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Wil Wheaton's Geek in Review: Pac-Man Fever

WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 7 2007 12:00 PM

Submitted by WilWheaton. Edited By erin_broadley.

TAGS: classic games, arcades, 1980s

I was born in 1972, and came of age in the 1980s, which means that I am of the video game generation. Though my family started with the Odyssey2 before moving to the Atari 2600 and Atari 400 (membrane keyboards FTW!) much of my gaming took place in various arcades, or local businesses � pizza parlors, drug stores, bowling alleys, liquor stores and even a head shop � and they played such an important role in my life, I still have all kinds of very clear and powerful memories associated with certain games and the places I played them. It's good that I do, because arcades in America are vanishing like rainforests.

Come with me, for a moment, back to the days when a quarter really meant something, and take a look at some of those games and places . . .

Donkey Kong will forever be associated with Verdugo Bowling Alley in La Crescenta, because that's where I first saw it. In fact, I thought it was some weird bowling game because the barrells on level one look like bowling balls, if you're nine years old and in a bowling alley. Donkey Kong Junior, on the other hand, will always remind me of my Aunt Val's house, where my cousin Jack's outrageously rich absentee father had actually bought him a stand up Nintendo cabinet of his own.

Another Nintendo staple, Punch Out!!, takes me back to Malibu Grand Prix, a Southern California staple in the pre-lawsuit-as-lottery '80s where adults could race cars around a twisty track while their kids played mini golf outside or tons of video games inside. I was never any good at Punch Out!!, but for some reason when I played it at Malibu Grand Prix in Northridge, I could make it all the way to Bald Bull, which isn't particularly impressive if you didn't suck at it, but still makes me feel like I accomplished something. One time, I even knocked him down once before he turned me into moosh.

Centipede will always be tied to the smell of mojo potatoes and the din of some sporting event I didn't care about on a projection television at Shakeys Pizza in Tujunga, where this young couple in their 20s with really awesome '70s hair that was beginning to turn into unfortunate '80s hair let me play their last man at the cocktail version because their pizza was ready.

Ms. Pac-Man will always be associated with the head shop in Sunland, where I got to the pretzel level the first time I ever played the game while my mom was, uh, shopping, in that area behind the saloon doors that was just for grown-ups.

Super Pac-Man, Defender, Gyruss, and Mouse Trap drop me through the worm hole into Sunland Discount Variety, a sort of family-run grocery and hardware store that pre-dates minimarts. I can close my eyes right now, and hear the old mechanical cash register and whirring Slush Puppy machine (ten pumps of syrup, please.) I can feel the cool dusty linoleum tiles beneath my bare feet when I stopped on my way back home from the community pool over several childhood summers, the chlorine burning my eyes and lungs, always afraid that the old Chinese man who worked there wouldn't accept my soaking wet dollar bills from my soaking wet pocket, or would enforce the "no shirt, no shoes, no service" policy announced on the front door.

Crystal Castles, Demolition Derby (did anyone ever get to see more of that girl between levels?), and Journey conjure up images of a Bally's Alladin's Castle at the mall in Eugene, Oregon, during the filming of Stand By Me, where my mom took me on my days off. Burger Time and Tutankham will always remind me of the smell of chlorine and concrete from the basement-level pool at the Eugene Hilton where we lived that summer. Lunar Lander reminds me of this Holiday Inn in Redding, California, where we stayed during the filming of Stand By Me's train trestle sequence. It was another indoor pool, but this one had a tropical theme with a giant waterfall, and if you didn't mind a mild electric shock, holding your wet hand over the coin slots gave you free credits.

I really miss those days when Chuck E. Cheese's had more than an assortment of ticket-dispensing coin suckers, I could find arcade games wherever I went, and every mall worth visiting had both a video arcade and an ice skating rink. But the video arcade's days were numbered as soon as home computers and console systems started to catch up to their arcade counterparts. Sadly, in their efforts to keep quarters flowing, I believe arcade owners and video game manufacturers hastened their own demise.

