Wavelflack
04-23-2004, 12:41 AM
(This is a meandering account of some of the adventures my cousin (and best friend) Mike Blomquist and I participated in. He passed away a few months ago, after a long battle with brain cancer. He was 26.)
When making our frequent sweeps of arcades and convenience stores, my friend Mike and I managed to consistently amuse ourselves with low level "mild" vandalism. Sometimes it would be an act of retribution, retaliating against a game that robbed us of a credit or had a "cheating cpu" (early SF2, for instance). The punishment meted out for such a violation of our trust might be something as innocuous as gum pushed down between the buttons and their outer casings (rendering the buttons sticky or stuck, and therefore worthless, and therefore unplayable, and therefore unprofitable). Occasionally the violation would be so severe as to require a proportionally severe punishment, such as a melted joystick. We placed at least ten burning cigarettes on the control panel of a local Rastan machine (they weren't even the ones we were actually smoking--they were for the sole purpose of burning trenches into the panel). It's crime? I guess that it was nearby and on, and had a flat enough control panel to support burning cigarettes being placed on it. The machine ended up looking like the Western Front.
Why would we attack the cabinets? In retrospect it seems ridiculous, especially in light of the fact that the program itself was the source of the problems. The cabinet was merely an innocent bystander (perhaps "unwitting accomplice" is more accurate, since they are at least physically linked), but it was there all the same. Besides, we couldn't exact revenge on the program code itself, now could we? It was locked down in a few ROM chips, protected by the citadel of the cabinet.
So you take action against the cabinet.
It was street justice.
This is why people continue to throw controllers against walls.
Additionally, it's much more cathartic (and practical) than carrying around a big 'Mission: Impossible' patch rig and a bunch of hex editing equipment and eprom burners. Destructive tantrums are also more impressive to your friends (an important point). No one will ever be offered the chance to smoke cigarettes with the cool guys over by the pay phone on the basis of his changing the "B" in line 38,723 to an "F".
Anyway, not all of the damage was done in the name of the righteous. Most of it was done purely for juvenile amusement. I'm still amused by it today, so perhaps it also qualifies as adult amusement. Or perhaps I don't qualify as an adult. It doesn't really matter.
What does matter is that we would do something like, say, put all of our cigarette butts in the coin return door, on the presumption that we might happen to be nearby when a person:
A. Used that machine
B. Had to retrieve a rejected quarter.
Sure, the chances were slim, but the potential rewards were phenominal! Imagine actually being there when some poor kid has his coin run all the way through and has to get it out for a second try! Initially, he would probably wonder why the game wasn't operating, because he never heard a coin hitting the bottom of the chute! Because the coin actually hit a bunch of filthy disgusting cigarette butts!
Eventually he would come to the inevitable conclusion (an experience shared by all kids who have spent their money unwisely on arcade games) and realize that the machine "took my fucking quarter".
(Those are, by the way and without exception, the precise words that form in every person's mind at that moment. They actually see those words in their head, just as clear as if it were printed on a wall. Verbatim. Word for word. Non-english speaking persons see a high quality subtitled translation in their mind. The blind see a series of raised dots appear in their head, but they also see a braille asterisk directing them to a braille footnote questioning why they were playing a videogame in the first place.)
Anyway, the kid would then dutifully reach into the coin return door to be greeted by an avalanche of ashes and stale burnt tobacco. And filters. We always wished we could be there when it actually happened, but that gag never seemed to culminate in our presence.
Before I go further, I should point out that not all of our exploits ended up damaging or defacing property. Sometimes the games themselves allowed you to be a dick! And what dicks we were! One of our favorite things to do would be to get in line to play Street Fighter 2 (the original version) at the local Pic Quik. This was, of course, back when SF2 was hot hot HOT!!
There were always lines of kids waiting to play, and a row of quarters across the front of the machine. We would finally get up to the machine, beat the kids (we took turns, trading off each match), and wait until one of them came along who was determined to beat us. The kid would secure his place at the machine by feeding it a ton of quarters in a row. Everyone else would have to wait until his credits ran out before it would be "their turn".
(BTW, I forgot to mention that we would play as Guile. He was used only when we had a potential situation such as this. The rest of the time it was mostly Ken..)
Once the match started, we would make sure to do the "Guile handcuff" trick. For those who aren't familiar with this (it was fixed in later editions of SF2), it allows you to permanently link both characters. They jump together, they move together. They are separated by a small distance, and so you cannot touch the other. In other words, the battle can't be won. Ever. The machine is effectively locked up. The kid has to forfeit his credits (hopefully it was a lot of quarters!) because all you can do is unplug and reset the machine. The best part of this (and this is why we picked that location to play at) was that the Pic Quick staff would not allow people to unplug or reset the machines. That means that not only did the kid burn all of his quarters into nothing, but everyone else in line is now out of luck! Time to go home!
