![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.gamingwithchildren.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/07\/sinistar_41.gif\")
OK, that sounds more dramatic than the reality of the situation – video arcades have been a dying breed for a long time now, but a few recent articles have caused me to reflect a bit on my own history with arcades and their impact on my life.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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(you can see the the articles here<\/a>, here <\/a>and here<\/a>).<\/p>\n There is a good reason why so many folks in their 40’s and 50’s are clueless about gaming – it is because while the industry was really forming up in the late 70’s and early 80’s they were in high school and college with a overflowing load of schoolwork, friends and hobbies. Whereas people in their 30’s were the perfect age to benefit from the ‘console as toy’ craze and get an Atari or Colecovision or later a NES or Genesis, me and my peers had Pong and pinball machines … and later got to be teens during the advent of the arcade.<\/p>\n Of course, some of us were fascinated by technology and were programming on PDP-11’s and on tape-based minicomputers before we were even able to get our hands on an Apple ][. We were a minority – as depicted in movies, being tech-savvy put you on the social ostracization hotlist! But arcade games were a perfect fit – they fit in nicely alongside the pinball machines in malls and bowling alleys and other spots, but offered us something that was similar to, but much cooler than the text adventures and Star Trek game on the mainframes. And playing them occasionally didn’t mark you as a geek, as everyone was up for a round of Breakout or Space Invaders!<\/p>\n That is all pretty standard stuff -coin-ops in the mall and bowling alley and movie theater are pretty much the norm for folks looking back at their arcade game history. Wil Wheaton recalls his favorite games in convenience stores. It is reading all of these articles that has made me realize just how lucky me and my arcade game-loving friends were: because by the dawn of the 1980’s, we were fortunate enough to have a full-blown, stand-alone arcade: the Canton Entertainment Center.<\/p>\n Though it apparently perished in a fire in the 90’s, the basic building still remains – it was built out into a sort of mini-strip mall at some point after we had left for college. It featured ~20′ x 30′ of game space, with one end raised up a step. At full capacity it probably fit ~25-30 machines, so it was not the massive space that some arcades grew into over the years. But from the very beginning it was focused on video arcade games. When it opened, the lower section had all pinball games and the upper area had arcade games like Pong and Space Invaders and Tank and Asteroids. There was a change machine and an office window, and not much else. The machines used coins rather than tokens, and the people who worked there were passionate about the arcade and really made an effort to keep everything working and everyone happy.<\/p>\n As time went on into the early 80’s, the pinball machines slowly left to make room for things like Football, Battlezone, Bezerk, Defender, Missile Command, and Pac Man. Pretty soon the place was packed with machines and was doing a decent business despite being isolated on a minor highway far from any malls or fast food or other hotspots. People came there just for the arcade games, and the recently opened D’Angelo sub shop was a great beneficiary.<\/p>\n Many of my favorite games got fed plenty of coins during those days – Tempest, Robotron, Joust, Tron, Discs of Tron, Star Wars and Sinistar.<\/p>\n My biggest memory from that arcade is that for the spring and fall that were part of our junior and senior years in high school, the CEC ran a promotion: each Thursday in the Canton Courier they would print a coupon good for $1 in ‘tokens’ at the arcade. Of course, the ‘tokens’ were still quarters at that point, and the weekly local paper cost 25 cents, so as enterprising students a bell went off in our heads: here is a way to play games and make a profit! So right after school the group of us would pile in a car and head to the convenience store near the mall in Canton, completely buy them out of stock on the paper, and head to the arcade!<\/p>\n We would exchange coupons for quarters, and start playing. Of course, if you went and played a single game for 30 seconds and came back looking for more quarters they would get suspicious, so we knew we needed at least 10-15 minutes between cash-ins. The goal was to get good enough at games so that you could only use 25 – 50 cents of each dollar. We each had our games we excelled at playing, so we would gravitate towards them. I could keep Sinistar and Tempest and Discs of Tron going for a while, but had others that I just enjoyed playing. At the end of the day we’d each have enough left over for a trip to McDonald’s or Wendy’s … that is when it would have been under $10 for the five of us to get meals! Quite often we’d have enough to pay for a movie that weekend as well!<\/p>\n The next year, over Christmas break from our freshman year in college we all headed back to CEC for a bit. They had put in real tokens, stopped doing the paper promotion, and generally become much less friendly and open. The arcade revolution was in full swing and the place was really crowded, and just didn’t feel like ‘home’ anymore. As I said, at some point the place was destroyed by fire, but I have never been able to find out if it had already gone out of business by then. Regardless, the place had already played an important part in my life and in my life as a gamer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" OK, that sounds more dramatic than the reality of the situation – video arcades have been a dying breed for a long time now, but a few recent articles have caused me to reflect a bit on my own history with arcades and their impact on my life.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1020"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1020\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}