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THE ARCADE ARCHIVIST
| Hi, I'm Tony Morales and I was born in 1969, which means I was exactly the right age when the arcade boom hit. I spent the years 1980 through about 1985 with a roll of quarters in my pocket and my initials on more high-score tables than I ever put on my homework. This page is my attempt to write some of it down before I forget, and before the last of those old cabinets ends up in a landfill. If you were there too, I'd love to hear from you. If you weren't, pull up a stool. The joystick's on the left, buttons on the right. |
| >> A SHORT TIMELINE << |
|
I'm not a historian, just a guy who was there, but I have checked these dates against
the books and magazines on my shelf. If I've got one wrong, e-mail me and I'll fix it.
1972 - Pong from Atari. A paddle, a ball, two knobs. It went into bars before it went into arcades, but it started everything. 1978 - Space Invaders, from Taito in Japan. Rows of aliens marching down the screen, that thump-thump heartbeat that sped up as you killed them off. This is the one that made the whole world notice. My older cousin tells me about seeing lines out the door for it. 1979 - Asteroids from Atari, with the vector screen, glowing lines on black. Also Galaxian from Namco, the first one I remember that had real color. 1980 - Pac-Man. Namco made it in Japan, Midway brought it here. If you were alive in 1980 you know this one, and if you were a kid you probably had the lunchbox. Also Defender from Williams (the hardest game in the room) and Centipede from Atari with the trackball. 1981 - Donkey Kong from Nintendo, with a little carpenter named Jumpman who later got renamed Mario. Also Galaga, Frogger and Ms. Pac-Man (she came out in early 1982, to be exact, but I always lump her in here). Ms. Pac-Man was the machine at the Fun Factory that never, ever had an open seat. 1982 - The peak, in my opinion. Tron, Joust, Q*bert, Dig Dug, Pole Position, Zaxxon, BurgerTime. So many machines the mall arcade had to open a second room. 1983 - Dragon's Lair, the laserdisc game that cost fifty cents a play, which felt like highway robbery. And then the crash. The home video game business fell apart in 1983 and 1984 (too many bad cartridges, too many companies) and while arcades held on longer, the crowds thinned out. The little strip-mall arcades closed first. 1985 and after - Gauntlet with its four joysticks, then the Nintendo Entertainment System in everybody's living room, and later the fighting games. A different era. A good era, but not my era. |
| >> THE FUN FACTORY << |
|
Every town had one, and ours was the Fun Factory, upstairs at the Crestview Mall next to the
Orange Julius. You went up the escalator and you could hear it before you could see it:
a hundred attract-mode jingles all going at once, the Defender explosion, the Pac-Man
wakka-wakka, some kid yelling because he'd lost his last guy on the Donkey Kong barrel level.
It was dark in there on purpose. Black carpet with little colored squares, black ceiling, the only light coming from the monitors and the marquee headers glowing along the top of each row. It smelled like the popcorn machine by the change counter and, if we're being honest, like teenage boys. The layout, as best I can remember it (I drew this out on paper first): Front row, right when you walked in: Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Frogger. The crowd-pleasers, where the moms would stand. Left wall: Asteroids, Space Invaders, Galaxian, Galaga, Centipede with that trackball worn smooth. Back room (opened 1982): Tron, Tempest, Joust, Q*bert, Zaxxon, the sit-down Pole Position that cost two tokens. By the bathrooms: the pinball machines, which we thought were for old people. (I have since repented. See Pinball Wizard's Basement, a fellow homesteader who is doing for pinball what I am trying to do here.) The manager was a guy we only ever called Bear, who had a big ring of keys and could open a cabinet and give you back a credit if the machine ate your token. He did this exactly once per kid per day. He knew every one of us by name and he knew when we were supposed to be in school. The Fun Factory closed in the summer of 1987. The space is a shoe store now. |
| >> QUARTERS AND TOKENS << |
|
In the beginning it was quarters. Real money, straight from your allowance or your paper route,
into the slot. Every machine had a coin door with a little red PUSH button and a rejected-coin
return that you learned to check on every machine, every time, because somebody was
always leaving quarters in there.
