Classic Gaming article in todays local Sunday News

[NE146]

Came across this article about 80's arcade games while perusing the Seattle Times Sunday paper tonight (yes tonight) and located the article online. I particularly liked it because it pointed out another local spot that has games that I hadn't heard of yet Guess I'll check it out later this week :P

http://archives.seattletimes.nwsourc...6&query=galaga

[Rev. Link]

That's always cool to find stuff like that in your paper. A while back I saw a story in the Cincinnati Enquirer about a classic gaming show that I'd never heard of before.

[Sanriostar]

Need to register... just for a single article. a local post here on the MB's? Please?

[NE146]

Need to register... just for a single article. a local post here on the MB's? Please?

Fine... :P Here the full article:

Arcade blast: 'Asteroids'

By J. Patrick Coolican
Seattle Times staff reporter

For Hannes Schindler, the old arcade game "Galaga" conjures up Matthew Broderick in the campy Cold War film "War Games."

Schindler, a Seattle bartender and entrepreneur, vividly remembers Broderick's teenage character playing "Galaga" at a 7-Eleven before he saved the world from nuclear devastation; the film's message - hitting us on the head with all the subtlety of a mallet - that if a computer can teach itself that nuclear conflict is unwinnable, so can we.

Schindler's game, though, he said recently at Shorty's bar in Belltown, was and still is 1979's "Asteroids," wherein a spaceship, represented by a triangle, flies through darkness avoiding and destroying asteroids, which are graphically depicted as rudimentary geometric shapes.

"Grand Theft Auto," this is not.

"I remember 'Asteroids' was the game. There'd be a line. Then you got your chance, and everyone was watching and then you died right away. And a quarter was a big deal then," he said.

Schindler, 31, is not alone in his enthusiasm for retro video games and pinball. At hipster bars around Seattle, a whole new generation of fans is playing games like "Fantasy Island" pinball, "Ms. Pac-Man," "Donkey Kong," "Galaga" and "Centipede" in smoky bars like Shorty's and the Lava Lounge in Belltown, Playland on Capitol Hill and the Twilight Exit in the Central Area.

Arcade nostalgia types revel in the games' simplicity and the simpler times they evoke, when America's enemy wasn't some amorphous, stateless thing called terrorism, but an "evil empire" of a familiar ideology; when the "Star Wars" trilogy was something to revere rather than ridicule; when Nashville had no hockey team.

It's hard to play one of these games and not get wispy visions of Jeff Spicoli with his mouth on a water bong or Mike Damone spouting his four rules of dating in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High."

In love with Ms. Pac-Man

Marc McArthur - Beastie Boys emblazoned on T-shirt - was coming to Shorty's so much to play "Ms. Pac-Man" he decided it would be easier to just get a job there, so now he's a bartender. He allows himself only one game a day because of "Ms. Pac-Man"-induced wrist ailments, he said, pantomiming the joystick motion.

In "Ms. Pac-Man," the eponymous character - a simple circle with a munching maw - moves through a maze, chased by what look vaguely like ghosts.

At one time, this was big-time, wiz-bang technology.

"I just can't imagine not playing," said McArthur, 29, moving his clenched fist in a circle, as Run-DMC belted out "My Adidas" on the jukebox.

His high score on "Ms. Pac-Man" is 326,380. (Another draw to these games is their deeply meaningless, arbitrary scoring systems.)

Across town at Playland on Capitol Hill, J.P. Koren, 20, was playing "Asteroids" while he waited for the doors to open for a hip-hop show at Noiselab. Although Koren was just a tyke when Cyndi Lauper sang "Time After Time" over the sound of "Asteroids" at mall arcades, he's a convert to classic games.

"It's all about these. I don't want to deal with some $5 game," he said.

He noted that although the games are inherently simpler, lacking an epic quest or NFL opponent, they can also be more challenging. The games usually involve one simple task - destroying asteroids or space invaders, gobbling up dots or fruit, jumping over barrels - that the gamer must perform faster with each successive screen.

It's hard to know how much of this ancient technology is still around. A leading video-game analyst, NPD Group, doesn't track the old games, said Dora Radwick, a spokeswoman.

Marcus O'Farrell of Space Age Amusement is a main local supplier. He has about 100 of the old games and is looking to buy more. He leases them to high-tech companies that put them in their break rooms, and bars, from which he takes a small commission on the monthly quarter haul.

Back at Shorty's, which was designed to look like the inside of a pinball machine and can feel about as airless, Kat Zapata was playing "Gilligan's Island" pinball in the back room, where there are 12 pinball machines.

"Pinball is technical and mathematical," she said. The simple objective in "Gilligan's Island" is to get the boat home. Zapata uses her knowledge of geometry to make the ball hit the bumpers at certain angles, giving her more points. Given her high score of 396 million, the three-hour tour has apparently turned into a few three-hour pinball games for Zapata. She spends $20 on pinball each visit.

McArthur, the bartender, said when he works days, people head to the back room to play pinball, not so much as glancing at the bar.

The owners, Martha and Ewoud Vanderwerf, are pinball aficionados whose annual pinball tournament Nov. 9 is expected to draw at least 65 players.

The tables at Shorty's are old pinball games, the menu almost exclusively hot dogs, the jukebox filled with Iggy Pop, Sex Pistols, Ramones, Dean Martin.

"If you were a sly business you could make more money with the square footage, but that's not what we're trying to do here. We're doing pinball," Ewoud Vanderwerf said. They take in about $150 a month in quarters from one popular pinball game, he said.

But Vanderwerf spends countless hours maintaining the games, he said, because one in disrepair isn't worth playing.

'They take you back'

Back in the front of the bar, Steve Bray, Angie Iler and Joshua Russell were playing classic video games as they do at Shorty's three or four times a week.

"There's like 80 different clubs in a three-block radius, and we come here," said Russell, a marketing manager at Redhook Brewery with fashionable chin hair.

Bray savors the simplicity of games like "Centipede," in which centipedes make their way through mushrooms while the player tries to shoot at them. (Creative genius like this went on to fuel the high-tech revolution.)

"It's nice to come back to a simpler game that's not a 30-hour quest," Bray said.

Russell agreed. "They take you back. When your mom was grocery shopping, this was the baby-sitter."

"Yeah, this is what happens when you let video games raise your kids," Iler said with a laugh.

"Yeah, we're not very smart, but we have great hand-eye coordination," Russell replied, referring to every kid's argument for getting a new Atari, the old home video game console.

Meanwhile, Schindler was still playing "Asteroids." His goal is to get to 100,000. His high score so far is 94,000. "I want to see if it will reset," he said. What he means is that he's wondering if the score will flip back to zero when he gets to 100,000, the classic video game equivalent of the Y2K bug.

The suspense must be killing you.

J. Patrick Coolican: 206-464-3315 or jcoolican@seattletimes.com