Memories of the 80s: The Video Arcade

The video game arcade was a phenomenon of the 80s. Sure, there were pinball arcades long before 1980 and there have been arcades since, but then as today your typical arcade is somewhere on the edge of town, off at the mall or down by the boardwalk along the beach or maybe in your local movie theater lobby. Only in the early 80s was there such a boom on video games did you end up with a situation where you had an arcade set up on nearly every block that was zoned for retail stores. Every neighborhood had dozens of arcades meaning that they were always within a few minutes walking distance. Stores and restaurants would clear an area that they reserved for their own mini arcade. Many settled for two arcade games, the smallest number of games needed to qualify your nook as an arcade. One video game by itself did not qualify, although you could be sure that for every store that opened up an arcade there were ten others with only the space for a single arcade game. Still others went for three or more, and in some cases an entire floor of up to 20 or more games.

Video games arrived during the 1970s, but were nothing more than a gimmick. Arcades had always been mechanical with the most popular games being the pinball machines. Shooting Galleries allowed players to shoot invisible bullets at moving targets that obligingly fell down when hit. Racing games had toy cars on a moving track trying to avoid other slower toy cars. Another had you looking through a periscope and trying to torpedo enemy ships. There was one with a toy helicopter in a glass booth that you picked up cones with. And one with a mechanical crane that picked up real toys and dropped them through a shoot for you to keep, provided you did not drop it. There was the classic Whac-A-Mole. And for those of you not interested in games there were machines that tested your grip, a mechanical fortune teller that dropped a rolled up fortune on a small scroll down a dispenser for you to read, and for the kids coin operated horses that rocked up and down and a coin operated spaceship that spun on an axis. When the first video games were introduced to these arcades their black and white screens and crude graphics simply could not compete. The one breakout success was Pong, a game where a square dot was bounced back and fourth by two bars that each player controlled, the object not to let the dot get past you or your opponent scores a point. occasionally an early video game would show up in our neighborhood in one of the stores but was usually ignored. The games that got played were the pinball machines. And since the majority of these games ended up in bars they were usually adorned with cartoon pictures of big breasted women.

It was in late 1979 or early 1980 that the first memorable video game showed up in our town. Space Invaders was part of a new more advanced generation of video games. It was in black and white but bounced off glass so that it was on a painted background, with color added by strips of colored cellophane that were plastered over the screen. The store that installed the Space Invaders machine sold auto speakers and nothing more. It did not really last long, about a couple of weeks before that store went out of business. But in the few weeks it was opened neighborhood kids quickly found out about the Space Invaders game and by the store's last days you could find a crowd of kids in the back every day playing. What drew you in was how simple the game looked. As you watched it defeat kid after kid you were sure that if you played you could easily clear a screen. And then you finally put your quarter in and got all three of your ships blown up within seconds. After the auto speaker store closed Space Invaders pretty much disappeared from our town. It reappeared in the next town over in the arcade of the Cross Bay Theater, which was just starting to convert from mechanical games over to video games. While playing it I cold here someone else playing the game next to it called Pac-Man. It sounded like a cheap police siren so I assumed the game was about someone on a motorcycle being chased by cops. I did not actually see a screen of Pac-Man until a year later when it was installed in the lodge of a camp I went to. Everyone wanted to play, or watch others playing, all the time neglecting to do any of the other camp activities. It had become such a distraction that the counselors decided to ban video games from the lodge. I had actually seen a similar game to Pac-Man called Space Chaser at Angelo's Pizzeria a year earlier. Angelo's was the first store in our neighborhood to embrace video games, replacing it's usual pinball machine nook. Angelo's put up with the years of crap video games until the new generation games in the 80's showed up, but in doing so had become our neighborhoods first video arcade. Unfortunately they continued to install weak forgettable video games and occasionally installed a pinball machine instead. But they managed to install a couple of legit classics. Defender was there for a long time and was only replaced by it's sequel Stargate. The other was Spy Hunter which was more memorable for the extremely loud noise it made when the car crashed.

