To this day, I remember hearing those sounds, in passing during the day, or sometimes even in my sleep. If you were lucky enough to grow up with them too, you know what I’m talking about. The glory of a wash of static as the local electronics store ran their loop of EWAV during the daytime. The coins clinking into slot machines. The frantic beeping of Frogger. The laser noises of Defender whizzing around the screen. And somewhere behind us, a teenager (or more likely, young woman) screaming in terror on a Mortal Kombat machine three rows over.
I walked into Target a few weeks ago and heard something that sounded almost like the startup music of Galaga, and I swear I reflexively put my hand in my pocket to fish out my quarters. My wife watched me do this and said “Really?” “At Target?” I said back. Yes really. Those stupid noises are hardwired into my brain right now.
My love affair with arcades began, like so many others, completely unintentionally. It was summer of 1986, I was eight years old and my mom took me to Metro Centre Mall up in Phoenix for back to school shopping. I was already in a pissy mood because it was AUGUST in ARIZONA and stepping outside into the 110 degree sun to go shopping was like opening the door to an oven. And who wants to try on stupid clothes? But then I see this cave of darkness full of flashing lights called “Atlantis Games.” School shopping was totally forgotten about. It was loud, intimidating, insane, and absolutely wonderful. Mom gives me $5 (aka 20 quarters) and tells me to “Meet me at Sears in an hour.” Ummm she just gave drunk Nicholas Cage the keys to a alcohol store right here.
Of course I head straight for Pac-Man because out of all the games it looked the least intimidating to me. Groups of pre-teens (probably 12-13) sitting around Street Fighter looked like they were there for business. Way too much business for a chubby little 8-year-old still learning how to tie his shoes. Pac-Man though? Cute little yellow dude just eating dots? Sign me up! HA! I could not play Pac-Man to save my life. That first quarter probably lasted me about half a minute until I got cooped up in a corner by Blinky. Some combo of luck and stubbornness kept me at that game until my mom came to find me an hour later. After dropping another stupid quarter I’d somehow managed to climb my way up to 7th place on the leaderboard. I died at least another 30 times getting there, but man did it feel good. I played non-stop for that hour until I was left with exactly two pennies. I told my mom it was “okay” as I watched the mechanicals whir back to life and the screen faded back to black. Little did she know that buck I asked her for earlier was entirely ridiculous, Joseph.
My weekends from that point forward were spent with mom dropping me off at the mall, me RUNNING to Atlantis, and me stuffing quarters into those cabinets like they were about to stop working forever. Which, in a very real sense, I guess I was keeping them going. That place had life to it. There was an ecosystem in there. A hierarchy I didn’t understand yet, but knew I desperately wanted to climb. There were the veterans – older high school kids who could probably play one quarter all day and would sit and leer at us little kids like we were beneath them. The middle schoolers (yours truly) fighting to one day be accepted into that group. And occasionally a dad taking his young son to experience “how it used to be when I was young” only to be massacred by some motherf*cking punk kid on Centipede.
Every arcade feels like home. They each have their own vibe, their own rules you don’t need written down. Atlantis was the fancy pants mall arcade. They always had newer games, cleaner cabinets, but the kids who played there were assholes. We had another smaller arcade nearby called “The Den” in the strip mall by our house. It had an older workforce and felt grittier. Like a blue collar place that wouldn’t mind if you were a scrub at games. The owner was this dude named Eddie who always wore Def Leppard shirts and would sometimes give me an extra credit if he saw I’d been playing for a while and was clearly destitute. “Let your parents know”, he would wink at me like he was selling me crack cocaine. Which legally speaking, he kind of was.
And then the Holy Cathedral…. Peter Piper Pizza. Imagine Chuck E. Cheese, but with slightly better pizza and way better games. They had every fighting game that released; these badass sit down racers with steering wheels; and in the back corner KITT (no they didn’t have the actual Knight Rider car) hanging on a rotating Neo Geo cabinet. Fatal Fury, King of Fighters, Metal Slug – games that cost you a dollar a pop but were completely worth it. I had been saving my weekly allowance just to play Metal Slug properly. Dying in Metal Slug was akin to performance art.
