Robot Claw

I (think) I can remember the first time I played an arcade game. It was probably in the very late 1970’s, perhaps 1979 or so. At the fish’n’chip shop up near Nobby’s beach, a hop-and-a-skip from the breakwater. The game was (of course) Space Invaders, and I have a dim thought that rather than play it myself, I may have watched my dad play it.

The craze – for all my life it has been a craze – grew rapidly from that point on.

I can vividly recall the first ever arcade on Hunter Street in Newcastle. It was an abandoned store, with greenish carpet and holes in the wall from where shelving had been removed. When it opened the owner had placed standup cabinets all around the walls, and gave change using an ice-cream container as his register. Since cocktail cabinets (the sit-down types) did not exist until about 1980, the middle of the store was full of mid 1970’s era redemption machines that no-one ever played.

The walls were lined with multiple copies of Space Invaders, Galaxian, Asteroids, Missile Command, Pac-Man, Tempest and other legends from the golden age. Even writing those names gives me a bittersweet feeling. I can recall Bernard and I would be dropped off by our parents outside this dingy arcade with a couple of dollars each and picked up an hour or so later. We’d watch each other play rather than split up and play alone – not only did it prolong our value-for-money, but arcade games were so new in those days there was still appeal in watching others play. The arcade lasted for many years, until (I imagine) it was put out of business by the amazing Orbit 100 (see later). The last game I recall playing in that old arcade was Gauntlet 2, and only then because there was a bus-stop in front and I had missed the bus that day.

I would have been at least 16 then. I wonder what I’d been up in Newcastle that day?

I can’t remember, and neither can I remember a great deal about my juvenile days. And yet I can clearly remember specifics of an arcade that closed over 20 years ago. I can remember exactly the layout of the legendary Newcastle arcade Orbit 100. I can remember dad dropping us off at the movies with enough cash each to buy a ticket, an ice-cream, lunch and a few games at Orbit, and me skipping on the ice-cream and sometimes even lunch so I could play a few extra games of Tutenkhamen or Super Sprint or (a few years later) Star Force.

During primary school, from about third grade onwards (that would be 1980) I can recall playing arcade games at the fish’n’chip shop on the Pacific Highway in Charlestown, and a bit later (maybe 1982) at the Squash Court behind the McDonalds. Indeed, a few of ‘us’ (10 year old boys) would converge there after school to play games like Moon Patrol, Scramble and – most memorably – Kung Fu Master. In those days I knew where every game was in every dingy fast-food joint within a few miles of my house (or so it seemed). If I felt like playing Senjyo, for instance, I’d be off to the Henny Penny on Pacific. Were I in more of an Exed Exes mood, it would be the hamburger joint just behind the bus-stop on the west side of pacific.

And then, of course, there was Charlestown Pool. I will shamelessly admit I used to occasionally pay the 40c entrance fee to the pool just so I could go to there arcade and play games such as Centipede, Galaga, Xevious and Dig Dug. The room was small, the floor wet and the smell of grease and vinegar strong (the arcade was next to the food stand). Often, the room would be jam packed by people seeing these games for the first time (in those days, it seemed a new game came out every week) and standing room was at a premium.

I remember it all, in some cases like it was yesterday. And yet I don’t remember the faces of my teachers during those days, and in many cases I can’t even remember their names. I don’t really remember much about my other hobbies (I remember what they were, but no firm specifics of doing them), but my fingers can almost feel what it was like to feed a cool 20c piece into the slot of Track And Field at Gateshead Indoor Cricket. (Interestingly enough, we were almost ‘banned’ from that establishment because the manager had an issue with us using a carefully cut-up plastic juice bottle as a means to obtain hitherto unseen levels of rapid button pressing…)

In my memories I index certain childhood vacations by the video games I played on them:
– Staying in Uncle Terry’s apartment somewhere in Sydney (Randwick I think?) was the time I played Pengo every day at some hamburger joint).
– A camping vacation at ‘some beach’ north of Newcastle with Troy & Ryan was the place where the local corner shop had Galaga running in a Pac-Man cabinet.
– A different camping trip near (unknown location) in a different caravan (owned by Uncle Peter I believe) was my introduction to Marble Madness and (the legendary arcade game version of) Star Wars. (This was probably 1984).