You can't just play SF2 forever, and word was getting around about that "trick" anyway, so you go back to other games and give them "what for" whenever they deserve it, as well as when they don't deserve it. Bubble Bobble deserved it. We tossed at least ten bucks worth of quarters into that machine in an attempt to beat it, only to get hopelessly mired in an unbeatable trap (an enemy got stuck in a part of the screen where you can't go, and so you never pass the stage. Ever.) Evenutally, and after more quarters lost, we proved to our satisfaction that the situation could not be salvaged, and we gave up. The only thing we could think to do to ease the pain was to melt the ball off the joystick. We didn't quite succeed in getting it to melt completely off, but by using two lighters each (four altogether), we managed to make it catch fire and melt into quite a deformed blob. This was in a gameroom at a convenience store, in case you wonder how we did that without being massively busted on the spot.
In the end, though, I figure we put exponentially more money into those machines than we ever cost for maintenance or repairs. True, we were both pricks and should have been punished in our own right, but that never happened. We got older and stopped abusing the machines. We grew up. In fact, I purchased a couple of arcade games myself. The first game was a tremendous bargain--a full upright Pac Man cabinet that had a faulty vertical sync wire to the monitor. It was priced at $40, but I still talked the guy down to $30. I think he just wanted it out of his garage. He did manage to suggest that it may be a collector's item, but I pooh-poohed that and pointed out it was defective in any case. Heh.
The second arcade game I purchased was another lucky break. A few years ago I sold cars for a small local car lot. The owner (my boss) brought in an old cigarette machine for a decoration. It was a classy old-style machine, and I asked him where he got it. He told me that his father owned a vending company, and they were getting rid of a bunch of stuff. He told me I could have a cigarette machine if I liked. I told him okay, and asked if his dad had any arcade games to get rid of. He got on the phone, and then turned it over to me.
As it turned out, the father had a handful of arcade games he was willing to part with, and due to my association with his son, they would be cheap. I asked what games he had, and he named ten or so. Mostly old stuff I didn't care for--Pepper 2, things like that. He DID have a Rastan machine in the bunch, and that caught my attention. "Does it work?" I asked. "Oh yeah. They all work." I asked what he wanted for it, and he priced it to me at $125. A good deal, in my opinion. He also offered to drop it off at my house and save me the effort. I readily agreed.
After work that day, I drove straight home in anticipation of my prize. Money in hand. The delivery truck showed up and unloaded my beauty. While it was being lowered via Tommy Lift, I could already see what I could not have imagined a minute before.
Densely adorning the control panel surface were...
...cigarette burns. Trenches of tar-laden melted plastic. All over the place.
At least ten of them.
When making our frequent sweeps of arcades and convenience stores, my friend Mike and I managed to consistently amuse ourselves with low level "mild" vandalism. Sometimes it would be an act of retribution, retaliating against a game that robbed us of a credit or had a "cheating cpu" (early SF2, for instance). The punishment meted out for such a violation of our trust might be something as innocuous as gum pushed down between the buttons and their outer casings (rendering the buttons sticky or stuck, and therefore worthless, and therefore unplayable, and therefore unprofitable). Occasionally the violation would be so severe as to require a proportionally severe punishment, such as a melted joystick. We placed at least ten burning cigarettes on the control panel of a local Rastan machine (they weren't even the ones we were actually smoking--they were for the sole purpose of burning trenches into the panel). It's crime? I guess that it was nearby and on, and had a flat enough control panel to support burning cigarettes being placed on it. The machine ended up looking like the Western Front.
Why would we attack the cabinets? In retrospect it seems ridiculous, especially in light of the fact that the program itself was the source of the problems. The cabinet was merely an innocent bystander (perhaps "unwitting accomplice" is more accurate, since they are at least physically linked), but it was there all the same. Besides, we couldn't exact revenge on the program code itself, now could we? It was locked down in a few ROM chips, protected by the citadel of the cabinet.
So you take action against the cabinet.
It was street justice.
This is why people continue to throw controllers against walls.
Additionally, it's much more cathartic (and practical) than carrying around a big 'Mission: Impossible' patch rig and a bunch of hex editing equipment and eprom burners. Destructive tantrums are also more impressive to your friends (an important point). No one will ever be offered the chance to smoke cigarettes with the cool guys over by the pay phone on the basis of his changing the "B" in line 38,723 to an "F".
Anyway, not all of the damage was done in the name of the righteous. Most of it was done purely for juvenile amusement. I'm still amused by it today, so perhaps it also qualifies as adult amusement. Or perhaps I don't qualify as an adult. It doesn't really matter.
What does matter is that we would do something like, say, put all of our cigarette butts in the coin return door, on the presumption that we might happen to be nearby when a person:
A. Used that machine
B. Had to retrieve a rejected quarter.
Sure, the chances were slim, but the potential rewards were phenominal! Imagine actually being there when some poor kid has his coin run all the way through and has to get it out for a second try! Initially, he would probably wonder why the game wasn't operating, because he never heard a coin hitting the bottom of the chute! Because the coin actually hit a bunch of filthy disgusting cigarette butts!
