This post is by guest blogger Unlockable Character.
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Tom can only see 256 colors.We didn’t have video games when I was a kid.
Okay, that’s not true. Video games existed, but we couldn’t afford to buy them. So it was about the same thing as them not existing. To entertain myself, I wrote dirty words on the Lite-Brite and displayed them at night from my bedroom window.
If I wanted to play a video game, I had to go out to the lobby of the local movie theater or the local drug store and play pinball or a pre-video game called Killer Shark where some weird filmstrip of a shark would flash an epileptic fit of bright lights in my eyes until I pulled the trigger on my spear gun at the time the game felt I should, then the screen would flood with bloody-red light to show the shark was dead.
That might sound like crap, but it was better than having my dad catch me in the house sitting on my ass. Then he’d yell at me to do something:
Get off your ass and cut the grass!
Get off your ass and clean your room!
Get off your ass and do the dishes!
Get off your ass and practice your clarinet!
Get off your ass and make me a sammich!
Get off your ass and fetch daddy his medicine!
So I was glad there weren’t any video games around to tempt me into staying home and sitting on my ass. Every weekend I was out of the house as fast as possible and off to play video games.
Initially, I found refuge in the nearby coin-op laundry where I could play pinball. Then it was a few blocks further to the 7-11 to play Breakout. Eventually, a three-and-a-half mile bike ride would bring me to a real video game arcade with 30 or more video and pinball games. And there I stayed for several years, with tiny breaks for going to school, and for pooping.
You know, a history of arcade games shows that it was 8 years between the releases of Pong and Donkey Kong. It took four more years for Gauntlet, and Mortal Kombat wasn’t out until 20 years after the release of Pong! So at any given time in the arcade you could play games that spanned 20 or more years. Sure, some games were crap, but Space Invaders and Galaga were responsible for sucking quarters from my pocket for many years. In the arcade, even old games feel new.
There was something unique about the video arcade where kids would gather and experience a mass hallucination by playing the same levels of the same games and sharing the same experiences together, yet isolated. The experience was the same, yet no two kids experienced it the same. We were only standing around a wooden box with some electronics flashing lights, but sometimes it had the effect of a rite of passage, like entering a cave to kill a bear. Your father and brothers and uncles each killed a bear when they were your age, so now it was your turn. You dropped in your quarter and entered the cave and you prayed the bear wasn’t very big. And when your game was over, your friends slapped you on the back because you kicked that bear’s ass, and then you got on your bikes and went to Taco Bell.
I don’t think the home experience is the same. The isolation is actual, and my dad still yells at me to get off my ass and do something (no, I don’t live with my parents, he calls on the phone). And video game technology becomes obsolete so quickly. We want everything to be newer, bigger and faster.
When a new game console is released, kids wait all night to buy it and screw you if didn’t get it first. Then that kid blogs his experience and soon everyone knows it. Pong wouldn’t have lasted six months in today’s world. Today we compress time and each message is stamped with some URL and indexed on a server sluggish with data.
Experience happens faster and nothing will ever be new again.
Except nature. Each Spring brings new flowers and the world is reborn, lush and green. And we marvel at its beauty and power.
Now get off your ass and cut the grass.