bithead redux

I graduated from High School in 1983. I was an arcade rat.

I was that kid that would stick my quarter on the machine while you were playing to claim the next game. I would stack up 4 quarters to lock it up for the next 4 games.

Yeah, I guess that could be seen as a dickish move, but it was the custom at my main arcade, a small arcade located next to the Safeway in Oak Harbor, the biggest town on Whidbey Island. I was from Coupeville, a tiny town south of there, 10 minutes away in my white VW Rabbit.

My favorite game was Tempest. I got good at it, and I felt that it was my duty to make sure that the top three scores on the list — the only scores that survived the machine being turned off — were mine.

At my arcade, we called that “owning” a machine.

I owned the Tempest machine.

I loved getting into a groove with the machine, running up a really good score with one man — so intense in my concentration that when I finally made a mistake and lost a man, it would shock me, and then I’d realize that there were 6-7 people behind me, watching me play.

I put a lot of money into that machine.

A Tempest machine is a bit of a temperamental machine. They had to be taken care of. I kept finding them in bars with unusable controls. Tempest uses a wheel, known as a “rotary encoder,” rather than a joystick. This was one of my favorite features — the control you can get with one is incredible. But Tempest machines in bars always had horrible wheels. When you spun them too quickly in one direction, your man would move in the opposite direction. This was always a recipe for a frustrating game. I usually walked away from those without finishing.

Eventually I just stopped trying, and didn’t play anymore.

More to come.