I'm sure it's an enormous surprise to learn that I've spent a lot of time recently thinking about games and gaming, so I've found myself looking through old blog posts for research, inspiration, and to confirm or deny that strange "I think I've written about this idea before…" tingle that's recently set up camp in my brain.
So here's something I found today, which may or may not find portions of itself rewritten for my PAX East Keynote, but should zap some of you Gen X gamers squarely in the happy place…
There are all these video games that remind me of the happiness of my childhood: Journey, Riddle of the Sphinx, and Dodge-Em on Atari 2600. The robot gyroscope game, Excitebike, and Super Mario Brothers (the turtle trick!) on NES are just a few. Writing about those, I can feel the orange shag carpet at the house in Sunland, the blue berber carpet in La Crescenta, and I can see the little television in my friend's bedroom where we played RC Pro-Am until we had "NES Thumb."
Do you associate certain games with certain arcades or 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.
- Centipede will always be Shakeys Pizza in Tujunga, where this young couple in their 20s let me play their last man at the cocktail version because their pizza was ready, and Ms. Pac-Man will always be associated with this head shop in Sunland, where I got to the pretzel level on the first try.
- Super Pac-Man, Defender, Gyruss, and Mouse Trap take me back to Sunland Discount Variety and Hober's Pharmacy (they've become interchangable in my memory) and Donkey Kong Country on SNES will always remind me of when I lived in Nice, France, during production of Mr. Stitch, and my brother and I beat it when my family came out to vist me for Christmas.
- Crystal Castles is Alladin's Castle at the mall in Eugene, Oregon, during the filming of Stand By Me, and Burger Time and Tutankham will always remind me of the smell of chlorine and concrete, from the basement-level pool at the Eugene Hilton.
Funny, just writing about those places I can almost conjure up sense-memories, like smells and other ephemeral things that I can't quite put into words but I can feel, but I can't quite make them out, like the boobie channel on cable in 1984 that was scrambled but would occasionally resove into view for two or three glorious seconds, which would be the subject of much discussion the next day at school.
Mmmmm… boobies.
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Super #1 video game memory? Tron at the Blue Whale in Yachats, OR. I think how badly I got hooked on that one alone was responsible for a childhood of arcade addiction.
Y’know, more and more my own nostalgia is making me wonder what the next generation will get nostalgic about. “On demand” entertainment was really just starting to become a thing, but generally as a kid I still had to WAIT for stuff. Video games were mostly standups in our usual restaurants or the arcade when I got a chance to go, cartoons were a Saturday morning event, and being able to rent something new on VHS was a pretty big deal.
Basically, with all the stuff I remember anticipating so much now so omnipresent, I have to wonder what’s going to really stick for kids 20 years from now.
I’m a gamer at heart, so even though the Atari 2600 was before my gaming time (I started off with the NES, SNES, and the original Game Boy), I can relate to having tons of memories tied into video games. I’ll even admit some of those come from a certain Blizzard MMO that more and more people seem to get addicted to (I’ve recovered!), but I have some non-MMO moments, such completing Metroid: Zero Mission for the Game Boy Advance on Hard difficulty with only 10% of the available pickups. Oh, man, that was a grueling test for me, and totally worth the effort.
Crazy Climber! Right! Oh jeez.
By the time most of these games came out I was mobile so we played them in more than one place:
1) Dragonr’s Lair – First time ever was Orange County Fair
2) Asteroids – Pretty much 7-11
3) Donkey Kong – 10th Grade. Arcarde was open late so played games instead of doing homework.
4) Pac-Man – Numero Uno Pizza near Tower Records (learned the pattern to play indefinitely)
5) Tron – Memories of Tron and Gator Gum – LOL
A lot of other good ones I have forgotten the names to but Donkey Kong is pretty much my all time favorite
There was a Farrell’s in Coquitlam? Didn’t know that. I used to go to the ones in Seattle with my girlfriend at the time. We met at Norwescon in ’80. Mmmmm, Hot fudge with Peanuts & Vanilla icecream.
