Yay, Chris!!! You did it! You overcame the unhealthy urges and obsessive / compulsive behavior so commonly associated with the video gaming habit, and now when you go to the arcade you understand the true meaning and value of uhhhh... uh oh...
Well, back to the 'ol drawing board...
6 comments:
Bahaha. Curses, foiled again. By tight shorts.
And man, that little Pacman ghost guy is a dick.
It's funny. I spent so much time and money playing arcade games back in the late seventies and early eighties; but as much as I loved to play, I loved just hanging out in the arcade even more. I didn't have to have quarters, or spend a lot of time trying to beat a score, or even meet up with friends or whatever. I liked walking through the cement rooms full of flashing lights and digital sound effects and stuffed animal prize displays, checking out other teens, consuming terrible food products, etc. I had my first kiss in the video game part of the skating rink, girl in one arm and a sixteen ounce Coke cup full of tokens in the the other. Later, about the only thing I really loved about Vegas (other than my wedding, of course), was that the casinos reminded me of video arcades--or at least their fancy carpeted, chandelier-lit socialite cousins.
Whenever I read a time travel story I always think, yeah, it'd be nice to become a time hero or meet Alfred Hitchcock or see the future. But I know the first thing I would want to do is go back to Myrtle Beach in 1979, get two scoops at the Pavilion, and watch chicks in roller skates play Skee-Ball while the sun sets.
Then later on we can all hop in the time car and go off to kill Hitler together. Chicks love that shit.
Great story Mr C! I miss riding my bike to the arcade as well, though it was a very short lived experience as it seemed the one I could actually get to by my own pre teen pedalin means barely lasted in business a year. The ones at the malls and movie theatres were harder to get to, most of my video gaming came from the games at either the local ice cream parlor or the Majik Market, and those games primarily were Phoenix, Donkey Kong, and Moon Cresta. An older friend who got his drivers license was pretty much our taxi to the pizza parlors and other random places not within huffy access distance... and really, some of the best arcades in those early years with the incredible variety of oddball titles like Bubble and Congo Bongo were at Six Flags and the Bagnall Dam strip area in the Ozarks too.
>Bahaha. Curses, foiled again. By tight shorts
The curse never ends for some of us ;)
"...riding my bike to the arcade..."
I know the feeling. My romance with arcades started on those yearly beach vacations in South Carolina, where the mile-long boardwalk had already been wall-to-wall game rooms in the fifties, back when mechanical table baseball machines, air hockey, and ten-pin bowling for tickets were all the rage. Shooting galleries, fortune teller mannequins, and plastic arm-wrestling sailors. They had just made the transition to pinball--and were in the middle of moving on to video cabinets--during my earliest memories of these places. The other fifty-one weeks of the year, I lived out in the sticks, and the only times I saw the inside of a Putt-Putt or bowling alley arcade were weekend birthday parties, pizza dinners with friends, etc. (Pizza places always had those cigarette-burned flat table versions of stuff, which were not my favorites). Also, dad worked at the college, and there was a student arcade in the basement of the alumni center. Later, during high school, there were two gas stations in walking distance after class, and they each had a couple of cabinets (Russian Attack! Ghosts and Goblins!). By the time I was able to really rely on friends with cars--certainly by the time I had my own--all the places were starting to give way to large, multi-token “immersive” racing games and stuff you sat in to play.
> Bagnall Dam strip
I spent many Summer vacations in the Ozarks (probably '74 to '86), and every time we'd do the strip one evening. I always got a custom T-shirt made. We always stayed at Point Breeze in Osage Beach (sadly, now gone with a cold high-rise condo in its place). Since I was always with my parents, I never got to hang around the arcade. When I was in high school, I took a friend along a couple times, and we were more interested in chicks at the resort.
Some years back, my girlfriend & I started going back to Point Breeze for our vacations. It was great. Virtually unchanged. We'd do the strip. Some of the shops were still the same, and I'm sure that most of the stock in one little ol' lady's store was the same stuff she originally ordered in the '70s. Like that brown glassware with brass and wood adornment, usually with a funny hillbilly saying. We bought a little wooden indian medicine man looking figure, hand-painted and little feathers glued to it. It had to be 30 years old by then.
Shit, now I'm going to be all melancholy for the rest of the night as I think about all the amazing times I had there and how mad I am that the lake is now a horrible place full of obnoxious drunks and partiers.
While I will forever cherish the years when I rode my bike to the Majik Market to plunk down an entire roll of quarters just to get to the Donkey Kong Pie Factory, (while consuming an entire rope of watermelon Bubs Daddy chewing gum and guzzling suicide Slurpees from KISS collector cups), it seemed like once we had friends who could drive was truly when our video gaming abilities exploded. The Pantera's Pizza in Concord Village had an awesome game room and what better games were there to go with my personal sausage and mushroom pie than Karate Champ, Elevator Action, Moon Patrol, and Jungle King?
My first job was at a Record Bar store at South County mall, and at the other far end of the mall was a Time Out Arcade where I seriously spent all of my lunch breaks whacking the crap out of my palms on Track and Field, or watching the same dude from Red Goose Shoes beat Dragon's Lair over and over to everyone's amazement. Speaking of beating games, I stood in the Showbiz Pizza Parlor one night for close to an hour and a half, and with one quarter (and with piss dribbling down my leg because I refused to let a much needed bathroom break defeat me) I beat JOUST! The only arcade game I ever conquered.
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