The Arcade.
Growing up in the 1980s, I loved playing video games at the arcade. Usually, I would go to the Tons of Fun arcade or stop roller skating at Great Skate to play arcade games. My childhood best friend, Chris, and I would talk for hours of how we were going to defeat Star Castle. Or Donkey Kong. Or Pac-Man. I would drive my teachers crazy talking about cartridges or computers. My 8th grade English teacher even gave me a detention for talking too loud about using the Apple ][ computer during study hall. Parents worried about us kids and the video games we played — maybe we would get detached from reality. I don’t know… maybe adversely for the minority. For the majority of us, though, it only helped our imagination. And maybe our parents’ headaches during parent-teacher conferences.
The graphics were simpler, and the gameplay more intense. The games were designed so we would be entertained either on one quarter, or hundreds of quarters. We needed to use our imagination a bit more to feel like we were in the game. Winky in Exidy’s Venture was just a smiley face with an arrow. Pac-Man was just a little yellow circle that ate dots and chased ghosts. There was even a pop song on the radio about him called, “Pac-Man Fever.” I had Pac-Man Fever and my t-shirt said so. We even flew around in a spaceship that was a black and white triangle blowing up Asteroids. When I wasn’t throwing away quarters at the arcade, I was at home playing ColecoVision. (BTW, you can play Coleco on your PC with an emulator, Virtual ColecoVision.)
One day, I discovered the usenet discussion group, rec.games.video.arcade.collecting. I was pleasantly surprised to read there were people out there that missed these old coin-op video arcade games from the 80s, and were restoring them. I knew what I had to do. I wanted to someday get the game I sank most of my parents’ quarters into. Star Castle.
On the right you can read about my current Arcade projects (completed and imcomplete) listed under “Blog Categories (Arcade).” Click on any of them to see some photos and what I went through in restoring each game.
