PLAYER ONE
I'm Ray. I'm 34, I fix copiers for a living, and from about 1980 to 1985 I spent every quarter I could get my hands on at an arcade in a strip mall on the west side of Toledo called Starbase. Yes, really. It had a painted rocket over the door and carpet with planets on it, and it smelled like popcorn and hot electronics. It's a shoe store now. I've been in there to buy shoes, once. It was strange.

This page is for anybody who remembers standing in that kind of room with a roll of quarters and nowhere to be. It's got my memories, my high scores (the real ones, from real machines, and some other ones I keep separate), and the story of the machine in my garage.

THINGS I REMEMBER

> The quarter on the glass. If the machine was busy you put your quarter on the edge of the screen glass, and that meant you had next. Nobody ever wrote the rule down and everybody knew it. The one time I saw a kid take somebody else's quarter off the glass, the manager threw him out before the kid he'd cut could.

> Pac-Man, fall 1980. It showed up at the bowling alley first, before Starbase even opened. There was a line. For a video game. My dad watched me play one game and said "it's a hockey puck eating dots" and then played eleven games in a row.

> Defender was for the brave. One joystick and five buttons, and the ship could go either direction. I lost more quarters to Defender than anything else, and I never got good. There was an older kid everybody called Stosh who could play it for most of an hour on one quarter. A crowd would stand behind him and not talk. I don't know what happened to Stosh. I hope he's doing well.

> Robotron. Two joysticks, one to move and one to shoot, and about two hundred things on the screen trying to kill you while you save the last human family. Your hands learn to do two things at once and your brain stays out of it. It's still my favorite game ever made, which is why it's in my garage. See below.

> The Star Wars sit-down. Starbase had the cockpit version, where you sat inside. It cost more to play and I didn't care. Flying down the trench with the speakers right by your head was as close as a fifteen-year-old in Ohio was going to get.

> Dragon's Lair cost fifty cents and everybody watched it and hardly anybody played it. It looked like a cartoon movie, which it was, and you died every four seconds. The attract mode was better entertainment than the game.

> Donkey Kong's last level. Everybody had heard there was a board where the game just breaks and kills you. Nobody I knew ever got there. I've since learned it's level 22, and I've still never seen it with my own eyes.

> When it went quiet. Around 1984 the crowds just thinned out. Machines broke and didn't get fixed. There were fewer new games and more old ones with "OUT OF ORDER" taped on. Starbase closed in the summer of 1987. I walked in on the last day and the owner was selling the machines. I didn't have the money. I think about that a lot.

> This summer somebody finally played a perfect game of Pac-Man, every dot, every ghost, every fruit, all the way to the broken board at the end. 3,333,360 points. My best is on the scores page. It is not 3,333,360.

THE GARAGE

In 1996 I went to an auction at a closed-down roller rink and came home with a Robotron: 2084 in an upright cabinet for $175. My wife, Linda, was very understanding about it, and continues to be very understanding about it, and parks on the street in the winter.

It did not work when I got it. The picture rolled, one joystick only went three directions, and there was a burn-in ghost of the score across the top of the monitor. Here's what it took, for anybody thinking about doing this:

• New capacitors in the monitor (a "cap kit"). Ask somebody who knows before you open a monitor. There's enough stored up in there to hurt you even when it's unplugged. I'm not kidding.
• Cleaned and bent the leaf switches in the joysticks back into shape.
• A new coin door lock, because the auction didn't come with a key.
• About four months of Saturdays.

The burn-in is still there. I've decided I like it. That machine had a life before me.

Next project: I'm looking for a Ms. Pac-Man cocktail table, the sit-down kind with the glass top, so Linda has something to play. If you've got one in a basement and want it gone, write me.