I’ve written quite a bit about video games and vintage arcades in this space. At 45, I spent a few hours last weekend playing Cyberball 2072 on my Playstation 2. It’s a classic arcade game featuring robots playing football, and it’s been one of my favorites since my college roommate and I spent hours on a cabinet in the Union at Kansas State.
In a previous blog, I wrote that one of the highlights of spending several days with my dad at our booth at the Columbia Mall in the mid-1980s was the arcade. I spent more time in that dark room with flashing, bright lights then I did helping the old man, dumping quarters into Track & Field, Wild Gunman, Rush’n Attack and Super Mario Bros.
Most of my memories of the various malls my parents worked revolve around the arcades. At the Northtown Mall in Springfield, Missouri, it was hours of 10-Yard Fight (a painfully slow-moving football game). At White Lakes in Topeka, it was Tecmo Bowl, Showdown, John Elway Football and Galaga. At Westridge Mall, it was Offroad and Arch Rival.
In thinking about this blog, I tried to determine exactly when I fell in love with video games and arcades. Really, everybody who grew up in the 1980s and early 1990s had that addiction.
My first memory of a video game is an old Asteroids machine at a small café in Fort Scott, Kansas. I was 7 or 8 years old, and my father and I were in town for a craft show. Per the usual, we were out and about at 6 p.m., way too early to set up, and stopped there for breakfast. Dad gave me a quarter to play, and I was far more interested in the game than the biscuits and gravy (probably the only time that’s happened).
A few years later, my brother and I were hooked on an old Atari the kids at our neigbhors/babysitters left behind when they graduated from high school and moved out. By that point, we also went on an annual trip to Springfield a few weeks after Christmas. While Mom shopped and Dad watched her shop, my brother and I were grinding away at U.S. vs. Russia hockey, Pacland and BattleZone at the Battlefield Mall.
Now, my father never played video games, at least as far as I knew. He did hit the slots at the casino and loved play money poker on the Internet, but I never saw him play Nintendo or touch a video game cabinet.
However, while interviewing him shortly after we learned he had terminal cancer, I discovered that the apple indeed does not far fall from the tree. As I’ve written, the old man got into a lot of trouble stealing in his formative years. One of the questions I always wanted to ask him was the obvious one: Why? Why did you start stealing?
“Well, I started when I had a newspaper route in Baldwin. I was 8 or 9 years old,” he said. “I started stealing some money from my route. It was a way to get more money, and I wasn’t getting caught.”
But, why? Why would you steal a few dollars here and there when you’re already making decent money for somebody that age?
“Because I loved pinball,” he said. “I’d take the change and go play pinball all day long. I was addicted to it.”
Suddenly, the love for video games made sense.