Though the great Home Video Game Crash is widely accepted to have happened in 1983, It was in the early '90s that arcades started to really fall apart, as unique games like Tempest, Robotron, Tapper and Gorf were steadily replaced by games that were all essentially derivative of Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat. While it took entirely different skills to beat Vanguard than it took to beat Crazy Climber than it took to beat Galaxian than it took to beat Dragon's Lair, a fighting game was a fighting game was a fighting game. Jump and leg sweep, mash the buttons, and repeat. Oh! A fatality. Awesome.

In my local arcade, which was called The Enterprise (no relation) and then The Cone Factory (when waffle cones ruled the world around 1985) it started when the sit-down Spy Hunter and Mach 3 were pulled out and replaced with two identical Mortal Kombat machines. Don't get me wrong; those games were fun and I'll still drop the occasional quarter into MKII and see how far I can get, but did we really need an arcade full of them? Where's my Bump-n-Jump? Where's my Wizard of Wor? And who let the damn dogs out? Who? Who? Who?!

As arcades became neglected and the games all blurred together into a beige collection of copycats, home consoles and PCs outpaced their cabinet cousins, and I had a hard time coming up with a good reason to even bother leaving the house. Who wants to go spend a dollar a minute on some fighting game when you can spend forty dollars once for a hundred hours of well-developed story and characters you can get emotionally attached to right at home? I'm bored out of my mind with FPS games now, but when they came out, Doom and Quake were new, and different, and fun. After I grew tired of them, I moved on to RPGs like Fallout 2 and Planescape: Torment, and I didn't miss the arcade experience at all; by the time Vice City came along, quarters were, for the first time in a decade, primarily used in parking meters.

But in the back of my mind, and on long lonely drives where a melancholy saxophone solo seemed to come out of nowhere to accompany me, I'd think about Tron, and Star Castle, and Mr. Do! and Zaxxon. I'd hear the jukebox playing Journey and Judas Priest and Asia and Van Halen. I'd smell the waffle cones and feel the quarters heavily banging against my thigh as they weighed down the pocket of my two-toned corduroy OP shorts, and I wouldn't miss the games as much as I'd miss the places where I played them.

If you're a Generation Xer like me, odds are you have at least one specific arcade you can recall, where you probably spent your weight in quarters every summer. Don't you miss it? Sure, it's fun to play games like Guitar Hero, and the computing power in one Xbox 360 probably exceeds the total computing power of everything combined in Captain Video circa 1982, but wouldn't it be great to walk into a real arcade and choose from thirty or forty different games, all of them unique?

I think the current generation of gamers, though they have access to more actual players than we did, are really missing out on the social and community aspect of the video arcade. Where I would spend my time haunting Discount Variety or the 7-11 with Super Mario Brothers and Gyruss, (and occasionally taking a trip to the Pac Man arcade in Pasadena, a video game Shangrila for those of us who grew up in Sunland/Tujunga) my kids and their friends just play online, and never even see the people they're playing with.

My kids' generation, with their online gaming and its associated sense of anonymity and unaccountability, aren't getting the same social workout that we all got when we were kids. When I played a two player game against another kid and I beat him, if I taunted him mercilessly and made explicit references to his mother's sex life and my role in it, he would have justifiably kicked the everliving shit out of me; so I learned that it was always a good idea to be gracious in victory and defeat. Contrast that with the foul and profane behavior exhibited in today's online gaming worlds, by players who are old enough to know better, or young enough not to care. It takes a lot of fun out of the gaming experience, and eventually results in something out of Lord of the Flies. This type of anti-social behavior spills over onto online communities and has been the subject of funny-because-it's-true comics by Penny Arcade and xkcd.

Yes, arcades were dark and loud and smelled funny, and they probably confused our parents the same way MySpace confuses me, but they were real places where we could escape into countless different worlds, and challenge our friends (and the occasional stranger) for nothing more important than getting our initials on the high score list (it's strange how so many of us had the initials ASS, XXX and SEX isn't it?) Because they were real places, staffed by real people, we had to conduct ourselves with a certain amount of respect, because there weren't rotating proxies and anonymous gamer tags to hide behind. It wasn't about spawn camping or kill-stealing or chat flooding or any of the other childish bullshit that makes so many online games and communities barely tolerable; it was about the interaction with our friends and the challenge these different games presented to us. I'm pretty sure it was about the fun, too.

