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September 10, 2002
Nostalgia Extreme
It was almost unbearable to wait in the registration line at the California Extreme classic coin-op games expo because from within the central keep you could hear the chimes of hundreds of pinball machines and the electronic phaser fire of a thousand retro-futuristic virtual weapons. The excitement was, as they say, palpable - it rang in your ears.  When I was a kid growing up in middle-class suburbia, we didn't have an arcade nearby to hang out in, and my sister and I had to content ourselves with playing Jumpman and Loderunner for the Commodore 64. Fine games, both of them, but they lacked the visceral audio-tactile experience of the dim, slightly beer-scented arcades. So when we got to go to an arcade, it was special. And it wasn't like we had a lot of money to spend (my parents believed in tight allowances) so we had to choose our games very carefully. Would we spend a couple quarters to play the reassuringly familiar Centipede? Or blow it on the more difficult but more rewarding Shinobi? It was microeconomics at work. We'd hoard our quarters carefully, walking around the entire arcade and mentally listing the games we wanted to play. Sometimes we'd watch other people play a particularily difficult game for a long time, trying to asses the controls, the environment, the special character moves. I think I learned how to play Mortal Kombat II simply by watching hours of other gamers. Well, I guess I'm grown now. Because for the price of a hundred coin-op plays, I could get myself into a giant hangar in San Jose for unlimited plays of my favorite games - plus games I never played before. Provided they worked, of course. Among the latter the standout was probably Gondomania, which had the added bonus of being two-player co-operative. You ride around on hover-cycles shooting enemies and collecting the coins they drop. Those coins can go towards the purchases of new weapons and powerups. So as you play, you have to decide - am I going to spend my 45 coins on these nifty axes right now? Or should I kill a few more dozens of zombies and hold out for the flamethrower? It's all about microeconomics, I guess. Some games looked almost impossibly fragile - I wondered how they could possibly have survived the onslaught of thousands of teenaged hands. Main Event, for example, is a mechanical game, much like foosball. The one pictured below was in excellent condition, and it looked pretty fun to play, too.  The pinball collection was quite impressive. Reportedly the largest single amassing of pinball machines in the world, the exhibition was a veritable museum of pinball history. I am not much of a pinball player, but it was somehow oddly comforting to hear the whirrs, clicks, and bells of the banks of games actively being played. Are there even any pinball parlors anymore? Once in a while you see a sad dusty machine off in the corner of a bar, jammed up uncomfortably behind a pool table, but rarely are they featured prominently in arcade establishments. Well, at the Expo, it was their turn to shine. But by far the most exciting game there was the Discs of Tron - just look at the gorgeous box.  Now I admit I didn't play a whole lot of Discs of Tron growing up. But seeing it there, in full purple-blue glory, brought back a wave of warm feelings and an itchiness in my fingers. I stepped into the box to experience the full virtual reality of the game. Sound effects blasted around me, red lasers chased along the top of the screen - for a few minutes nothing existed for me but the evil guy throwing his discs at me. Hah! Take that! Blinking, I emerged, and thought to myself what a shame it was that these beautiful games are now only to be found at events like this one. I watched the young kids running around playing games older than they were and wondered, when did my entertainment become someone's museum piece? Miyuki Jane Pinckard often writes about games on Umami Tsunami. Comments
1. C64 games i still get misty-eyed about: california games, realm of impossibility, skate or die, sammy lightfoot, archon, yie-ar kung-fu, speedball, boulder dash, impossible mission, karateka, way of the exploding fist, ultima III and ultima IV, bards tale, might & magic, spyhunter, commando, maniac mansion, zak mckracken, i could go on forever... 2. regarding adolescent microeconomics and the arcade: SFII not only revolutionized the fighting game genre, but also radically altered the microeconomic logic of arcade spending. i rationalized spending $5 everyday towards mastery of SF2, as the future payoff of playing for hours against a stready stream of inferior opponents was worth it. it was. 3. in terms of pinball, there has been a serious dropoff in terms of quantity and quality ever since williams withdrew from the industry a few years ago due to its perceived financial "failure" of pinball 2K. stern pinball (presently, the sole monopolist in the pinball manufacturing business) is still such a joke-- even with some former williams greats designing for them. who remember's when the underground arcade on ucb used to have 10 pinball machines? pepito pea Posted by: pepitopea on September 11, 2002 10:59 PMI went to CA Extreme last year with my sister and her husband and had a great time, but I didn't make it this year. I've had the flyer for this year's event on my refrigerator for months, but it wasn't at eye-level so it became forgotten. Jennie and I were desperately hoping to find Space Panic, a silly little game about digging holes and luring alien pursuers into them to fall to their deaths. We hoarded quarters from grocery change whenever we were sent to Safeway for milk, Dr. Pepper, and cigarettes. Yes, Safeway clerks sold cigarettes to us for our parents. Space Panic was on the list of available games, so we were on a nostalgia high. Unfortunately, last year's event took place the weekend after September 11 and a lot of the vendors/displayers were unable to book flights to California. So no Space Panic. The turn-out was low, but not as low as expected. It seemed that quite a few people were looking to bring a little fun back into their lives. We had a lot of fun playing games from our childhood: Zookeeper, Tron, Q*Bert, Rampart, Food Fight, Moon Cresta, Pengo and several pinball machines. I found myself strangely drawn to the pinball games -- I kept going back to them. I was especially attracted to the ones with multi-ball capability. There's nothing like trying to keep two, three, or even four balls in play at once. Many of the machines were broken and there were a lot of vendors selling arcade game parts. Couldn't they have gotten together somehow?? But I guess that's to be expected in a museum/showroom. Somehow it made me feel even older. Games I used to play are now so old that they can't even be fixed. Posted by: randomlife on September 12, 2002 11:52 AMI'm one of the "founding fathers" of this show, although the last few years it's been tough for me to even make it. Download eMule 0.47c Program P2P do bezposredniej wymiany plików p2p. ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.gamegirladvance.com/nav-commenters.gif) on December 18, 2006 03:34 PM
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