Used to go to Red Robin’s a lot, before they were ever heard of in Vancouver.
Hey, it looks like there are still some Shakey’s in California – can anybody report on what they are like? http://www.shakeys.com/
Donkey Kong – New York Pizza next to the K-Mart
Centipede – The raquet club where I used to hang out after school.
Super Pac-Man – I didn’t see this much. I think I only saw it at a mall in a nearby town.
Gyruss – the arcade in the Sears at the mall in my town.
Mouse Trap – the arcade at the World of Clothing
Crystal Castles – Chuck E Cheese which opened in my town when I was almost too old to enjoy the place.
Tutankham – an arcade in the hotel where we stayed when my mom went to a work convention in Orlando, FL. Her meetings were in the morning so I had a lot of time to kill while I waited to go to Disney World in the afternoon. I also remember Donkey Kong Jr and Turbo there. That was also where I first saw Poltergeist on the hotel room pay-per-view.
BTW
They still had TRON at Disneyland the last time I looked.
Honorable mentions include Qbert, Galaga and Dig Dug. Journey also had a decent video game but cant remember what it was called exactly.
There was another game where you had a mine cart and had to escape using ladders. The game would scroll offscreen from left to right which was pretty unusual. Does anyone know what it was called?
The Journey game was called … wait for it … Journey.
If you completed all five levels (one for each guy in the band) you would get a concert screen, where they played Separate Ways (actually a cassette inside the machine) while you controlled the bouncers that held the crazy fans away. They'd play until a fan got on stage, at which point the game would reset and you could play again, only harder.
This was incredibly frustrating to a 13 year-old me, who worked like crazy to get to the concert level, only to realize too late that he had to control the bouncers.
Also, the 2600 version was pretty fun, but fundamentally different from the arcade game.
I'm Wil, and I know way too much about video games.
YES! YES! Yes!!! Wil, you are so good! What a writer; God! Thank you so much! I totally agree with you. I can link specific games to specific moments and places.
1) Legend of Kage – Eating a crappy BK chicken sandwich at my living room.
2) Duck Hunt, Lunar Pool & Wild Gunman – My 80-something grandfather finally played NES with me.
3) Ms. Pac Man – the first video game I played which was at Pollo Loco in L.A.
4) Maniac Mansion – my cousins telling me that the stamps and the jar of water could be placed in the microwave together and to keep trying.
5) Bugs Bunnies Birthday – my dad spending what I thought was so expensive a game at Kay Bee Toys.
6) Super Mario Brothers – my grandmother was in in the hospital and I kept dreaming that Mario was a war soldier with a machine gun like if he were Rambo.
7) Deja Vu: Ace Harding – a night with a terrible fever where kept seeing the “goods” page all night long.
8) Dick Tracy: my first individual cartridge giving to me from my mom on my 9th birthday.
9) The place: school; home economics. My classmates getting ticked-off at me because my Godfather got me a Chinese 114 games-in-one cartridge. (One of them called me a liar and told me to prove it by bringing it to school- fat chance.)
You’re super! I love this post! God bless you!
p.s. The turtle trick, hitting three with one koopa troopa and jumping up when it bounces off a rock or green pipe. Mmmm. . .yummy!
Well, nice to read that I am not the only one who thinks about her childhood whenever she´s thinking about all of those games! We had a NES when I was a kid and I loved to play with it. Well, until my mum gave it to neighbours because she bought us a Sega (which I never really liked).
A few years ago, I bought me a new NES on Ebay, just because it makes me feel good to play with that. Just, because it reminds me of my childhood. That´s pretty weird, isn´t it?
Here are my arcade game memories:
Pac-Man: Pizza Hut; the old “table-top” style whereupon my brother and I would take turns pushing our plates across the glass to block the others’ view.