I know I'm not the first parent to hit his mid-thirties and start demanding that the damn kids get off his lawn � I'm sure my parents were sad as drive-ins were torn down to make way for strip malls, and I'm sure they complained that we were playing in video arcades instead of riding bikes, and watching video tapes instead of going to the movies. I'm sure that my kids will one day complain that my grandkids immerse themselves alone in the holodeck rather than killing boars in the forest or charging into battle with Leeroy Jenkins.

But I do believe that this moment in time is unique, because video arcades are closing all over the place, and this enormously important part of my generation's coming of age will probably be gone forever, unless some billionaire (I'm looking at you, Mark Cuban) decides to open a chain of truly classic 1980s video arcades, complete with Journey and Rush on the jukebox, and dispensers that give us five tokens for a dollar. Hey, there was a resurgence of '50s diners in the '80s, so why not a resurgence of classic '80s arcades in the new millennium? Hell, it could even be a place where the damn kids today and curmudgeons like me could find some common ground.

I call first on Defender.

Wil Wheaton has Pac-Man fever, and the only prescription is more tokens.

51 Comments

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Chris_Gore

Los Angeles, CA

September 2005

FEB 07, 2007 12:10 PM

Great piece Wil! I also started with an Odyssey2 and I currently have a massive retro game collection. The Odyssey2 had this Space War game that had space ships that looked like TIE Fighters, so I played it constantly.

Also, there is a place called "Barcade" opening up in LA next week that you should check out. Barcade is at 371 N. Western Ave., Los Angeles and there's a grand opening party on Feb. 13th. Drinks and classic games -- what could be better? Here is their MySpace page and there is an article in the Calendar section. Cool!

Boogalooshrimp

Colchester, VT

March 2006

FEB 07, 2007 12:23 PM

Boy, do I relate to THAT. I really miss the days when you and a bunch of your friends would go to the arcade and spend what little money you had competing with one another, as well as cheering each other on. There was also the aforementioned sense of decorum. I hate it when I go to an arcade these days, and some kid just comes up and starts playing on a machine I'm already on. In my day, if you wanted to challenge someone, you put your quarters on the machine until it was your turn, or at the very least, you asked them first. You definitely didn't act like a jerk, win or lose.

There was also the excitement when a new game arrived. I remember when the first four player Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game came out (we have one in our office today), and I couldn't even SEE it when I walked in the arcade because it was so crowded with people. It was really just a much better time. Gaming may not be the most social activity in general, but at least back in the day you had to leave the house, and actually speak to someone face to face.

Alright, I'm done. Sorry.

ZenTrixter

Ethiopia

October 2002

FEB 07, 2007 12:26 PM

http://www.wunderlandgames.com

Let the revival begin. Well, at least in Oregon. Once again, we're all about keepin' it weird

mydogfarted

Waldwick, NJ

June 2003

FEB 07, 2007 12:26 PM

Will, come visit me... seriously. We can sit in my den and spend hours with my Atari 2600, Intellivision and ColecoVision - hopefully soon a 27" screened MAME cabinet!

I grew up around Pinball machines, and while I don't remember my first video game, I do remember when "The End" joined the other 2 video games in the corner of the Rec Center amongst the 30-40 pinball machines. It was bliss.

J24U

Danvers, MA

February 2006

FEB 07, 2007 12:30 PM

Dude, 5 tokens for a dollar, how could you go wrong?! My game was always Galaga, though centipede and zaxxon were favorites as well. It is kind of fun playing some of these classics on the Xbox 360 arcade, but it isn't the same without the line of kids behind you, all with their quarters lined up in the machine, yelling "I got next"...though I do have a Street Fighter stand up cabinet in the living room that gives me that joy during parties.

jason

USA

August 2002

FEB 07, 2007 12:35 PM

i drive past the unmarked and private luna city arcade every once in a while. what i wouldn't give for a few hours in that place.

trocc

Chicago, IL

March 2003

FEB 07, 2007 12:36 PM

great stuff, Wil - i especially like the idea that specific memories are attached to particular games. doing some thinking, i definitely have a few of my own.