By the time I hit middle school I had amassed what you could only describe as “arcade lore”. Skills? Ha! I was trash at every game except maybe Pac-Man. But I sure as hell understood the culture, the unspoken rules, and politics of those cabinets. Everyone who spent a significant amount of time at the arcade had a game. A cabinet they owned. Tommy was the God at Galaga – he could play for hours on a single quarter and knew every enemy attack pattern like it was sheet music. Rick was the God of Street Fighter II – nobody messed with Rick when it came to Street Fighter unless they wanted Rick to school them in front of everybody. As for me? I was the Pac-Man lover who would play anything. Puzzle games, shooters, platformers, weird ass Japanese imports no one could understand – I would tackle it. I was that friend who will eat at any restaurant.
Fighting games changed everything. Literally as soon as Street Fighter II hit Atlantis in 1991 the entire atmosphere of the arcade changed. Up until then games were about how high you could score. Street Fighter II was about beating your friend, your neighbour, that stranger across the room into a bloody cockslaughter. Every cabinet had kids lining up their quarters on the machine like it was war prep. I stood there mesmerized at those cabinets for hours on end just watching, soaking it all in trying to comprehend what techniques made these kids so goddamn good.
I ended up gravitating towards Blanka for the same reasons I went with Pac-Man when I was younger. His electric attack looked cool and nobody expects much from the fat kid picking the green monkey. I had literally no game plan when I played – I just mashed whatever special I could think of, hop over their character and attack wildly. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked sometimes. Winning against someone wasn’t even the best part – making someone else upset was THE BEST. The day I beat Rick… the Rick. The Street Fighter God king of Atlantis…. remains probably the proudest moment of my adolescence. He had been on a massive win streak for close to two hours at that point and was getting cocky. My hail mary barrage of Blanka nonsense and dudes ended up costing him the match. Kids surrounded the cabinet cheering. I felt like I’d just killed Jesus.
Road trips in the summer meant one thing – hitting up every arcade we passed. My dad, bless his soul, realised I had a problem very early on and tried his best to drive by arcades whenever we were going someplace. Roadtrip arcades were an entirely different beast than your local mall versions. Older machines, probably broken buttons, stickier floors from spilled drinks and melted ice cream. But they all had characters. The arcade at Santa Monica Pier had this beat down Defender cabinet that looked like it could fall over at any second, but the high score was still from “ACE” who played it back in 1982. There was history in that, some mystical being who traveled around the world setting quarter lives ablaze. Only his initials lived on long after he stopped playing video games.
Arcade gaming also taught me capitalism better than any university can. Each quarter was an investment. Every continue screen was a risk-versus-reward calculation. Do I drop another quarter into this Street Fighter match I’m clearly going to lose or forfeit my loss and seek out another challenger I may have a chance against? I became obsessed with “quarter efficiency” – how to get the maximum amount of playtime out of each coin. I studied other players, learned patterns, mastered cheap tactics that would give my opponents tricked out for cheap. Figuring out how to stretch my weekly allowance as far as I could was like beating the system.
Even the cabinets themselves were pieces of art that modern “console” gaming forgot about. Every cabinet was custom built with it’s respective game in mind. The placement of the controls, the art on the sides, how the screen faced you. The Star Wars arcade game had you literally sitting inside the cockpit of an X-Wing. Tempest featured a spinner control that felt perfectly balanced for the aggressive gameplay. Paperboy had ACTUAL BIKE HANDLEBARS on his cabinet. Video game controllers these days don’t come close to coming close to matching the tactile exhilaration you got from those custom cabinets.
I swear I could write an entire article on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game alone because it took up more of my quarters than was morally acceptable. Four player simultaneous gameplay was TOP OF THE LINE technology at the time and that cabinet was ALWAYS packed. “I’ll take Donatello!” “Nazareth I want Michelangelo!” You literally could not win as four players – it was designed that way. You had to split duties, communicate, strategize wins and losses as a team. Hell, I played TMNT with strangers more times than I can count on TWO hands. Yet we all shared this quarter long camaraderie because someone had to watch out for when Shredder came down so you could mash out that combined special attack.