Centipede and Space Ace: Showbiz (now Chuck E. Cheese’s); achieving level 18 on Centipede, while I couldn’t even get past level 1 on Space Ace. The memory of the chief screaming “DEXTERRRRRRRRR!” still resonates in the back of my mind once in a while.
Street Fighter and Double Dragon: K-Mart; why they had arcade games at the entrance of K-Mart was beyond me; Later on, I discovered the electronics section, and haven’t looked back.
Since some are throwing in console games, I thought I’d see if anyone remembers the old Wonder Wizard console that had three games programmed into it. I still have mine, and though it’s been a long time since I last played, I believe it still works.
Your mention of games and K-Mart was like an electric shock to the memory center of my brain, and now all I can think about – and feel – is how happy and wondrous it was to stand in the electronics section of the K-Mart I wrote about in Blue Light Special and look at all those Atari games. I can even hear the older kids playing the intro to Jump on one of the keyboards they had on display there.
Wil, I know, it doesn´t really fit in here.. but do you have an idea if or when your book “Sunken Treasure” will be available in Europe? I´d really love to read it.
People who aren’t going to SEMO actually move to Cape? 🙂
Great post! It has me thinking back to the various locations around my home town where I could find different games to play with friends. We had a Space Port at the local mall ( but that was beyond biking distance so we went to places like the ancient YMCA, where we exchanged PacMan patterns. Then there was the greasy lunch spot where we waited seemingly hours for a chance to waste a few quarters on Defender. The only other Defender machine in town was in a different lunch place where we weren’t allowed to go. Something about a shootout between police and a drug dealer there had our parents nervous enough to forbid our patronage. Then a small arcade opened next to a supermarket that was reachable by pedal power. This was one of those places that used tokens instead of quarters. I never understood that, but we happily bought them anyway. Many tokens were pumped into Atari football, which did make my hands hurt after a while. They also had my favorite pinball machine of all time, Black Knight. Less about score, our competition always seemed to revolve around who could go into multiball the quickest. Then they got Tron, and we seemed to forget the rest of the machines.
After I got a drivers license, I spent less time at these types of places because I could easily get to the big arcade at the mall, but I’ll always remember those earlier places because they each had their own personality.
Dude, my freshman year at Lewis & Clark College in Portland (early 1980’s). Joust in the basement of Platt-Howard Dorm. Epic matches in the wee hours.
When you came clean about knowing way too much about video games (which is too many of us, lol), you made me think of one of the other blogs I follow. He’s a sci-fi author who happened to write a book called “The Ultimate History of Video Games” – Steven L. Kent.
The reviews are great, and although I haven’t read it in its entirety, I’ve seen excerpts, reviews, and the author’s a fountain of geek-knowledge. http://www.sadsamspalace.com is his blog (which is fairly dead as of late sad to say) and a link to the book – http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-History-Video-Games-Pokemon/dp/0761536434
Note: Not trying to hock any goods – just thought you’d enjoy the link/s.
Great post Will. Definitely got me thinking about growing up as a gamer and what things remind me of what games.
I associate Asteroids with LaVerdierre’s Drugstore on main street in Pittsfield, where I grew up. I remember standing in the entry way, feeding quarters into the machine as people came and went.
I used to hang out at with my friend, Michael, playing Venture on his Intellivision game system after school. He was the only friend I knew at the time with his own game system, which I was amazingly jealous of (and proud he let me play).
GATO Class Submarine was my first computer game experience, played on a Macintosh at my high school history teacher’s home while my girlfriend and I were house sitting for him and his wife, watching his Russian Borzoi hound, Ilya Muromets.
I was a Commodore owner, and remember all night sessions sitting on the carpet of my apartment in Brunswick, Maine, playing Pool of Radiance and Project Space Station.
Good times…. good times….
My name is Jeff (crowd: “Hi Jeff”)… and I’m a video game addict.
Oh, you are all so “not old”.
I remember a squash court in Cardiff, New South Wales, Australia.
