Blame It On The Arcades
I 'discovered' videogames in the summer of 1981 - on a road trip with my dad (my "adopted" father though at that time he was still a fairly new stepfather). We were in Phoenix, Arizona for a three-day conference he was attending. While we were there, I learned (overhearing a phone conversation) of some severe marital problems my parents were going through. It didn't look like they were going to stay together much past this little trip.

Distracted and upset over the possible drastic changes in my family's lives, I found myself wandering around the hotel while my dad was away. It didn't take long to discover the game room.

The videogame "revolution" (fad, as many called it) was just beginning to hit the big time at that point. Arcades were sprouting up everwhere. And nearly every restaurant or other business with a throughput of walk-in customers had one or more of these arcade games set up in the corner, hoping to draw a few extra quarters from passers-by. It's probably a little hard to believe for anyone that missed that area, but arcade machines were uniquitous. Or at least, getting that way.

The game room of the hotel had three arcade machines, including "Asteroids", a game that I had played briefly before. But this time I played it (and the two others, Laser Blast and Star Hawk, I think) in earnest. Asteroids, in particular, was an escape and a twelve-year-old's geek fantasy. The thrumming heartbeat sound-effect helped raise the tension as rocks and saucers closed in. Even though the implied pilot of the rockets of Asteroids was ultimately doomed in every game, with no way to "win," the threats surrounding him were material and could be staved off indefinitely with skill and rapid taps of the fire button, and the player could feel the euphoria of beating back impossible odds - at least for the time being.

In Asteroids, even though your salvation was hard-coded to be forever beyond your reach and skill, your fate was nevertheless under your control. When you played the game, you were the most important person in that mini-universe, and you had POWER. Due to my circumstances, I think that was exactly what I craved those three days. In fact, that explains a lot of the draw videogames have over anyone.

Regardless of cause, I was hooked. I spent way too much money on that machine. And as I ran low on money, I watched other players. I wondered what other secrets lay in that virtual universe behind the glowing vector-graphics screen. Eventually, I learned that the answer was, "nothing," but I didn't know that at the time. Instead, I fantasized about what kinds of amazing possibilities there were for the game. I began to imagine the amazing possibilities of all of these games - the ones I'd played before, and ones I could only imagine now. I had no concept of their limitations, only their potential.

We continued our trip to Colorado, to drop off a car for my stepbrother. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to explore the Academy's game room, but I did get a peek at a game I didn't see again until last year. A cadet was battling fighters ripped off from Star Wars in a game called "Tunnel Hunt." I didn't have a chance to play it, but I felt its pull, and realized that I was hooked.

The next day, I flew to Illinois and spent the next eight weeks in a tiny town called Addieville, Illinois. A speck that only appears on some maps. I was spending the rest of the summer with my "real" father (I hesitate to use that adjective, but he's my father by blood and birth). He'd recently remarried, and my brothers and I would be spending time with our new relations in a small, 90-year-old house. I think the only real business in Addieville was a single tavern called "Bobby's Hi-Lo." Besides alcohol they also served sandwiches. And they had a juke box. And they had Pac-Man and Asteroids.

The most popular song in Addieville in the summer of 1981 was Juice Newton's "Queen of Hearts," which actually set up a nice rhythm with the hearbeat thrumming of Asteroid's background. I found that the rhythm would actually help me keep pace with the game, and my scores actually improved when the song was playing in the background. Not that I'd ever spare a quarter for the jukebox if it DIDN'T happen to be playing. But to this day, the song and the sound effects for the game are indelibly intertwined in my brain. I can't play Asteroids without hearing that song. Which is funny, because other than that song, I really never liked Juice Newton.

My disease was also addictive. My new stepmother, Barbara, then got hooked. The two of us would compete for high scores. She preferred Pac-Man, but she loved getting on the high score table of Asteroids because her initials were "BAM." We loved seeing the high score list punctuated by what others might mistake for a mere onomatopoeia.

The coolest thing about this though, was what outsiders to the arcade scene never quite understood, was the social aspect. The quarters went all too quickly. But the shared fascination with these games gave us something more to talk about. While it wasn't universal, people who played these games also TALKED about them. We discussed strategies, compared scores, talked about what we liked about them, told each other about new ones that we'd discovered, and swapped stories of our victories.

My stepsister joined in the fun to a lesser extent. One day she mentioned to me that her uncle (I think) actually WROTE games like that for computers. That concept floored me. While I'd realized that SOMEONE had to have written these games, the idea that it might be a person that someone might actually know. A real person. I pressed her for answers to questions she didn't know --- such as exactly HOW he made those games. I couldn't get my brain around it. Communicating a game design to a computer --- how was it done?

How did you tell the computer how to draw the ship in Asteroids? How did you tell it how big to make it? How exactly did you make the computer produce the images and behavior that were in your head? (Sometimes I STILL wonder that...) We visited the library, and I checked out books on computer programming in an effort to find out. The books available at the time were dense tomes on opcodes and operands for assembly language for "minicomputers" like the PDP series. Nothing on how to make Asteroids. (Nowadays, the problem is too MANY books on he subject...)

Weeks later, I returned home, to find my parents were still together (for another seven years, at least), though Barbara shortly thereafter got a divorce. I spoke to her briefly over the phone in the fall, but never heard from her or her family again. I wonder if she still plays games.

For me, the obsession had only begun.



(Vaguely) related wastes of perfectly good pixels:
* Pac Man Fever!
* So How Do I Make a Game? Part I
* A Twisty Little Maze of Passages, All Different
.

Labels: retro

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 11:34 PM (Permalink)