Once upon a time, in a land before the X-Box, kids ventured out of the comfort of their homes and to the video arcade. The arcade housed all of the popular video games as well as a few scattered pinball machines. Bustling with activity, these arcades could usually be found in the local shopping malls.
The first arcade-style video game that I remember was Space Invaders. Quite primitive by today's standards, people would line up to take a shot at these marching terrestrials. More games like Galaxians, Donkey Kong and Punch Out quickly followed. Before long, the local arcade was alive with an assortment of buzzes, bells and flashing lights.
It generally cost a quarter to play any of these games. So, most arcades had a machine that ate dollar bills and regurgitated quarters. If you were halfway decent on the games, five bucks could buy you a few hours of virtual excitement. By comparison, it now costs me about $100 to let my grandkids go crazy at Dave & Busters for a couple hours. Back in the day, 100 bucks would have bought me a day at Hershey Park, a movie ticket and a couple hours at the arcade.
I remember this one time when someone dropped a "stink bomb" inside of the local arcade on a crowded Friday night. These "stink bombs" were basically a small plastic vial of liquid stench. We used to refer to it a "skunk piss". You would drop it on the ground, step on it and then wait for the reaction. The smell could be best described as an overload of putrid rotten eggs. The scent came quick and it came hard...
When the smell was unleashed in the arcade on that Friday evening, countless video games were instantly abandoned. It was kind of like Chernobyl, but on much smaller scale. People immediately rushed to the exit door, desperately trying to grab a breath of fresh air in the open area of the mall. The odor was so bad that even the poor guy on the Punch Out screen was left dazed and confused. They had to open all of the doors of the arcade and let it air out for about an hour before anyone could return. Every had a good laugh about it back then. But if something like that happened today, they would have had the Haz-Mat team onsite immediately and they would have shut the entire mall down.
There were bragging rights associated with the early video games. So, if you had one of the top scores, you were invited to type in your name and it would be displayed for all challengers to see. I was never that good on these games but I wanted to impress my friends. So, I would power off the game and then power it back on before I played it. This would wipe out all of the high-games and ensure that I was the top dog when my game ended. You might call it cheating. But I look at it as my introduction to "thinking outside the box".
I remember one guy getting really pissed because his high game was wiped out. He was actually ready to fight. He had a super impressive high game. I can't remember exactly but it was something like 10 million points or something. Well, he comes in and sees his top score replaced by 1500 points by some asshole named "Tank Arm". I hear him ranting and raving, "Who the f*ck is Tank Arm?!" (My friends gave me the nick name "Tank Arm" because of my "Bull-in-a-China Shop" approach on the basketball court). Well, I never admitted that I was the current owner of the top score. The guy was really coming unglued and I didn't feel like getting my ass kicked over a game of Missile Command.
When the Nintendo game console was introduced, the old-school arcades began to fade away. Kids could now play their favorite video games in the comfort of their own homes. And they no longer had to worry about stink bombs and people stealing their high game scores. But they'll never feel that unique dose of excitement that always seemed to follow the kids of my day...
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