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.

Star Castle and the Discovery of Vectrex

Back in the day, everyone had an arcade game that they played all the time, a game they could play for hours on just a quarter or two, a game that they had mastered, yet still enjoyed. For me, that game was Star Castle.

I first encountered the game, and conquered it at Malibu Grand Prix some time around 1980 or 81. I would play it dependably every time I was there. When I first went to college, there was a Star Castle machine in the lounge that I'm sure contributed to my low grades that first semester.

I loved it, and sadly, it was not a game I saw again that much in the years since. Star Castle was supposedly the basis for Atari's Yar's Revenge, though similar, and even though I loved that game too, it wasn't the same. I never saw it much because, as far as I knew, it was never available for a home video game system.

Just because I wasn't aware of it doesn't mean it didn't exist. Recently my friends Ray and Justin mentioned they had gotten a Vectrex app for their iPads that included Star Castle. Like I said, this was new to me, but back in the day there was this thing called a Vectrex. A box halfway between the size of a GameBoy and a full-sized arcade machine, so still kinda bulky, but it had a huge selection of games available like Berzerk, Pole Posistion, Mine Storm, and Star Castle.

I have been since able to find Star Castle online, but with keyboard controls, it's just not the same. Check it out here. Then I found Vectrex on my iPhone and my iPad. Granted, it's bigger, and therefore more fun on my iPad. And the touch controls make it easier to work, but for the real thing, I guess I'll just have to break down and buy a real Star Castle machine. I could always hustle folks for the money to pay back the machine…

Zen and the Art of Pinball

Okay, those of you who read this blog, as well as Welcome to Hell and French Fry Diary, know that I was a sheltered child, and that I am no videogame genius. The truth is I was also a pretty dumb kid.

Outside of television, I had never seen a pinball machine until I was around ten, and that was in my uncle's basement. We visited and while the adults chatted upstairs I was supposed to keep myself occupied with the pinball machine in the basement for a couple hours. So I played my three or four balls, badly, mind you, then waited it out down there for my parents to be done visiting. Yeah, that's right, I had no idea there was a button to push to start over.

And that was my first pinball experience. Did I mention I was a pretty dumb kid?

Later, years later, when The Sweet Shop opened on my hometown main street Atco Avenue, and when I started going to Malibu Grand Prix, I did learn the basics, as well as the more subtle ways of the silver ball. I was never very good, but I had come a long way from that dumb kid in his uncle's basement.

While dating the woman who would eventually become The Bride I got my real education. She is the real player, getting multiple free games and lots of play time out of a single quarter. Watching her I learned how to work the flippers, move the machine, and finesse the ball. Damn, she's good. And she would little to no interest in the PS3 game Zen Pinball.

Much like the Atari Pinball game (although with graphics eons ahead of it), this is still a videogame. No matter how pretty, how stunning, how super high def these tables are - these are not real tables. Push buttons all you like, you cannot finesse this ball. Perhaps Zen Pinball is fun for those with no pinball background, but not for those of us even with a limited understanding of real pinball.

It is noteworthy that there are some cool tables, including some based on Street Fighter and Ninja Gaiden, and the graphics are outstanding. Pretty, but not playable in a pinball way.

Malibu Grand Prix and the Mystery of Dig Dug

One of the games I have downloaded from the PlayStation Store has been Namco Museum Essentials. Yeah, they're old arcade games. I figured they would be way more my speed. One of the games included was Dig Dug.

I used to play Dig Dug all the time, probably for the first time at Maibu Grand Prix in Mount Laurel, New Jersey. The big draw was the miniature Indy car raceway in the back, but inside, it was a huge arcade, back in the day when videogames were played in such places. Now it's just at home on the computer or video console. Us old people did it differently.

Malibu's been gone for a long time now. They tore it all down and there's now a medical complex there. Before that, it was closed and abandoned for years. Rumor has it that when they went to demolish it, a body was found on the grounds. Weird. There are still some Mailbu complexes open, in California and Texas, but for the most part, the arcade is a dead thing in our time.

I discovered Malibu in high school. A friend's mother used to work in the offices nearby and he would pick her up after work every day, and take his brothers and his friends with to play at Malibu while we waited 'til the working whistle blew as they say. Malibu was where I first played a lot of great games, stuff like Star Castle, which I used to be able to play for hours on only a quarter - that was my game, as well as Centipede (though I preferred Millipede), Warlords, Popeye, Galaxian, Qix (another favorite I was very good at), Astro Fighter, Time Pilot, Pac-Man, Zaxxon, and another old favorite, Sinistar - and of course, Dig Dug. Hmmm... I guess I'm really dating myself with that list, huh?

Anyway, as I was playing Dig Dug, and getting my ol' skillz back after navigating the PS3 controller, I started to wonder about the game. I mean, what the hell is it, really? It's a guy named Dig Dug, who dresses like an astronaut and digs through the ground... and when he encounters weird creatures and dragons he shoots a hose at them, and inflates them until they explode. That sound about right? Wow. You can not tell me there were not drugs involved in the creation of this game.

After a bit of research (always a dangerous thing to do when you don't know what you'll find), I discovered Dig Dug's real name was Hori Taizo, and he was the father of the guy in the Mr. Driller videogame (never heard of it) and the ex-husband of the heroine from Baraduke (that one either). The creatures are Pookas and Fygars respectively. Collectively they represent a weird incestuous hierarchy in Japanese videogaming. They are everywhere, in dozens of games.

I still got no explanation of what the game actually means. Sometimes a little knowledge, or a lack thereof, is a bad thing. At least it's fun, and at least I can play it without embarrassing myself...