Aging
Yesterday, I turned 36. After dinner at Millennium , Pocahontas and I didn’t have much of an agenda, so we wandered to the Sony Metreon to see if maybe there were any interesting IMAX films playing.
There weren’t, but I’d heard tell there was a Dance Dance Revolution game there, so we sought out the arcade.
As a lad, I enjoyed playing video games, but gave up in the late eighties when every new game was copying Street Fighter, save maybe the ones that were coping Gauntlet. Whatever happened to each new game inventing its own genre?
So I’ve pretty much been away from arcades for some 15 years… I’d played DDR only twice before, once when my friend Johnzo took me to a dirt-cheap arcade in Portland, and another time on a friend’s Playstation.
The machines don’t even take quarters anymore — there are magnetic key cards. When I heard $5 was the minimum purchase and that’d get me only 2 games, or $10 for unlimited play of anything for the next 90 minutes, I turned around and was walking out. Pocahontas encouraged me to stay and play, and, heck, it was my birthday, so she was paying.
And we had a really great time.
I played DDR. And some fanciful taxi-driving game in which jumping ramps and hitting glowing things bestowed special powers like giant tires that let you roll over other cars, flight, a jet engine… that was a theme also in a street luge and a snowmobile game we played.
In Hyperbowling, one operates a giant bowling ball-sized trackball to roll your bowling ball across various city landscapes. I only played in ancient Rome — San Francisco looked much harder — you have to roll it uphill, dodging cable
cars.
One game was something like Extreme Skateboarding, in which the controller was a skateboard mounted an something like a giant joystick/paddle in which it could tilt in any direction as well as turn.
Then there was a Retro Room, in which half the games were after my time. I played a couple of games of Joust.
In a Slashdot thread on a new release of Nethack I was distressed to read one commenter say
I first tried playing Nethack a few years ago, and I couldn’t stand it. I’m a huge fan of RPGs and MUDs, but I just couldn’t get the whole nethack thing. For those of you who don’t like it either, try Falcon’s Eye (or another Nethack GUI—there’s many!)
Nethack’s an extraordinarily complicated game using ASCII graphics, in which the player is represented by an @ and beats up on monsters represented by all the letters of the alphabet. I spent a lot of time in college playing it. So that comment left me with a profound “Kids these days” sentiment. What, they don’t have a long enough attention span to play a game without graphics? Why when I was a kid, we used to hunt the wumpus in text and we were lucky!
But the calls to update the graphics were retroactively made somewhat worth it by this :
If they do, I can’t wait to see the fully raytraced, mip-mapped hi rez @ sign brutally attacking the letter Z.
But, anyway, after playing what kids these days are growing up with, I can see how the appeal of, say, Joust (or Tempest, or Centipede, or Time Pilot, or Frogger…) could be lost on them.
We had to ask the attendant how to do simultaneous two-person play a couple of times. I had the sudden horrifying realization that any 11-year-old would know how to do that and would be rolling his or her eyes about someone not getting it.
And I’m not used to that.
Happy birthday Zed!
That post made me nostalgic for the old days of playing Zaxxon, Galaxian, Dig Dug, Tutankham, Berzerk, Marble Madness... ah, the list goes on.
But I'm only a year younger than you, and I never got into Nethack either. Playing Empire on the old Unix workstations at RPI, on the other hand, now that was a blast.
Nowadays I see the inside of an arcade maybe once every three years or so. But I've got Sim City and Civilization at home to keep me busy.
Posted by Jimcat on October 16 2003 05:47
I feel your distress. I came to the realization a while ago that the videogaming world has long since passed me by. I'll content myself by working on getting a latter-day case of Space Invaders Wrist.
Oh, and happy birthday!
Posted by CT on October 16 2003 07:13
Zed! I worry that I accidentally skewed your evening's experiences by neglecting to note that the Sony Metreon holds three DDR machines.
I can't stand the noise of the "PortalOne" arcade, which holds two DDRs with perhaps six songs apiece, and dislike the magcard payment system. But a third, better machine, which runs on quarters, resides a floor above, near the entrance to various theaters. I use that one.
But the Retro Room is cool. There used to be air hockey!
Happy birthday!
Posted by Sumana on October 16 2003 08:16
If they do, I can’t wait to see the fully raytraced, mip-mapped hi rez @ sign brutally attacking the letter Z.
Once, in a fit of having too much leisure time, I used Norton Utilities to hack the binary of the PC version of Larn. I found the data segment where the program kept its strings, and changed all the descriptions of the monsters, making sure that they fit in the available space. My favorite was renaming the floating eye as a "big letter E".
Posted by Alan Bostick on October 16 2003 09:36
Happy birthday, Zed (hey, we're the same age!). I, too, am confounded by the new breed of video games.
For a while there, about five years ago, I used to go to Sega Playdium once in a while. I'd stick to games of a more "analogue" nature, like some of the less complex shooting games, the ski race thingy, and good ol' fashioned air hockey.
Posted by jen on October 16 2003 10:25
Thanks for the birthday wishes, folks!
The Metreon Arcade's Retro Room does still have Air Hockey and I schooled Pocahontas in a couple of games. "I've never seen you like that," she said of my crazed aggression and competitiveness.
I knew we're the same age, Jen, from your blogchalk and remembering your talking about it being our year (and, like Joey, I prefer "Ram.")
And thanks for reminding me about Empire, Jim -- in thinking about old games I was trying to remember what was the name of that strategy game reputed to be so compulsion-inducing that a corporate executive power-cycled the mainframe rather than let a turn in which he was going to be slaughtered complete?
Posted by Zed on October 16 2003 11:16
And my thanks to you for the link to that cool history of Empire. Now I understand why Scanner said that "Empire is just an improved version of Hammurabi." It wasn't just a figure of speech! So all of the turn-based strategic "empire building and combat" simulations out there can trace their ancestry back to Hammurabi. Pretty neat.
Posted by Jimcat on October 16 2003 13:29
Oh wow, happy birthday, Zed!
Folks, if you think he's agressive and competitive at Air Hockey, don't play this guy at Foosball either. ;)
The Slashdot thread about Nethack had me falling off my chair laughing. Now here's a game that had a persistent world before all these massively multiplayer online role-playing games came along. I mean, how often does a nethack adventurer run across the ghost of a previous character? And can you do that in modern games? :)
I've also given up on current arcade games like some of the other commenters, but I still break out Mame every once in a while for nostalgia. The experience's not quite the same without a joystick, but it's close enough...
Posted by Pomru on October 16 2003 15:30
In my school days, if I could find a friend or few logged in, it would be time for a quick round of 'hunt' (multiplayer frag-each-other-in-a-maze game, with charming ASCII graphics and very nice gameplay). If anyone ever makes a web version of that, I'll have a new addiction to cope with.
Posted by Dan on October 16 2003 15:31
Happy, etc.
Know what's funny?
Until this post, I thought you were in your twenties.
For what it's worth.
Replying to another commenter, the appeal of Joust, Frogger, and Tempest, can never be lost.
Hey, is there an emulation I can get on my 'puter?
Posted by Gary Farber on October 17 2003 11:10
I hear MAME is good. You can get games for it here . I oughta check it out myself some time...
Posted by Zed on October 17 2003 14:29
=v= Happy belated birthday, Zed! I think I celebrated my 36th at Millennium, too. Also, I, too, was born in the Year of the Ra. (but only if you parse that as a regular expression).
Posted by Jym on October 24 2003 16:51