Pizza & Pac Man

My first arcade game was at Pizza Hut and it was a cocktail table Pac Man game.  It sat by the emergency exit door, on the path to the bathroom.  It was a treat to play it.  I wasn’t good at it but played it with my brother or family friends.  On Friday nights, we would go out and Pizza Hut was a frequent node in the loop. 

Pizza Hut was cozy – there was a round fireplace in the center of the dining room.  A chain mail mesh curtain protected the dinners from sparks.  There was wood paneling and booths with red vinyl bench seats and fancy fake Tiffany lamps that said ‘Pizza Hut.’  It was not a subtle interior.     

Pac Man was a highlight of that evening out.  We maybe got four quarters to share. They’d sit on the glass table top while we played. It was my first video game. I’d get eaten by ghosts when stuck in the corner of the maze listening to waka waka waka.  It took me a while to get the hang of working the joystick and buttons. 

Arcade video games came forth in the 70s.  They were coin operated and housed in wooden consoles. Space combat games were the first ripple – Galaxy Game and Computer Space – and they were commercially unviable.  Then came Pong  in 1972 – the first successful arcade video game.  Ripples rolled into Space Invader swells and crested with Pac Man. The golden age of arcade games blinded us with quarters and invaded our dreams with waka waka. 

It’s hard to imagine that skee-ball and pachinko are cousins of Pac Man.  Games of skill for amusement’s sake were commonplace in fairs since the 19th century.  Coin-operated automated amusement machines lead to penny arcades and their racy mutoscopes.  Skee-ball and pachinko are both redemption games.  Skee-ball spits out tickets to be redeemed for crap. Pachinko is a form of low-stakes, low-strategy game that skirts Japan’s strict laws against gambling.

Arcades were always dens of youthful iniquities from pinball to Dance Dance Revolution. The arcade bar is the latest incarnation where you can play with quarters or tokens and run up a bar tab.  I prefer freeplay arcades where you pay a flat fee for a day of play.  The bug-a-boo for any arcade these days is maintaining the glorious old machines. If you want to play a certain game, you might want to call and make sure it’s working.