Eventually he would come to the inevitable conclusion (an experience shared by all kids who have spent their money unwisely on arcade games) and realize that the machine "took my fucking quarter".
(Those are, by the way and without exception, the precise words that form in every person's mind at that moment. They actually see those words in their head, just as clear as if it were printed on a wall. Verbatim. Word for word. Non-english speaking persons see a high quality subtitled translation in their mind. The blind see a series of raised dots appear in their head, but they also see a braille asterisk directing them to a braille footnote questioning why they were playing a videogame in the first place.)
Anyway, the kid would then dutifully reach into the coin return door to be greeted by an avalanche of ashes and stale burnt tobacco. And filters. We always wished we could be there when it actually happened, but that gag never seemed to culminate in our presence.
Before I go further, I should point out that not all of our exploits ended up damaging or defacing property. Sometimes the games themselves allowed you to be a dick! And what dicks we were! One of our favorite things to do would be to get in line to play Street Fighter 2 (the original version) at the local Pic Quik. This was, of course, back when SF2 was hot hot HOT!!
There were always lines of kids waiting to play, and a row of quarters across the front of the machine. We would finally get up to the machine, beat the kids (we took turns, trading off each match), and wait until one of them came along who was determined to beat us. The kid would secure his place at the machine by feeding it a ton of quarters in a row. Everyone else would have to wait until his credits ran out before it would be "their turn".
(BTW, I forgot to mention that we would play as Guile. He was used only when we had a potential situation such as this. The rest of the time it was mostly Ken..)
Once the match started, we would make sure to do the "Guile handcuff" trick. For those who aren't familiar with this (it was fixed in later editions of SF2), it allows you to permanently link both characters. They jump together, they move together. They are separated by a small distance, and so you cannot touch the other. In other words, the battle can't be won. Ever. The machine is effectively locked up. The kid has to forfeit his credits (hopefully it was a lot of quarters!) because all you can do is unplug and reset the machine. The best part of this (and this is why we picked that location to play at) was that the Pic Quick staff would not allow people to unplug or reset the machines. That means that not only did the kid burn all of his quarters into nothing, but everyone else in line is now out of luck! Time to go home!
You can't just play SF2 forever, and word was getting around about that "trick" anyway, so you go back to other games and give them "what for" whenever they deserve it, as well as when they don't deserve it. Bubble Bobble deserved it. We tossed at least ten bucks worth of quarters into that machine in an attempt to beat it, only to get hopelessly mired in an unbeatable trap (an enemy got stuck in a part of the screen where you can't go, and so you never pass the stage. Ever.) Evenutally, and after more quarters lost, we proved to our satisfaction that the situation could not be salvaged, and we gave up. The only thing we could think to do to ease the pain was to melt the ball off the joystick. We didn't quite succeed in getting it to melt completely off, but by using two lighters each (four altogether), we managed to make it catch fire and melt into quite a deformed blob. This was in a gameroom at a convenience store, in case you wonder how we did that without being massively busted on the spot.
In the end, though, I figure we put exponentially more money into those machines than we ever cost for maintenance or repairs. True, we were both pricks and should have been punished in our own right, but that never happened. We got older and stopped abusing the machines. We grew up. In fact, I purchased a couple of arcade games myself. The first game was a tremendous bargain--a full upright Pac Man cabinet that had a faulty vertical sync wire to the monitor. It was priced at $40, but I still talked the guy down to $30. I think he just wanted it out of his garage. He did manage to suggest that it may be a collector's item, but I pooh-poohed that and pointed out it was defective in any case. Heh.
The second arcade game I purchased was another lucky break. A few years ago I sold cars for a small local car lot. The owner (my boss) brought in an old cigarette machine for a decoration. It was a classy old-style machine, and I asked him where he got it. He told me that his father owned a vending company, and they were getting rid of a bunch of stuff. He told me I could have a cigarette machine if I liked. I told him okay, and asked if his dad had any arcade games to get rid of. He got on the phone, and then turned it over to me.
As it turned out, the father had a handful of arcade games he was willing to part with, and due to my association with his son, they would be cheap. I asked what games he had, and he named ten or so. Mostly old stuff I didn't care for--Pepper 2, things like that. He DID have a Rastan machine in the bunch, and that caught my attention. "Does it work?" I asked. "Oh yeah. They all work." I asked what he wanted for it, and he priced it to me at $125. A good deal, in my opinion. He also offered to drop it off at my house and save me the effort. I readily agreed.
After work that day, I drove straight home in anticipation of my prize. Money in hand. The delivery truck showed up and unloaded my beauty. While it was being lowered via Tommy Lift, I could already see what I could not have imagined a minute before.
Densely adorning the control panel surface were...
...cigarette burns. Trenches of tar-laden melted plastic. All over the place.
At least ten of them.