Donkey Kong Jr. brings me back to the ice rink in Lewiston where i went to hockey camp in the summer; there was a tabletop Asteroids machine in the lounge of Squaw Mountain ski resort, where my family would go for many of my young winters... and i'll never forget the small arcade in the back of LaVerdiere's Drug Store downtown, where i pumped quarters into Elevator Action, Rampage... and even splurged on that terrible Dragon's Lair game a few times...

thanks for stirring up those childhood visions yet again, man.

Brother

Czech Republic

OLD SKOOL

FEB 07, 2007 12:58 PM

Amen.

Pac-Man fever hit me when I was 9. I was living on the cusp of Piedmont. A poor jewish kid in a ultra-rich WASP neighborhood. I'd cross the street to leave Piedmont to walk down Piedmont Avenue in Oakland. (I know.. it's confusing until you get to Oakland Ave. in Piedmont...) and head to Gaylords Ice-Cream for a small vanilla on a sugar cone and the sitdown Ms. Pacman machine. I had that game memorized. It took no conscious thought to play. That warm up held me over until I got to (name forgotten) bowling alley slash bar slash video arcade. On the way I'd sell some of my father's coin collection for game money. One silver dime was worth five dollars in quarters. The video arcade was rank. Old men, beer, whiskey, smoke and the auditory chaos of 10 video games and 8 bowling lanes. I'm guessing at the number but that feels about right. Tempest was the thinking mans game in my mind. Then there was Tron or Star Wars with the walk in booths for that enveloped I'm-really-there sensation.

Gyruss was my personal favorite... as I was fighting my way through the solar system I was so absorbed a bar brawl could have been going on behind me and I wouldn't know it. It was my solemn duty to replace whatever highscore was up when I got there. I remember a big kid, college age maybe, urged me on when I was beating a hard level by the skin of my teeth with "USE THE FORCE, LUKE!" ... he had been watching me play without my knowing. I floated home on cloud nine. I wasn't used to being acknowledged much less complimented. I don't think anyone knew I played video games. Partially due to the illegal method used to fund my habit and also because every other boy I knew would rather play with his skateboard or read comics. The bar I was in, all the other kids avoided... as it was, well, a bar. The first time I walked in I was lured to the arcade section and it wasn't until I left that I noticed there were other sections. I felt like I owned the place and my presence was never questioned.

"Greetings Starfighter. You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada."

Any Oakland folk here who can tell me the name of the place and if it still exists? This would have been early 80's.

Suitsme

Regina, SK

October 2005

FEB 07, 2007 01:04 PM

For me it was Gauntlet outside of Safeway in the local mall. I'm lucky though, there is a pay by the hour arcade where I live now. $3 an hour gets you all the gaming you can handle. We're also lucky enough to have a privately owned gaming/comic book store or two that you can hang out and game in. Feel free to come visit Will, I'll give you the tour.

AceT

Portland, OR

April 2004

FEB 07, 2007 01:20 PM

Everyone needs to come to Portland and have a beer with me at Ground Kontrol. All your favorite arcade classics, booze, and DJs spinning The Minibosses and other classic video game fabulousness.

It's where Seanbaby used to hang out, and Stormy shot a set there.

On New Year's Eve they had free play all night and free champagne at midnight. With occasional trips across the street for my favorite pizza, it was geek paradise.

malkav11

Saint Paul, MN

July 2003

FEB 07, 2007 01:41 PM

The only arcade games I was ever that interested in were fighters. The others are either high-score driven (something that's never, ever held any interest for me) or those brawler/shoot-em-up type things that you could maybe eventually beat, but that were ridiculously cheap to get you to keep pumping in quarters. Those latter were mildly entertaining, but to see anything other than the same level over and over you'd have to spend real money and I never wanted to.

Not that I played the fighters, either. I've never been good enough at them to play them on a pay-per-fight basis. But their home console versions have entertained me quite regularly.

Sorry. I'd really rather have immersion and plot and all that good stuff than my initials up near the top on an arcade machine.

Brother

Czech Republic

OLD SKOOL

FEB 07, 2007 01:46 PM

Sweet Jesus!!!! I started tripping down memory lane with Google and found this http://www.vgmusic.com/music/console/nintendo/nes/gyr-main.mid

Gauntlet! I forgot about that one. Shit... that was on the top of my list for games I fantasized about owning.

