I've been touring the arcades in town lately, and it gets to be depressing. I remember growing up in the early 90s; arcade machines everywhere. The grocery store might have a Pac-Man or Donkey Kong machine. Then, the machines started to disappear. Slowly at first, but a few years ago I realized that almost no good arcade machines are still around. It's incredibly curious. There used to be stragglers, machines that seemed to remain timeless in laundry mats, hotels, and restaurants. There used to be people lined up at the mall to play Marvel vs. Capcom 2 after school.
I started thinking more about the arcade when I heard about this documentary:
King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. It chronicles two men trying to claim the Donkey Kong world record. It's been rather popular lately, both on the internet, and, oddly, in mainstream media. It's a great film, and I highly recommend it.
The film doesn't just talk about Donkey Kong, it shows classic gamers living in 2007. These guys are out of place, and want to live in 1983, in a perpetual arcade. And who can blame them? The lights, sounds and atmosphere made the arcade seem futuristic, psychedelic, and magical. They were places of pure electricity.
I was born in 1985, and, consequently, missed the entire golden age of video games. But bits and pieces of the 80s trickled down into the early 90s, just late enough for me to remember the arcade. This wasn't my world, but it fascinates me. I identify more with the NES, and started playing video games at 4, in 1989, when I received one. And in a way, the gap is bigger than it seems. The arcade is a social place, where high scores matter. Somewhere along the line, we decided to stay inside rather than go out, and spent our money on carts instead of quarters. We started to play games that could be conquered by mortals.
So I am giving the arcade a personal revival. I played Defender and Robotron: 2084 all day. I am memorizing the Pac-Man patterns. I would have spent 30 bucks on a real Frogger machine.
The second (Golden) age of games was the most crucial in history. Games stopped being science projects and started becoming art, created through hard work by a few people, for entertainment. The pixelated aesthetics and bright colors on a black background can be an amazing site. And to have that built into a giant statues which covered the nation... what a truly impressive spectacle Earth must have seemed to aliens.
There is a certain satisfaction to playing an arcade machine. It's bigger than you are, and if it were alive it would kill you. But it's nice to see that much dedication, the materials to build a huge cabinet, a TV monitor set aside strictly for one game, artwork painted on the side, all surrounding a few thousand lines of code and placed in front of you by some magnificent phenomenon of human ingenuity.
Go see King of Kong, it does a better job of discussing arcades than me. Hopefully
Chasing Ghosts, another movie about the arcade scene, will get a DVD release.
And one final note to my readers, Brawl madness has passed, and I am once again a functioning member of the internet community. Expect updates every Monday from now on! I might be a little late to the game, but high scores are forever, and I've got plenty of time.
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