Angelo's was the exception to arcades. They kept games there for a long time. Other arcades changed games up after a few weeks. Why? Well, because there was always that one kid who became an expert at a game, showed up one day and put one quarter into the machine, stayed there all day on the same quarter building up bonus lives and an impressive score while preventing anyone else from playing, then getting his quarter back at the end of the day when the store was trying to close and asked him to leave even though he had enough bonus lives to play for another six hours. Stores quickly learned to get rid of games long before anyone became a pro, and the company who installed it and collected half the profits was all but happy to move it to a new location where there were no experts.

Some time after Pac-Man became a hit the arcade boom took off. Between 1981 and 1983 it seemed like there was a least one arcade on every block. Heading East from my house on Jamaica Avenue and not counting the off limits arcades inside the bars there were six major arcades we wasted our days hanging out in. I already mentioned Angelo's, and across the street from that one was the Ice Cream Parlor. It was only open a couple of years before lack of business finally bankrupted it. But while no one seemed to want to buy Ice Cream there they were more than eager to play in it's mini arcade. The games that turned up there were among my favorites. Carnival, Phoenix, Crazy Climber, Vanguard, Quix and Q-Bert just to name a few. Each staying no more than a few weeks to a couple of months before being changed for a new game. A couple of blocks away was a candy store called The Grasshopper which had a three game arcade. Everyone found that store both filthy and a bit scary and usually avoided it. However, it was the only arcade in town that had Donkey Kong, Missile Command and Venture. It also had a mysterious metal door in the back where there was suppose to be a room with a pool table. When one day the gate on The Grasshopper was padlocked shut the word on the street was that a police raid discovered the back room was a drug den and the dirty candy store was just a front. Another arcade that was connected to organized crime was Knight Castle. This time it was the Mafia who were experimenting with hacked games. They had a hacked version of Crazy Climber where you could get knocked off a ledge even if holding on with both hands, a hacked version of Frogger with invisible cars, and the notorious Pac-Man hack with Pac Man replaced with a Popeye's severed head. Knight Castle also had unhacked ( as far as I could tell ) versions of Centipede and Robotron. Why the hacked games? because once the mob got into distributing video games they immediately looked into tweaking them so that they were harder to beat and therefore theoretically impossible to master. Other than Knight Castle hosting mob owned arcade games it was one of the best arcades in town. It's name was a play on the word night as it was open 24 hours. It was actually suppose to be a convenience store much like 7-11 but ended up devoting most of it's floor space to at least 8 video games. In the back of the store in the corner was a small counter where some loafs of bread and candy was sold along with a single refrigerating unit with some milk and orange juice. The store was well lit with the walls and sealing painted white. It was a nice friendly place and when walking past at 3am a source of warmth and safety. It was a shame when it closed.

Beyond Knight Castle was Kay's Variety Store with it's pocket arcade. Phoenix moved there from the Ice Cream shop and we followed, but it also had Asteroids as well as Pac Man Jr. which was part pinball machine. Beyond that was the newsstand. The newsstand was in a small building beneath the railroad trestle. The arcade nook was a tight fit, but had one of my favorite games, Temptest, and Galaxian. The newsstand was the furthest from home we were willing to travel to play arcade games, about 11 minutes walking. We never actually bothered to walk West along the avenue so I have no idea what arcades were in that direction. This brings to mind another odd arcade that was two blocks South on Atlantic Avenue. Odd because it was in a pizzeria that was set up in a garage that a few months earlier was a car repair shop. And the video games, they were built into the table tops. One could sit down at the Galaxian table or at the Pac-Man table. The garage pizzeria was not open for long but was pretty memorable.

Video games did not go away, even after the home video game crash of 1983. But the arcades did. The early arcade games became too easy to master, and once that happened they made no money. To solve this problem the next generation of arcade games came with a definite ending. When playing Double Dragon once the gamer rescued the kidnapped girlfriend the game came to an end forcing him to put in more quarters if he wanted to play again. In addition since the game allowed two players then someone else had the ability to pump in his own quarters and join the game in progress, meaning that one person would no longer tie up an arcade game preventing others from playing. But these games came too late to prevent stores from doing away with their arcade nooks. Arcades remained at movie theaters and malls but disappeared as local attractions. By 85 the arcades were long gone, the only store in my neighborhood to still have video games being Angelo's