb had the ‘nads to set up a smoke-free geek haven … something that wouldn’t become popular for years in the mainstream … I never knew until years later how good I had it!
July 8th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
I’m not sure if it’s what you’re talking about GamerDad (I remember that mp3 going around as well) but check this out: http://www.coinopvideogames.com/sounds.html
July 8th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
I had the follow-up experience — born in 1980, I was a bit too young for the early Atari arcade stuff (though my first console was a 2600), but I grew up playing early Neo-Geo, the X-Men arcade game (still one of the best 4-player co-op experiences, IMHO), the Tower of Doom, and Mortal Kombat. I got to know the last great generation of arcade games, before the high-end home consoles finally killed them off. I still have a soft spot for ’em…
July 8th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
Holy flashbacks Batman! I had the Colecovision and Intellivision before the Atari 2600. I spent countless hours and almost as many quarters in our local arcade, Foosball World. My game was Robotron 2084, I can still here the music in my head. Then there was the little candy store/bakery down the block from my high school that had Q-Bert and we would go down there and play for hours.
The Good Ole Days. 🙂
July 8th, 2008 at 10:08 pm
Alas, I’m but a lowly college student at the arse-end of his teen years and missed out on most of what is described here. But I’m also a history major and an avid gamer, and the two combine now and then. I am endlessly fascinated by the steady evolution of gaming over the last decades and records like this are good to have as a means of grounding ourselves. In the grand scheme of things, was 1982 really that long ago?