Oddly enough I went through a period in high school where I was kinda embarrassed to like arcades. I don’t know why looking back – everybody else I knew was into “more mature” things now. Hang outs, dates, ACTUAL social interaction with girls. But I couldn’t stay away completely. Every weekend I spent at the arcade kept me feeling like a kiddie. At least at the arcade, I was good at something. Besides, they didn’t stop making games I liked. Mortal Kombat with it’s gruesome finishing moves. NBA Jam and it’s ludicrously fun yet completely unrealistic game of basketball. Street Fighter Alpha, which pretty much REQUIRED you to obtain a doctorate in joystick technique if you wanted to be any good.
The rise of DDR and rhythm games temporarily brought the cool back to arcades around ’98-’99. Nothing like that existed at home and Dancing Dance Revolution was a freaking workout. All of sudden, going to the arcade wasn’t just going to “play some games”. You were going to entertain yourself. The top DDR players had actual crowds of people watching them play. I sucked at DDR. Like really bad. But that didn’t stop me from feeding quarters into those pads because no other device could replicate that magic. No console, no laptop. Nothing came CLOSE to the arcade experience.
Alas, our demise was inevitable. The PSX and N64 were bringing us arcade style graphics RIGHT TO OUR HOUSES. Not to mention the upcoming marvel that was “online gaming”, where we could now play against other gamers all over the world instead of whoever happened to go to the same arcade as you. One by one local arcades shut their doors or converted into these gaming linked ticket redemption cabinets – essentually legalized gambling for children. Atlantis was reduced to a fraction of their game count, and eventually shut down. The Den became a cell phone store. Peter Piper Pizza kept the pizza, but swapped out every real “grown up” game for kid rides and claw games.
I’m sure my last truly amazing arcade experience happened around 2001 and I was playing Crazy Taxi at some lame ass Dave & Buster’s. Even that felt different though – sterilized. Corporatized. The cabinets didn’t feel loved like Eddie loved his games. Quarters were replaced with game cards that made the entire process feel cheaper than it already was.
Now I have a little game room in my basement with a handful of refurbished cabinets – Galaga, Street Fighter II, and a multi-cade filled with classics. Every once in awhile my teenagers will wander down there and throw a few games down, usually mocking how “retro” it all looks. They’re cool about it, but I know they don’t understand. How could they? You can’t put into words the smell of an arcade cabinet. The culture. The feeling of being somewhere that felt like a clubhouse for the kids who knew video games were meant to be played at 60hp on a CRT screen.
Sometimes when I’m down there adjusting the RGB sliders on my Galaga monitor or replacing microswitches on a stubborn joystick I can almost feel it again. The anticipation of playing your favorite game, the focus you had to maintain, the utter joy of conquering pixelated demons. The artwork on those cabinets is still gorgeous. The sound effects are immaculate. And the games today still aren’t quite as easy as they were 35 years ago. What’s missing is that feeling of being amongst other kids who loved this crazy niche hobby just as much as you did. Giant rooms packed with children all trying to out-do each other for the highest score.
We’ve been gone for years. The golden age of arcades ended decades ago. But everytime I’m downstairs by myself, usually late at night when the house is quiet, I swear I can hear them. Ghosts of Capcom past calling my name as arcade sounds float down the stairs towards me. That satisfying intoxicating riff of Galaga’s challenge round. The desperate beeping of Frogger avoiding cars. The sweet sweet sound of failure as your quarters finally run out. For a brief second, I’m 12 years old again and the world is my videogame oyster. Pockets FULL of quarters.
Joe’s a history teacher who treats the console wars like actual history. A lifelong Sega devotee from Phoenix, he writes with passion, humor, and lingering heartbreak over the Dreamcast. Expect strong opinions, bad puns, and plenty of “blast processing.”
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