My personal bests. The rule in my house is that a score only counts if it was on a real machine with a real quarter (or a real token), and somebody else saw it. Usually that somebody is Linda, who is a very fair witness and does not round up. When I can, I take a picture of the screen, and then I wait a week for the drugstore to develop it, and half the time the picture is just a glare with a number somewhere in it.

Notes on the table. The Robotron score went up in August after a very long Saturday. It's the first time I've gone over a million on my own machine and I made Linda come out to the garage in her bathrobe to see it. The Ms. Pac-Man is from the laundromat by my work, which has one of the last ones in town that anyone keeps up. I do a lot of laundry now.

Yes, my Asteroids score is low. I never learned to just sit in the middle and turn. I always had to go somewhere.

A few friends from work come over Tuesdays to play the Robotron. This is the garage board, as of this week. The machine has its own table, but the little battery that's supposed to remember it is dead and I keep forgetting to replace it, so the board forgets everything when I switch it off. The real record lives here.

LIN is Linda. She played for the first time in June and is coming up fast. LOU has been within 300,000 of me for two years and I can feel him back there. GUS is Lou's nephew, who is eleven and plays with his face about two inches from the glass.

I've been playing some of the old games on the computer with MAME, which is a program that pretends to be the old arcade boards. It's amazing that it works at all. But it's a keyboard, not a joystick, and there's no glass and no quarter, so these go in their own table:

Notice they're all worse. Tempest with arrow keys instead of the spinner is like eating soup with a fork. And please don't e-mail me asking where to get the game files. I don't have any to give out and I'm not going to post any here.