The Hitchhikers Guide to Unseemly Video Arcades

For those unfamiliar with arcades before the onset of Dave & Busters, they were dimly lit halls of idle distraction where you could skip school and smoke.  They routinely smelled terrible and were run by surly, cantankerous old men who despised having to work with snotty teenagers complaining about the machines eating their quarters.   They were dark, musty pits of isolation and noise that wasted your time and money a quarter at a time.  They were fantastic. 

What makes for a good arcade has little to do with high technology and clean restrooms.  The good ones get more out of a well-tuned Ms. Pac-Man than a million state-of-the-art 3D racing games.  The great ones let you play tic-tac-toe with a chicken. 

The Korean Gangster Billiard Hall
Here, everything was cheap: Pool ($7/hour), pinball (25¢ for 6 turns), their hacked versions of Street Fighter.  They had one of the last rotary payphones in circulation.  Korean businessmen would play carom billiards while dangling cigarettes from the furthest corner of their mouthes.  Occassionally skirmishes over ball placement and trick shots would break out only to be interrupted when we sheepishly complained about the rotary phone not working or a pinball machine getting stuck. You could always hear muffled shouting matches from the back room.   The "slots were loose" so to speak in that you could play pinball for hours on end with the same quarter. 

Wheaton Mystery Storefront
Eerie and unsuspecting, it looked like an abandoned clothing store covered in window tinting from the front.  Inside, it was a dark and smokey abandoned clothing store lined with video games, half of which were in serious disrepair.  Others lay prostrate with their electonic innards exposed.  You could touch the right switch to get a free game of Yie Ar Kung fu.  Graffiti kids would congregate there to compare tag books.  The whole place definitely had a Miri aspect to it; children left to their own devices, to run amok, and this is where they come to congregate for who knows what.

Any Beach Boardwalk
Boardwalk arcades have a special place in my heart as they offer a refuge from the constant popularity contests surrounded by sand, sun, and schlock merchandise.  It might seem paradoxical to travel somewhere specifically for sunshine and water only to hide away in darkness on land, but it just feels right.  Each boardwalk has it's merits, from Coney Island's Russian junk merchants to Point Pleasant's pseudo-casino games, but sometimes all you need is a chance to blow away virtual junkies with a missle launcher to remind you that you don't need to swim in chicken farm runoff to have a good time. 
 

—May 9th, 2010

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