Greetings, beautiful party people of the world wide webbernets! Even though I write about modern video games and, from time to time, also work on modern video games, I consider myself a retro gamer at heart. I grew up on Nintendo and SEGA, and my generation was the last who can say that they remember true arcades. There was something magical about the ambiance of walking into an arcade; the dim lighting, row-after-row of vertical boxes with fading CRT monitors, the sounds of bleeps, bloops, and quarters dispensing from machines… man, I miss arcades.
I grew up not far from an Aladdin’s Castle, which was an arcade chain owned by Namco. It was also my personal safe haven during a period in the early-to-mid-1990s where being a “gamer” was akin to being a “nerd,” and being a video game nerd who played D&D at recess and stayed up until midnight on school nights to watch Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, I took any safe place my nerd-self could find.
Enter Aladdin’s Castle at the Genesee Valley Mall in Flint, Michigan.
It was a massive chunk of floor space that was dedicated exclusively to video games. Right when you entered you were greeted by two massive Jurassic Park machines – the kind that were themed after the Jeeps, where you’d have to climb in and sit down. Along the wall nearest the ticket counter were all of the classics from the arcade’s golden age: Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Burger Time, Joust, Star Trek, Time Pilot, Zaxxon, and Tron, among others. Along the other wall is where you found all of your “modern” racing games – namely Ridge Racer and Daytona USA. There was a motorcycle game, too, but I never played it.
Aladdin’s Castle is where I was introduced to the earliest incarnations of what we today call eSports. Local Street Fighter 2 (Super Turbo Hyper Alpha EX USA #1 Go! Championship Remix Edition, probably) tournaments every Friday, where the prize was little more than the right to stay at the machine to take on the next challenger. Eventually Street Fighter 2 became Marvel vs. Capcom 2, but the result remained the same. I stank the joint up. A hundred Fridays, and not a single win to show for it.
It was the first time I saw video games as something more than a quarter-chomping time sink. There, huddled around the tall box with faded art and yellowing screen, people from all walks of life had come together for the sake of playing video games. You had the poor kids from the inner-city, the rural rednecks from Montrose and Mount Morris (yes, Michigan has rednecks, too) and the rich kids from Flushing (a well-to-do suburb). After the weekly tournaments started earning sponsors, you had high school kids driving up from Detroit, and down from Saginaw, to compete for the paltry sum of $100 and a case of Bawls.
Many jokes were cracked. Many Bawls were busted.
My small group of friends and I would spend just about every weekend during the summer at that arcade. When they opened their eatery and little dining area (where the Skee-Ball machines used to be), it was as if our every wish had come to pass. Sure the food tasted like greasy cat food and all of the colas were watered down with enough ice to solve California’s drought, but it was sustenance. It was all we needed. We had video games, we had food, and we had each other, our friends. As we gnawed on overcooked pizza and undercooked hamburgers, we’d seriously contemplate the logistics of moving in and living amongst the cabinets so that we’d never have to leave. Every time, though, one of us (usually my friend Malcolm) would remind us about needing to eventually shower, and we’d agree that no showers was a deal breaker.
Today, being a regular convention attendee, it brings me no shortage of relief to know that I was always conscious about my hygiene. Not that I feel compelled to drive that point home again, or anything.
Of course, times changed. They have a habit of doing that, after all. As we grew older and we all came into the possession of this newfangled “PlayStation 2,” our weekly trips to Aladdin’s Castle became daily trips to each other’s houses. Daytona USA was traded in for Gran Turismo 3, and although there weren’t too many games that supported all four of us to play at once, part of the fun became dicking around on the PC and looking up stupid videos (a real skill in the days before YouTube) while taking turns on NFL Blitz.
We were in high school when Aladdin’s Castle was closing up shop, and by that point the four of us didn’t really talk too much. One of us had joined the Drama Club. Another had become a Jock. The third had dropped out and started home schooling. Myself, the fourth, hung out with the stoner kids and spent my lunch hours writing stories in composition notebooks. But that last week of Aladdin’s Castle being a thing, we went back for one more nostalgia trip to reminisce on how life always seemed so much easier when all you had to worry about was whether or not the coin dispenser could break a $20.
Christ, that place was depressing. The carpet, stained and worn, peeled off the concrete floor, and the whole place smelled musty. It also wasn’t as bright as it used to be. The neon signs above the ticket stand were dormant, as were the lights inside the empty glass display cases. The food stand had, thankfully, been long closed but the aluminium picnic-style benches remained. The classic games along the side wall were all shut down, most of ’em having “Out of Service” signs taped to their screens, and the two massive Jurassic Park machines had been replaced with a couple of Dance Dance Revolution platforms.
Have you ever seen video of a chimpanzee being given building blocks and them staring at the things because they have absolutely zero idea of what to do with the damn things? That was us with DDR. We tried it, sure, but the end results were… not pretty. This was the age immediately before the iPhone became a staple of modern life, thankfully, so no video exists. But trust me – it was bad. But we played, and we talked about our memories of the place, and we took a detour to the Sbarro’s in the food court because if we were going to replicate our childhood then we needed awful pizza. We talked, we laughed, we cracked inappropriate jokes. Despite the fact that we spent five days each week in the same damn building, it was the first time in years that we had all hung out.
Then we left. As quickly as the day had started, it ended, and we retreated back to our cliques and never hung out as a group again. Aladdin’s Castle closed three days after the fact, and the space in that mall would become the site of a pop-up Halloween shop.
For a while after, I thought arcades were dead. Sure, you have your Gameworks and your Dave & Busters, which try to emulate the arcade feel, but they never really felt… I don’t know, “right” to me. Dave & Buster’s very much feels like a bar with arcade machines thrown in to keep you drinking, while Gameworks is too bright, too colorful, too sterile. They’re filled with these behemoths of machines that act more like simulators than arcade games, and now each turn costs $1 or more. There is no life in these places, no purpose. They, for a lack of phrasing, lack a soul.
A proper arcade is very much like a proper dive bar, where everything has wear and tear. It’s not dirty, but it’s been lived in. There are scuffs on the floor, and scratches on the walls from moving the machines. The paint has chipped and faded on the outsides of the cabinets, but the screens remain absolutely pristine. There are no overhead lights during business hours, as the combined lights from the machines make that room glow like a technicolor sun.
I don’t think we’re going to ever have those again – not like we remember them. But thanks to some places, like EightyTwo in downtown Los Angeles, and other arcade-themed bars out there, those of us who grew up during the height of the arcade boom once again have a place that caters to us. It’s dark, it’s grungy, it’s primarily illuminated by the sea of arcade cabinets pulled straight out of 1982. These kinds of arcades may never catch on outside of major urban centers, like Los Angeles and New York (though Seattle, Portland, and Austin are ripe for some of these), but they do exist – and they exist primarily for us.
It’s not about the games. It’s never been about the games, to be perfectly honest. I played some real stinkers at Aladdin’s Castle just because they were new, and they were pretty, and they were there. No, the appeal of the old arcade was always the environment. It was always the dim lighting, the cacophony of sound, and the slight chill in the air. But those are mostly gone now, replaced with Xbox LIVE Arcade and PlayStation Network.
But at least it lets me play Time Pilot while sitting on my couch, so, you know… got that goin’ for me.