It’s not so far from Bennett’s Green.
Last time I went past the building was still there.
I remember sitting for hours playing Pong while my parents played squash !
Later they added Space Invaders. And then Misex (is that rude ?) did the song Computer Games. “I fidget with the digit dots and cry an anxious tear, til the XU1 connects the spot, but the matrix grid don’t care.” It was probably in response to the Space Invaders song. “Just another pale dream …” is all I can remember.
And then came the arcades.
I remember the excitement when Star Wars came out. And that video pinball where you played with the ball until it went below and the video screen startet so you could play in virtual mode until it somehow came back up to reality.
I remember hours in Stan’s Bar at the University of Newcastle playing Xevious and finding I did better when my lizard brain took over while I was chatting to someone. I never got a high score though.
I’m a bit younger, so while I spent time in arcades when I was a kid, I never spent anywhere near the hours you did… So I don’t necessarily have any arcade associations like that.
But there’s a handful of console/pc games that I associate with an album that I had just got and listened to at the time. Many times I’d play games and turn down their volume and put a CD on in the background. So there’s lots of songs that when I listen to, it gives me memories of playing certain games.
A brief historty: Donkey Kong is Longo’s Pizza in Madison, OH. RC Pro-Am is the basement in my house in Massachusetts. TMNT is Mazzio’s Pizza in Fort Worth, TX. Rogue Squadron is my living room in vet school.
Ahhh the memories…for me most vivid are 2 things, both at the Topsail Beach Putt-Putt arcade…Karate Champ – I got so good I simply couldn’t lose. To this day I can remember the combo of moves I used…game could never win. I’d just get tired and hand off to another kid…then when Dragon’s Lair first came…what beautiful graphics yet sucky gameplay…
Indeed happy memories are made of this 🙂
I got a nasty crescent-moon pinch from Marble Madness in 1985. Holding a pencil in school was memorable for a week or two afterward.
Ah, yes, I wasn’t an arcade gamer but we did get an Atari 2600 when I was six. It annoys my mother to this day that I can still jump on the crocodile heads in Pitfall and she never, ever could.
But as for specific memories, the first time I beat Super Mario Bros is the most vivid. We were living in what was in retrospect a fairly awful rental house with truly horrid orange carpet, and I was in the living room when I. Did. It. I was so worked up I screamed. My poor mom came running into the room thinking something bad had happened and was not impressed at, “I WON! I WON!” as I had woken her up. Oops.
But it was the first game I actually BEAT and it was cool. I got so good at it I could run through the game over and over and over again. I haven’t played it for years but I bet I still could, I played it so much.
I had two paper routes and exchanged every bit of profit into rolls of quarters for the local arcade.
Lunar Lander. Missile Command. Qix. And my all-time favorite: Space Wars!
I miss arcades…
Although I wasn’t as into the arcade games as I was my Atari 2600 at home, I did play some Pacman, Ms. Pacman and Centipede at the local 7-11 and Round Table pizza.
The thing I remember most though, is riding our bikes over a mile to get to the arcade games. My brother and I would FILL our knee-high tube socks with quarters (no pockets in my dolphin shorts; pockets that weren’t big enough to hold all the quarters in his corduroy shorts) and ride, all uphill, to play these games. When we got there we were so sweaty that when we sat on the curb to dump the quarters out of our socks, several of them would stick to our legs. After a couple of hours of playing games, we would save enough quarters to treat ourselves to a Slurpee and Hot Tamales or Red Vines and cruise no-handed down that hill back to our house.
I think I need to break out that Atari 2600 again. Guided missile Air-Sea Battle anyone?