Jay_Blank

Brooklyn, NY

July 2006

FEB 07, 2007 01:59 PM

Wil, this is really a great piece. God, just the names of the games alone conjured up old memories of quarters gone missing. Crystal Castles....Bump N Jump....I can't believe anyone remembers those....

There is a Barcade here in Brooklyn. They have some great brews as well.

And, I've been to Ground Kontrol in Portland. Very cool place. I could lose hours there.

I've never been into the Mortal Kombat genre and only recently have been getting into FPS. Current games I'm into include Resistance and Marvel Ultimate Alliance. Yet, when I see a stand up Ms. PacMan game, 9 times out of 10 I'll play.

Thanks for the memories.

geasavenger

Milwaukee, WI

May 2005

FEB 07, 2007 02:15 PM

This made my day, and reminded me why I like it so much at SG.

I used spend every quarter I could earn, beg, or steal to play any aracade game I could find. Pinball every one different, pacman being about to go play this at a greesy spoon by my little brothers house off the highway while waiting for food, and even mortal combat...which when i played it for time first time, when i was down visiting in texas for the summer...blew me away at the time.

Shinryuken said:
There was also the excitement when a new game arrived. I remember when the first four player Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game came out

agreed that a was a great day

Or my one of biggest moment of glory as a young lad...
My brother was on his last quarter playing some game, cannot remeber which at teh bowling alley by our house. A couple of older boys, like 17 maybe kicked him off the machine taking his life. I being the older one stood there for a second, then demanded they give it back to him. When laughed at me, the way only older boys who feel no threat can laugh...I paused for a moment..then did the only thing that seemed right at the time, you DO NOT steal someones game. SO I took a few steps back then charged them both...knocking them both to the ground. Causing the manager to come over, getting them kicked out, and my brother a new game for the trouble Standing up for my brother, and gamers. Though might have been in trouble if the manager had not come over....lol.

Jace

Reno, NV

February 2004

FEB 07, 2007 02:17 PM

ActeT and Jay_Blank mentioned Ground Kontrol in Portland, Oregon in their posts, and they're absolutely right. It's probably the best retro arcade I've ever encountered, and I've looked in a lot of places west of the Mississippi. It's a retro-only arcade in downtown Portland, Oregon, and it's awesome. The place is comprised entirely of classic games, including classic consoles for play (or sale!) including NES, SNES, Atari, TurboGrafix, Neo-Geo, Sega, Sega Genesis, etc. The classic stand-up machines include all the staples - Pac-Man, Galaga, Defender, Centipede, Arkanoid, Donkey Kong, etc. The best part in my opinion, being that I'm a huge pinball fanatic, is that the entire second story of the place is devoted to pinball. Most of the machines are older, and they even have some really old and interesting ones like Haunted House and an original Black Knight! This is one of the best places I've ever encountered for pinball, especially older pinball. Every machine in the place (pinball or otherwise) was in excellent condition, the place was very clean and professional, and best of all it took quarters, not tokens! Very cool, friendly, social place to hang out and play.

Reno, where I'm fortunate enough to live, is also a pretty good place to play. Since we have so many casino-resorts there are a lot of arcades around to entertain the kids while the adults lose their college funds (and pay for my excellent roads and scholarships, heh). Reno is especially awesome for pinball. We have an excellent local company that manages, shops, places, and maintains the arcade machines and pinball machines, so everything is in at least decent condition. We can (and do) call them 24/7 and they dispatch maintenance guys as soon as possible, often the next day! It's awesome.

Wil hits the nail right on the head with his analysis of contemporary games and arcades. While playing World of Warcraft with millions of people is awesome, and schooling some random guy in Resistance: Fall of Man is lots of fun, it's completely different and there's nothing that compares with immersing yourself in an arcade with a bunch of like-minded people who share the same interests. I was fortunate enough to experience the tail-end of this phenomenon as a kid, being that I was born in 1985, but I never got to visit an arcade in its hayday, which is a bummer. The closest I ever got was dominating the Tekken 3 machine all day one day because the maintenance guy left the access panel open, and I kept flipping the little wire coin catch, adding credits, and vanquishing newcomers with Hworang. Hworang all the way!

I would be absolutely thrilled if a retro arcade opened in my area, and I would support it as much as my meager college income would allow.

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