The Fight Club

Now don't get me wrong, even though one of my favorite games right now is Injustice: Gods Among Us, and I have put hundreds of dollars (in quarters) into both Street Fighter II and Killer Instinct back in their respective days, and maybe a little bit of Yie Ar Kung Fu, but I am in no way good at, or could even be considered a fight game guy. If anything, I like the visuals, and am more of a button masher.

That said, we're going to talk about those last two games today. About twenty-five years ago, I made the mistake of joining a bowling league. I was lousy at it, and surrounded by people I did not like, and did not like me. One of the few joys of that time was the Street Fighter II machine in the bowling alley's small and hardly adequate arcade. I was late to the fight videogame, and to be honest, it had been a few years (probably since the demise of the Galaxy in Cherry Hill) since I played any videogame. This was a harsh re-introduction.

In this phase of my life, I really kinda dug playing Vega with his pseudo-Wolverine claws and his Spanish matador moves. After some weeks of practice both before and after bowling, I got pretty good. However, by that time, fight games had moved on while I hadn't noticed. My contemporaries were all Mortal Kombat players. This game opened my eyes with its more graphic special effects and just plain graphic-ness. This wasn't for me.

I was enticed back in a bit later by a game very similar to MK, but just enough of a scifi, almost comic book edge that I dug it… Killer Instinct. This fight game had a plot involving an evil corporation (aren't they all?) running a tournament that included aliens, experimental creatures, metahumans, monsters, and great stuff like that. I didn't have a favorite in this one; I liked playing them all. Hey, anyone know if they have Killer Instinct for PS3?

From there, I kinda drifted away from videogames, or at least fight games until I discovered Injustice: Gods Among Us. And that's a whole 'nother story. But there's my fight history.

Whatever Happened to the Arcade?

Whatever happened to the arcade? I could just as well ask whatever happened to the mall, as for the most part, that's gone as well, or at least its function as a hangout for teenagers and adults young at heart alike. Back in the day, and I'm talking the 1970s and 1980s, the mall was the place to be. It was where you wanted to be, and where you wanted to work. It had everything. The record store, the fast food joint, the movie theater, the food court, for the nerds the book/game/comics store, and of course the crème de la crème, the arcade.

Every mall had its arcade. Cherry Hill, Echelon, Deptford, Moorestown, Burlington, some had two, heck even the Berlin Farmers Market had its own arcade. As videogames entered its golden age, arcades were everywhere. Malibu Grand Prix took prominence. There was Bally's across from the Cherry Hill Mall, the Galaxy (not the rock club) on Route 70, and even in my own hometown Atco, we had the Sweet Shop on the main drag, Atco Avenue.

Most of the mall arcades began as pinball places but moved forward with the times. The Sweet Shop in Atco started as a penny candy place, thus the name, but soon became something else all together. I remember when they first opened, they had one machine, a tank game, which may or may not have been Atari's Combat. In a very short time they added a poolroom in the back, got rid of the candy counter, and filled the front room with videogame machines. I loved playing Space Invaders and Astro Fighter there notably, and remember how the place was always filled with smoke.

As home video systems advanced beyond Pong and the Atari 2600, there soon was little reason to leave the house to play videogames. It took a long tme, but it eventually happened. I remember seeing my first NES in 1982 at a college friend's house, Donkey Kong, groundbreaking graphics for the time. If you could have that at home, why go to the mall?

While there are some still around, some even as nostalgia museums like Barcade, the arcade is for the most part dead. I think the last tiny one I know of was gotten rid of when the Marlton 8 theatre was remodeled. Malls are dead too, some crushed by 'forward thinking' opportunists, look at what used to be the Echelon Mall for an example of that. That place ironically does have an arcade of sorts, more skeeball and the like than videogames, but still. I guess home gaming and social media have killed the mall and the arcade, and it's a shame.

Dragon's Lair and the Arcade with No Name

When I started writing this entry, I was struck by a bout of senility as I could not think of the name of the arcade where I first encountered Dragon's Lair. It was upstairs at the Gimbel's end of the Echelon Mall, directly above Listening Booth, and had an odd shaped entrance, like a large Chevrolet symbol. When I was in high school and college, it was the place to hang out, even though it had been predated by Funway Freeway on the opposite side of the Mall by at least a decade. Most importantly it was the place where in June of 1982 I first met my future wife.

I struggled with this mind fart, I Googled, I contacted old friends I hung out with at the time, and finally, on a whim, looking at old foreign coins, as I suspected, I came across tokens (for the uninitiated, arcade games didn't run on quarters, you bought tokens with quarters and put the tokens in the machines) from the place. Video Village. Such a simple name, yet so evasive over the years. When I saw it on Google as a store in the Mall listings I assumed it was a video retail store, but no, it was the arcade.

In the early 1980s arcades were everywhere. There was Space Port in the Deptford Mall, the Cherry Hill Mall had had several over the years, heck there was one in every mall. I've already talked about Malibu, there was also Bally's across from the Cherry Hill Mall, and the Galaxy (not the rock club) down the road from it on Route 70. There was even one in my hometown right on Atco Avenue, the Sweet Shop. Like I said, they were everywhere, and also like I said, Video Village (now that I finally remembered the name) was special.

New games or games with buzz were given a special position in arcades so everyone could see them. At Video Village, this was just inside the entrance, facing into the Mall, this way, even if you were on the other side of the stairs, you could see the new game. This is how I first saw Dragon's Lair, logo standing out above a throng of heads of perhaps two or three dozen people mesmerized by it or waiting their turn on this amazing new game. And it was amazing, at least for its time.

There were no pixels or imagination involved in Dragon's Lair, as it was fully animated by Don Bluth, just late of Disney, and designed almost as a choose-your-own-adventure with the magic of laserdisc technology. It was all about a light touch and perfect reflexes to get heroic knight Dirk the Daring past various traps in the castle dungeons, the evil wizard Mordoc, and the dragon Singe, to rescue the Princess Daphne. Oh, you couldn't wait to try it yourself, but it was also a blast to watch - not just a game, it was an entertaining cartoon as well.

This was a far cry from Atari's Adventure, said to be its inspiration. Dragon's Lair was also a notable step into the future for one other reason as well. It was the first game I am aware of that took two tokens, fifty cents, to play as opposed to one token/quarter. I am unsure if this was forward thinking or just plain greed, but at the time in my easily amused late teens, it seemed a fair exchange.

So why all the nostalgia for events that happened over three decades ago? Well, I just recently downloaded the Dragon's Lair LLC app for my iPhone. It has the same great animation and gameplay, only using the touchscreen instead of a joystick. So Dirk the Daring lives, or at least he does when I make the right moves...