Totally off-topic, but worthy of being sent to Wil & friends:
Would A Lava Lamp Work On Jupiter? Lava Lamp In A Centrifuge
You can order the World Edition from Lulu, and it will be printed and shipped right in Germany:
http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/sunken-treasure—world-edition/6052246
Dragon’s Lair and Fighting Street at the Circus Circus in Reno… my mom was a blackjack dealer, and that’s when they used to do .50 pieces for tips… so I had this giant jar full of them… then my mom couldn’t find a babysitter so she sat me up at the arcade… big mistake… that jar disappeared in a hurry…
phoenix at the boys and girls club… Galaga at the laundry mat… later it would be mortal kombat at the 7-11 across the street… which i beat once with my eyes closed (go go Raiden back, back, forward ayayayAYAYAYAY!)… the mountain mike’s across the parking lot got mortal kombat 2 first… which is also when I figured out how to break into the back of video game machines for the quarters >.<
SHAKEY’S PIZZA?!?! Were their Mo-jo’s not the best. thing. ever?
I associate Ms Pac-Man with Shakey’s in Elkhart, IN. And BurgerTime will always be associated with Twin Mills Campground.
Space Invaders at the ice rink in Virginia where my sister took lessons.
Battle Zone at the arcade that became a Vietnamese restaurant a few years later. I still remember that they had one of those poster books. Hundreds of two-by-three foot images of pot leafs and ubiquitous VH symbols (Van Halen for those of you young-ens out there) mounted to the wall. They went ‘clack’, ‘clack’, ‘clack’ as you flipped through them.
Omega Race at the 7-11 down the street from my house. Has anyone ever played that game? Do you know where I can find one?
Years later, blowing out my monitor whilst trying to play a meme of Defender on my computer at work. I loaded it up and heard this ‘thunk’ as the meme commanded my monitor to change to a resolution out of range and back again. Then all was dark. I had to go to my old IT manager with a story about how ‘my monitor just stopped working’…
The Star Wars Arcade Game (the sit down version, not the cabinet version) will, for me, forever be associated with not just a place, but a person: the place is Bullwinkle’s Pizza and Games in Claremont, CA. The person is my father. This was the one game he would play on those days he took us kids out for arcade games and pizza.
Given the rather turbulent relationship I had with my dad (what young man doesn’t?) I look back on those times I saw him zapping TIE fighters in that darkened, ray-traced booth with a new sense of. . . fellowship.
It also occurs to me that I am now as old as he was back then. 😛 Goddamn it.
Asteroids at the A&W in Pacific Grove. The taste of onion rings and root beet floats, ahhhhhh. Thanks for the time machine ride!
My husband and I love to find arcades and look for the cool, old games; in fact I play more video games in Vegas than gamble!
Super Mario Bros. 3, for me, will always be a stand-up arcade unit (Nintendo PlayChoice 10) at a local sports bar called “Booters” that my father used to take me to sometimes on weekend afternoons. He got to have a drink and watch sports, I got mozzarella sticks and a stack of quarters. I never got past World 3, as I remember, on that machine, but I loved the hell out of it, even after I got my own NES at home.
The PlayChoice 10 could have a bunch of different games in it, and I don’t remember all of the ones that were housed at Booters, but I do remember Fester’s Quest, TMNT, and 1942 being in there, too. None of them ever caught my attention nearly as much as SMB3, though.
Those are good memories. Thanks for helping me revisit them.
Wow… So many memories. Mostly of Princes Dept. Store in the small town of Oroville, WA. Street Fighter II, Gauntlet, Rygar, Willow… Centipede at Theodore Bruins. Joust at Eisons Gas Station…
Most of my distant memory stimulus, however, is currently taken up with Final Fantasy and how it opened up the world of computer role playing for me. I just downloaded 1 and 2 on my iPhone. Man did Square Enix do a good job translating them over. I think FF2 is my favorite game of all time. It was hard to get into p&p rpgs when no one else in my small town was that interested.
In fact, when I got my PS3 and smelled the inside of the box, I commented to my wife how much the packaging reminded me of when I got my first NES. And what the controller felt like in my hands when I was 10. She said I was giddy like a school boy. I won’t deny that it took me right back to my bedroom and the fist time I played Super Mario Brothers (no arcade carried in my small town). I truly believe the NES and FF changed my life for the better by helping to open up my imagination.