Then around 1981 or '82 the Fun Factory switched to tokens. Brass-colored, a bit smaller than a quarter, with FUN FACTORY - NO CASH VALUE stamped on one side and a little smiley gear on the other. You bought them at the change counter or from a machine that took dollar bills (and spit them back out if they were even slightly wrinkled). Four for a dollar, and on Tuesdays after school, five. The arcades liked tokens because nobody could take them across the street and spend them at the record store, and because a token you didn't use was pure profit. We liked them because they looked cool and because you could take them home and keep them in a jar. I still have my jar. As of tonight there are 212 tokens in it from eleven different arcades, and the Fun Factory ones are the best. The other thing about tokens: if you had one from a different arcade that was the same size, it usually worked. I'm not going to name any names about who figured that out, but Bear caught on fast and put a sign up. |
| >> THREE LETTERS OF FAME << | ||||||||||||||||||
|
The high-score table was the whole point. When you beat one of the top scores, the game asked
you to enter your initials, three letters, by spinning the joystick through the alphabet. Then
your letters sat there on the attract screen for every kid in the mall to see, until somebody
beat you or until Bear unplugged the machine on Sunday night and the table reset. (Some
machines held scores when they were turned off, but most of the ones I played didn't. That
was part of the tragedy of it.)
My initials were TAM. I was on the Galaga table for most of the spring of 1983, and I was number one on Ms. Pac-Man for exactly one weekend before a girl named only "JLO" on the screen took it away from me and never gave it back. I never found out who JLO was. If you are reading this: well played. The rules of high-score culture, as I remember them: 1. You did not enter a dirty word as your initials. The machine let you, but Bear would reset it and you'd lose your score. 2. You did not bump or "tilt" a machine somebody was on a hot streak with. 3. A token on the glass meant "I've got next." You did not touch another kid's token. 4. If somebody was going for a high score, you stood behind them, quietly. Coaching was permitted. Breathing on them was not. 5. When a good player died on the last guy, everyone said "awww" together. This was mandatory. For the record, here is the Fun Factory Galaga table as I copied it into my notebook on April 9, 1983. I was thirteen. This is the only high-score table from that arcade that survives anywhere, and yes, I'm aware of how that sounds.
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| >> WHERE DID THE MACHINES GO? << |
|
This is the part that got me started on this page. Thousands and thousands of cabinets were
built. Where are they?
Converted. A lot of them didn't survive as themselves. When a game stopped earning, the operator would pull the board and the marquee, slap on a new side-art sticker and drop in a "conversion kit" for a newer game. Many a Pac-Man became something else by 1986. Look closely at a beat-up cabinet at a laundromat and you can sometimes see the old art under the new. Sold off by the route operators. The men who owned the machines and serviced the arcades, pizza parlors, bowling alleys and bus stations (they called them "routes") sold them off at auction for fifty or a hundred dollars when they stopped earning. Some went to bars, some to campground rec rooms, a lot of them to the dump. Basements. This is the happy ending. Grown men and women my age are now buying these cabinets back, hauling them home in pickup trucks, replacing the monitor caps and the sticky joysticks, and putting them in the basement next to the furnace. There are collectors who have twenty or thirty. I have two: a Galaga (of course) that I bought from a retiring route operator in 1996, and a Ms. Pac-Man cabinet that I am slowly bringing back to life. The Ms. Pac-Man monitor is the current project. I have learned more about discharging a picture tube than I ever wanted to know. On your PC. There is a program called MAME that has been going since 1997 that lets a regular computer run the actual code from the old arcade boards, so you can play Galaga on your Pentium. It is remarkable. It is also not the same, because the joystick's wrong and there's no Bear and no line of kids behind you. But it's how I checked my memory on half of the things on this page. If you have one of these machines, take care of it. Keep it dry, keep it out of the sun, and don't let your brother-in-law "fix" the monitor. |
 WANTED / TRADE:
Fun Factory tokens (any year), a Galaga marquee in decent shape, and anybody who has photos of
the Crestview Mall arcade. I have a scanner now, so if you mail me a photo I will scan it,
return it, and put it up here with your name on it. I'll also trade doubles from my token jar
two for one.
COMING SOON: A page of my token collection (once I figure out how to photograph them without the flash glaring off every single one), my Ms. Pac-Man restoration log, and a list of every arcade I ever visited with what became of it. 
Those pages are under construction. The Galaga is fully operational.
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This site is a member of the Time Capsule WebRing, owned by Tony Morales [ << Prev | List Sites | Next >> ] |
