J.W.’s Notes: Ode to the Arcade
I remember when I was younger, I would take the ten dollars I made for an allowance, or the money I made from shoveling driveways, raking and mowing lawns, etc., and after begging my uncle for a ride we’d go down to the local arcade and I would blow all that money on Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, or Skiball. Yes, Skiball.
I remember when having a ten dollar bill meant an afternoon at the arcade. When every game cost only a quarter, or at most, fifty cents.
The idea of a place that was only illuminated by the glow of a hundred monitors flickering throughout a vast, otherwise empty room has always appealed to me. The thought of being able to go into a place where I knew I would always be welcome was always a comforting one. Being a frequent at the local arcade was almost like being a member of a secret club. If you were getting your butt handed to you in Time Crisis, all you had to do was look around and someone would be willing to jump in and save your skin.
This is gone now. Crowded, noisy arcades are replaced with silent, empty rooms that lay dormant, waiting their new owners. Probably a Pac-Sun, or some Jewelry store. The closest thing you can get to an arcade experience nowadays is in the renegade, fifteen year-old arcade cabinet that is in such a state of disrepair, the “Out of Service” piece of paper taped to the blue lightgun has started to turn yellow on the edges. At a local BP Gas Station, when the 3rd shift people would come in, I remember my old friend and I would spend all night playing Area 51. An unremarkable shooter by gameplay standards, we would simply have fun in seeing who could get the highest score on a single quarter, or who could rack up the longest kill streak. My 81 stood as the longest until the day they finally wheeled the broken-down box out of there, replacing it with two pay-per-use computers.
There was a simple pleasure in playing an arcade game that the consoles (or PC, for that matter) simply have not been able to emulate. Everything is set-up for you, all you need to do is plop down the quarter and you’re ready to play. No manuals, no installation guides, not even any real controls. The blue button was punch, the red was kick, and the green/yellow was simply labeled “Special.” It was the pinnacle of simplicity, and allowed your mind to relax. All you had to do was kill whoever was killing you.
You go into an arcade now, and it’s a sad sight. A game like Daytona USA, which only cost 50 cents when I was in my youth, now has a dollar bill slot built into it. A dollar a game. And for what? A minute or two of actually playing the game? Now, if the game was truly mind-blowing, I wouldn’t mind paying a dollar to play it, but it’s a racing game. And not the only game, at that. You go into an arcade nowadays, and you find gimmicks, stacked on top of gimmicks, piled on top of even more gimmicks. In the Arcade I frequented on pass in Basic Training, there was a Mech Simulator that had you getting inside a giant, yellow headset and guiding the Mech by turning your body from side to side. Never mind that this was uncomfortable, but the game itself was just boring. But it’s become a growing trend in the few operating arcades left.
The traditional arcade has long died out. Only a few, scarce, starving members of the species survive today, but they too are slowly dying out. The arcade has, sadly, become irrelevant in this day and age, where you can get games that are superior on every level right from the comfort of your own home. Now, with services like Xbox Live Arcade and the Nintendo Virtual Console, you can even get arcade classics in your home, further driving the nail into the arcade coffin. But even as you sit at home, playing Paperboy on your 360, it still lacks the same feeling – that same flavor that kept arcades alive during the console’s downtimes in the 80s. Hell, arcade ports are a large part of what saved the home console market.
This is not to take away from console gaming. I love playing my games from the comfort of my couch. But there is no denying that you can not replicate the feeling of being inside an arcade; of having loud, bright machines to your left and right, the sounds of twenty different games mixing into a mish-mash of music, explosions and bad voiceovers that would borderline on poetic in it’s chaos.
But for those of us who remember arcades, I think what they represent most is the good times of our childhood. Of blowing a week’s allowance on Pac-Man, and coming home feeling good about ourselves. Of seeing our friends and then kicking their asses in Street Fighter. Of having a place where we could go to escape from reality. Sure, they may be gone, but for those of us who can still hear the machines blaring at near-deafening decibels when we close our eyes, the local arcade will still hold a special place in our hearts.
…thank God I’ve got “t3h w31rd” tomorrow – I can’t handle doing too much of this sappy shit.
J.W., arcade, childhood memories, Daytona USA
