GranolaBox

I have a checkered history with video games. I’m not like most other people my age when it comes to video games. I think it’s because of a complicated variety of forces that guided my adolescent behavior. The result is that Protestant thrift and Catholic guilt kept me away from video arcades.

The Strong Museum of Play in Rochester always brings back memories of my childhood. Anybody born in the 20th century or later can find stuff there that they played with as kids. Their latest exhibit is a giant roomful of vintage video arcade games that brought my checkered past to light again.

The video/pinball arcade in Saranac Lake was a SCARY PLACE. It was in a decrepit building on the corner of Woodruff and Church Streets and SCARY TEENAGERS hung out there. These were the kids that smoked cigarettes and beat up little geeky kids like me. These were kids who, according to my mom, were HIGH ON POT.

These were the SCARY KIDS that would hang out under the overpass outside Petrova Middle School to smoke cigarettes. The overpass was just off school property, so school officials couldn’t harass kids for smoking there. After they went to high school isn’t wasn’t cool to hang out under the overpass anymore, so moved to the arcade.

I could play some of these games once in a while if I went to the Bowling alley where they had a little arcade in the back. There was a modicum of adult supervision there or my mom was bowling so I could usually finish a game or two without being harassed.

I had a problem with video games in general though. I loved them, and my parents even got me an Atari. Video games were like comic books. Your parents knew they would eventually poison your mind and lead you down the path of idleness but they’d let you have them anyway to keep you busy.

Here lies the crux of the problem: I really sucked at video games and still suck at them now. I lack most forms of coordination, including the hand/eye coordination so critical to video games both old and new.

This brings in the economic problem. The three lives that the video game gave you cost a whole quarter, and if you sucked like I did you were pretty much throwing your quarters away. This was money that could have been spent on records or given to poor children in India and was not to be idly squandered in a video arcade.

My most specific of video arcade games date back to summers in Saranac Lake while I was in college. I was able to go to bars by then, and the Journey’s End always had a game that I was fairly proficient at, and once in a great while (if they’d recently reset the game) I’d be able to have my initials on the screen for a while. My friend Shawn and I would get a whole roll of quarters and play their video games until our roll ran out, which was usually in less than an hour.

I’d play Galaga a lot because it was pretty easy and not very exciting. Since there were sexier games like Pac Man around the Galaga game was always available.

Centipede was my favorite game, and I got fairly good at it. Then they came out with Millipede which went way faster and so I sucked at it.

Frogger is a sick, sick game but I still loved to play it. The only sicker game, and one not suprisingly represented at the Strong Museum was Death Buggy. You’d drive around in a buggy and run over people. As soon as you ran them over, a cross would appear where you hit them.

When I played the games for the first time, I was hoping to impress my daughters with my mad skills, but just like when I was a kid the games lasted for a minute or less and it took no time at all for me to burn through the three tokens provided by the museum.

Some things never change.

Filed under: Yesterdaze on July 6th, 2009