The Atari 2600 was an obsession for me. When we got ours when I was a kid it meant that I could finally stop pouring quarters into the Space Invader machine at the 7/11. Within a couple years I developed trigger-thumbs where they lock and click. At the time my family doctor had only ever seen the injury from war veterans and repetitive machine workers. Did I stop? Oh hells, no! Journey ESC4P3, KABOOM! and Circus Atari were on the menu! I burnt out a few 2600’s until I got my NES. I remember being carted between friends houses in high school to show and prove to slackjawed classmates my ability to beat Mike Tyson in Punch Out on demand. A fair chunk of my lunch money was spent at the corner store across from my school playing Kung Fu Master, Double Dragon, the first Street Fighter, Shinobi, and Wonderboy in Monsterland on cabinets with multiple cigarette burns on the buttons. If achievement points were retroactive I’d be in the millions. I still game, perhaps more than is considered fashionable at my age. It still brings me joy to defeat the cluster of tweens at the retro Street Fighter 2 cabinet at the laundromat nearby. I may have clawed up hands into my senior years from arthritis, but as long as I can still clutch a Sanwa I’ll be too busy to tell the kids to get off my lawn. Thanks for the memories Wil, apparently Crystal Castles is coming to Game Room this month and my inner child couldn’t be happier.
I guess that I’ve wasted enough of Wil’s bandwidth talking about pizza… mmmm pizza! Anyway, a couple of my old time arcade games was Asteroids and Lunar Lander. Pretty basic stuff, but I did like them. LL because it was a “simulation”. The only thing better would be to be playing with the toys that NASA owned.
Awesome. My brain is inundated with memories of button slapping and joystick wiggling and cabinet kicking…
The coolest part about your reminiscing is the ‘smells’ associated with certain locations. I thought I was one of the few arcade geeks that would get intense flashbacks after smelling familiar scents from childhood.
There used to be a greasy spoon near my childhood home where there were three standup arcade games that would rotate every month. Every time I smell that greasy spoon grill scent, I remember playing games like GORF, Asteroids, Pac Man and Burgertime. Burgertime was actually in a head to head cocktail table setup that was ‘reserved’ seating for staff. When I was lucky enough to sit and play, my buddy’s older brother would sneak me a small cardboard tray of fries.
Those were the days.
Man – I have a million memories of old bowling alleys, smoky pool halls, dirt mall arcades and carnivals with their darkened hazy rooms and sonic barrages of 8-bit MIDI sound effects.
Then we got a C64 and an NES and there was no turning back.
Unknown in the dining room of the house I grew up in. Honestly! I have no idea what the console was called, it was 1978 – 79 and I was only 5 and a bit. The only other thing I remember from this period is my Lego Galaxy Explorer!
The memories I do have mostly involve orange, as I think the sides and base of the unit were that colour, two controllers on “kettle-style” cords, with small, black, ridged knobs that you could unscrew if the game was *really* dull, and an inordinate number of motorcycling games that I was totally useless at; I’d go too fast and crash with a horrid electronic screeching noise. The fact that my best friend was awesome at those games didn’t help much either. It didn’t last long before I got a “proper” computer, a magnificent Sinclair ZX81, and that was it for me and consoles.
Skip 4 or 5 years to 1983 and the pure, isometric awesomeness that was “Ant Attack”. A friend and I played this together in my bedroom, perched on the wooden stools that Mum had upholstered in a white, blue and red flowery fabric, one of us on running around, the other lobbing the grenades (A, S, D, F and G, for different distances). Stepping off a high wall, with perfect aim, resulting in the triumphant message “You have paralyzed an ant!” The huge poster from “Your Sinclair” that mapped out the whole city and stayed blue-tacked to my wall for a few years. The sheer relief of completing the bastard-hard 10th level!
