But of course regular hours wouldn't be the same as the late-night booze-slinging opening night hours; I fished a bit without success...
@Landyachtz All right, bros, east van hipsters with kids want to know how early your pop-up arcade opens on a weekend.
— Rowan Lipkovits (@UnwashedMass) July 26, 2015
Thoughts and reflections: Goddamn, this place was SO NOISY! My toddler, holding her hands over her ears, agreed. I appreciate that the games back in their first-run incarnation were in a sense competing with each other for your quarters, each week's underperformers returned and upgraded into newer, hopefully more appealing games, but that's a concern between the game manufacturers and the arcade owners. As far as players go, c'mon: once you're in the arcade, does it really matter which machine your coins are going into? Never did I end up in a situation where coins allocated for gameplay went unspent just because none of the offerings were sufficiently loud.
(Speaking of audio cues: that "doom" sound when an Atari Games / later Midway arcade cabinet had a coin inserted is hardwired somewhere into my parasympathetic nervous system. They weren't all great games, but they were never less than good!)
My first game played was Rampage; seeing an opportunity for father-daughter bonding, I polled my tot regarding which of the three monsters she'd like to play (A: "the ape" -- and pardon my digression, but whenever she encounters this species of simian in a children's book now she will proudly proclaim how she knows another ape named Donkey Kong!), then tried to (multitaskingly -- while playing) lure her back after she wandered off, the 2P paid for but unplayed... shockingly, despite George just standing there picking his nose the whole time, I (as Lizzie) only outlasted him by 10 seconds. I never realised the game's constant player-health-chipping-away was so evenly calibrated!
Then we installed my daughter on a surveillance chair -- she's at the age where "playing video games" still pretty much means "watching Dad play video games", and got down to business with Ms. Pac-Man... which I performed surprisingly good on, but unused to the speed at which she moves on actual arcade hardware, kept accidentally ramming innocent ghosts! It turns out the second map pattern also is not quite as ingrained in my subconscious, and so I didn't last terribly long on this machine. The joystick seemed period authentic but the unforgivingness of its stark short up/down/right/left seemed hostile to one grown fat and lazy on gamepad thumbsticks.
Another real classic sat adjacent: there it was, Donkey Kong. To help my tot get over the "why should I care?" factor, I carefully explained to her how this was the very first game in which her beloved Mario appeared. That got her attention! This hardware was a bit rough; certain sprites would disappear from the screen when crossing certain vertical locations, only to reappear later. I was expecting it to be tougher; on my first try I found myself trying to remember what came next while wondering how I'd managed to get up to the top so quickly? But he who hesitates is lost; the second time through, inexpert hammer handling hubris proved my downfall, despite that being, via Super Smash Bros., the one aspect of the game I've experienced most recently. Its stubby arcade joystick, from the days before such things were standardized, also threw off my game.
As for Puzzle Bobble - well, it is what it is, which is a thin slice of perfection. There are funner games, and there are more beautiful games, and there are more exciting games, but for my money nothing dresses up such a slim premise so completely. It only pales compared to the original Bubble Bobble, which, well hey, here it is! It turns out that I am apparently embarrassingly good at this game, getting up to level 30 on my first credit virtually solo, despite the game's dip switches being set to a harder mode (the first level's bad guys aren't typically Incendos -- ah, I see the game had been set to "Super Mode".) While playing this game, my wingman finally made it, and we whiled away several minutes discussing how we'd play something together "as soon as I die"... which, stubbornly, refused to happen. I didn't finally shuffle on until just after he joined in; feeling that abandoning him was a gesture in poor faith, I popped in another credit only to blow through all the lives within a single level. Sprees: go figure.
My big regret is that I didn't play the cocktail Tetris, which to me was always the authoritative version of the game; all my life I've confused gamers discussing the great music from Tetris and talking about the kazachok dancers between levels, unaware that in the grand scheme of things it was the Game Boy version alone that achieved cultural canon status. This had, I'm sure, some intriguing competitive multiplayer modes. Next time! Next time for this and the Street Fighter 2 pinball.
Speaking of SF2, there's a game (heck, a genre) whose absence was conspicuous, and where were the Capcom / Konami brawlers in the Final Fight / Ninja Turtles vein? In my experience, those were the big quarter-hoovers -- four friends playing through TMNT simultaneously (did I tell you yet about how I distributed a strategy guide for this game through my elementary school's C64 lab?) could be expected to drop about $5 in quarters each. But maybe that becomes unsustainable with the new prices of $.50 per play for arcade games, $1 for pinball? And what's up with that inflation? Has a monopoly on period-authentic setting of the nostalgic experience taken on such a swollen premium? San Francisco's incredible Musée Mecanique, last visited in 2010, still only demands quarters for its amazing machines, ranging from the 1800s to Death Race to the present day, and one of my favorites, the Avalon in Portland, charges a flat fee for entry and then only a nickel per play.
All the machines in this arcade were sourced from East Van Amusements, which only raises more questions than it addresses: this company started in 2012? How did I miss getting in on a piece of that action? How come it has no representation at any of obvious local "nerd bar" locations such as the Storm Crow, EXP, etc., just the square footage premium of Vancouver real estate? These guys rent machines for weddings? A video recounted how, being stationed around the corner from La Casa Gelato, this site sees more than a few couples on their first dates visiting... I fear that had this site existed on my first date with my partner, there might not have been a second date: learning a little too much, too quickly...
You know, you really can't go back again, but though I could have enjoyed a very similar experience on my laptop through the Internet Arcade without leaving my living room, I don't regret going to get a feel for the trappings of the bygone era. The room was even decorated with pinball backings and video game marquee artwork, hung like animal heads in a hunter's lodge. I wonder what my 3-year-old daughter made of it, and if this experience will even be possible when she's my age. Or is it just one of those dwindling throwbacks like going to the opera or the horse races that is destined to slowly fade away across a couple of generations?
(I appreciate that, in uncharted climate change territory, a couple of generations hence may have far bigger fish to fry than celebrating the leisure electronics of the late cold war. But I still wonder!)
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