I have virtually no recollection of studying for my college entrance exams (the HSC), and yet I can recall walking from SFX (my high school) up to Orbit to play Black Dragon, Tiger Heli, Slap Fight and Galaga ’88 (the latter for which I had a savage addiction).

I can remember one time a female friend of mine finding me in Orbit. She’d been in town shopping and walked past and figured she’d poke her nose in on the offchance I was there and wanted to join her for lunch. I was. And I did.

Early university were the glory days. That was when I became extremely good as Street Fighter 2, to the point where it was very rare that anyone could beat me. I remember the thrill of joining in on someone’s one-player game (sometime without asking, such was the arcade etiquette of the day) just knowing I would beat them and therefore cut down on their play time. Better yet, was when they would join in on my game. Sometimes I would throw the first round, to give them false hope. Sometimes I would crush them without hesitation. Those were the days when few could even do the joystick maneuver required to pull-off the successful Shoryuken move. I could do it flawlessly. Forever. Many times these nameless strangers would keep feeding money in, hoping to beat me with a different character, needing revenge. Almost always, they would lose.

It got to the point where I would offer to let them choose the character I would play (from the 12 available). Even if they chose Zangief or Dhalsim, I would usually win.

I remember clearly the young-man (about 15 years old, with blonde hair and a skateboard) who joined in on one of my games once, picked Guile versus my Chun-Li, and pointed to the screen (not me) and said “Your ass is grass.” And he meant it. And he lost. And he walked away without comment.

In the very late 1980s and early 1990s much of my gaming was spent at the big arcade up near the new Hoyts cinema complex on the hill in Charlestown. It was there I first played Street Fighter 2. It was there I first beat the final level of Snow Bros. It was during this period that I was as good as I think I ever got at video games. I would play for hours and yet spend little money. Every credit in Steet Fighter 2 was a beat game, and I would sit there and beat it with character after character and not get bored. The arcade was heavy with shooters, a genre I was incredibly good at. I would play one until I beat it, and then move on to the next. I remember laughing at the ludicrous names used by developers in the credits (headhunting was common in the 1980s Japanese arcade industry, so game companies forbade developers from using their real names).

I have stronger recollections of the interior of that arcade than I do of the house in which we lived during 1989.

During the early 1990s, especially to the 21-year old me that frequently went to Sydney and spent half-days in Orbit 600 or Timezone on George Street, arcades were in their glory. Sydney was a haven for gamers like myself, since the mega-arcades freely added untranslated Japanese games (the first and only time I ever play the arcade game Willow, it was in Japanese). At the same time the industry had not yet turned it’s back on the now ‘classic’ titles such as Tempest of Pac Man. Fifteen years of gaming were available, only a coin away, if you had the motivation to get to an arcade.

In 1993 I left Australia for America. Of course I had no idea then that the Golden Age was over. The next year Sony released the Playstation, which would impact the arcade game industry like nothing before (especially in America).

There was still some life left, and even to this day games are occasionally found in unexpected locations. But for people like myself – those that grew up during the golden age of arcade-games – those days will never return.

Anyone that read any of my Japan blogs would have no-doubt detected the passion I still hold for arcade games (and don’t confuse the beauty of an arcade game experience with the home video game experience). Of all the aspects of Japanese pop culture that interest me the survival (and indeed thriving) of the arcades is the peak. Wowing two young Japanese youth’s with my (modest, I am sure) DonPachi skills at that arcade in Yanaka is amongst my fondest Japanese memories. Late-night Mushihime playing at Ueno’s 24-hour Sega Joypolis was like stepping briefly back into the days of my youth.

I would love to spent the time to master the bullet hell shooter (a genre that never even existed back in the golden age), or embrace the mania of something like The Quest Of D. I suppose, and let’s be honest here, I would love to be able to step for more than the briefest of moments into a world from my youth that simply no longer exists (at least here, in America).

That’s the Pure Land: A world in which arcade games never died…and the golden age lives on forever…

This entry was posted on Friday, August 31st, 2007 at 4:27 pm and is filed under Family, Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.