Other random memories: stuck like glue to my ZX Spectrum while I completed “Sabre Wulf”, guarding my last life as if it were my own. Pretending to be a low-budget Indiana Jones in “Fred” (vampires in an Egyptian tomb? Twilight wasn’t the first to take liberties, it seems!). Crowding around a QWERTY keyboard to play Gauntlet. And, of course, watching the shrill blue and yellow lines on the TV screen while the game loaded from a cassette player, which everybody knows is the only true way to get ready to play a game :-).
Here’s my list, not quite as cool as a working actor’s, but who cares anyway…
1) Donkey Kong – The 3 Gables restaurant in Springfield, Ohio
2) Super Mario Bros. – Showbiz Pizza in Springfield, Ohio
3) Ghosts and Goblins – A local mini mart that carried Ice Cream in Winterhaven Florida (I lived there for a short stint in High School)
4) Kung Fu Master – Kelley’s Fantasy Island in Troy Ohio
5) Asteroids – Police Athletic League (PAL) in Springfield, Ohio
Wow…. First video game for me was Space Invaders circa ’80/81 at the Pizza Como on 7th st. in Allentown.
Then, Asteroids in the 7-11. A friend of mine spent an entire weekend playing ONE game of Asteroids on that machine. He was good.
Centipede, Battlezone, Defender, & PacMan in the Muhlenberg college student union. We discovered that if you hit the PacMan machine at JUST the right place with a pool ball, it would give you free games. That lasted for a few weeks until the game guy showed up and there was like $5 in quarters in the machine. Then we got Ms. PacMan instead.
And yes, guilty of fuzzy boobie watching.
I’m anapeptically appreciative of your kind indulgitudes.
FFII is your favorite? Honestly? Can I seriously ask why? I mean, it has a fantastic storyline and introduces some great concepts into the franchise, but that leveling system is just brain-numbingly terrible, you ask me. If it was just a standard XP grind like FFI, I think II would have been one of the greatest games in the series.
While I remember playing the ‘classic’ arcade games like Asteroids, Space Invaders, Missile Command, and the like. The one that stands out most is R-Type that I played at a local 7-11 during high school.
Also, slightly related. My first memory of Dungeons and Dragons was over at my mom’s friend’s house watching her sons play. And seeing one of them roll for damage, and him having to roll twice cause he couldn’t fit that many dice in his hands.
Mario Bros, Duck Hunt, Paper Boy – Great Skate Roller Rink. I used to spend every Saturday afternoon skating and playing video games while my patient grandmother sat in the food court and watched me. She used to give me enough freedom to do whatever I wanted but I always knew she’d be sitting there. I used to get in for a reduced rate because I had a gold card (A reward card that gave discounts at local businesses that the school board used for kids who got good grades. I never used it for anything other skating). She always gave me more quarters and never got tired of listening to me complain about “that stupid laughing dog.”
Pacman, Ms Pacman, The Simpsons, TMNT – Aladdin’s Castle. When I wasn’t skating I was here. I played other games here but these were the ones I focused on first when I was young. My grandmother would give me a few dollars for tokens and then would wait outside the arcade, which was inside a local flex space building that also housed a movie theater and offices, until I was finished. There were no benches, but she stood and waited for me.
Unknown arcade game – Pizza Hut. I have no idea what game it was (It was probably Space Invaders or Galaga). I was ten and it was the first time I was complimented on playing video games. I can see the brown brick walls, the red pleather seats, the yellow and orange stained glass light fixtures, and the two arcade games in the corner by the pick up counter and salad bar. I was hovering near the game, watching two boys play. One asked me to play his game while he went to get more change from his parents. I lost but his friend watched me play and said that I “played pretty well.” When I gave the console back to the first boy I continued to watch. He asked me my name and said that it was pretty. When his pizza came he gave me his remaining two quarters and his game. I had never had a fellow gamer talk to me and be that nice to me. I can still smell the pizza. I have never forgotten this moment.
God, I fucking love video games.
Let’s see…
For Atari 2600, I mostly remember Star Raiders in my parent’s “nice” living room next to the dining room. It came with the little 12-button pad thing that you could slide plastic “skins” over depending on the game you were playing with it. Star Raiders was pretty much the precursor to every 3D space combat flight sim ever made.
For Atari 7800 it would have to be Pole Position, same living room, several years later. I don’t remember anything else from that system…
For Commodore 64 it was Beachhead in my best friend Dave’s basement.
NES it is Super Mario Brothers, staying up until like 1 a.m. on a school night with my Dad when we discovered the infinite 1UP trick, loaded up on mans, and stayed up until we beat the game while Mom kept getting angry at the both of us. Same living room, by the way. Also Section Z in my best friend Dave’s basement. Also Bionic Commando back in my living room.
PC is the original Wing Commander, which my Dad got me. First PC game I had ever played.
For SNES, it’s Street Fighter II and NHL in my dorm room, sophomore year of college, and Battle Clash/Metal Combat that used the light bazooka accessory. Only the really cool kids had the light bazooka…
Per arcades, the only one I really remember was in the mall closest to our house, but there’s no one game per se. I remember Operation: Wolf fondly, and APB among others.
That’s actually kind of scary that I don’t remember arcades very well. I guess I’ve been focused on home console gaming for so long that arcades just feel like ancient history.
I remember those shorts!!!!! Wow! and corduroy. I wasn’t much into video games, but I was a Pacman and Ms. Pacman junkie. I loved how you could time it just right to get the pretzel, and Inky, Pinky, Blinky and Clyde (or Sue for Ms. Pacman). I would beg my mom and dad for quarters.
We didn’t have an Atari, we had Intellivision. I remember my mom, grandmother and aunt playing Space Armada for hours.
Now Skee Ball at the Chuck E. Cheese and “Earthshaker” pinball at the mall, were my games baby!
Wow. For just a second, I was right back in the convenience store where I used to play Spy Hunter and Karate Champ in middle school in the mid 80s.
Thank you very much!!!!!
To: [email protected]
My family never had much money, but I will always remember the year we got our Colecovision. I’m fairly certain it was Christmas, but I can’t be certain because I was only 4 or 5 at the time. All I can recall is finding my dad in the living room trying to set this miracle up in the pre-dawn hours while the rest of us slept.
And there was a slew of games with it. Donkey Kong {my dad’s favorite}, Carnival, Lady Bug {my mom’s favorite}, Venture and my favorite, Mouse Trap.
I spent many, many nights pinching the hell out of my hand on that monsterous controller, jumping barrels, saving relics, eating vegetables and hiding from cats.
Venture, however, was the game that stuck with me forever. That music was enough to induce a panic attack. Many years later, in high school, I dug that old coleco out of the back of a closet and jacked it into an old portable black and white TV that my folks used when they went camping. Venture was the only one that worked and the music was still terrifying.
On a related, but sidenote, I was wondering if you had heard of mind.in.a.box. They’re a really great Austrian duo, but that’s neither here nor there. What is, however, is their latest album, R.E.T.R.O. which is basically “An homage to the era of the Commodore 64 and 1980s video games” To quote the liner notes :
“I grew up with these melodies of days long gone. But they are still so strong today. These wonderful arpeggios, the magnificienct soft bubbles made audible by an integrated circuit called SID, which was an integral part of the success of the Commodore64 home computer. This fascinated me endlessly and pulled me in to such an extent that I wanted to do my own electronic music. […] Now, years and three whole mind.in.a.box albums later, I felt the fundamental need to do a new take on some of the tunes that had touched me so profoundly back then. To again feel them, and to pay tribute. It was a heartfelt desire, and I salute these early pioneers.”
You can hear some clips on their site {mindinabox.com}. I thought it might be something you get a kick out of.