The posting of the young kid narrating his Dad's arcade machine purchase got me thinking about the nostalgia of those years and I dug up this write up I did on my blog a few years back.
A Different Excalibur and Holy Grail
Few things were as awe inspiring in my pre-teens as the mighty "roll of quarters". It was every arcade playing kids' dream. If the fantasy of having our own arcade was the "Holy Grail" then the mighty roll of quarters was "Excalibur". The similarity to "Excalibur" wasn’t just in status and power but in difficulty because getting your hands on a roll of quarters was about as difficult as pulling old "Excalibur" out of the stone.
1981, unlike 2009, wasn’t an age of endless game restarts on graphically state of the art home consoles or computers. This was a time when the best game graphics could only be found in one place, the arcade. Arcade games cost you 1 quarter and for that 1 quarter you generally got 3 lives. Packed in that wondrously tight roll of spiraling paper were 40 shiny coins with the picture of some old broad. One roll represented roughly a full day of gaming nirvana. There were games you were good at and those where you sucked so bad 1 minute was considered a crowning achievement.
Arcade culture had its own codes of conduct. If someone was already playing a game you wanted to play you would put your quarter at the bottom edge of the glass. This signaled to everyone else that you were “next”. Now, there was an exception to this rule called “Big Kids”. If a “Big Kid” decided he was going to play again you really didn’t have much say in the matter, you basically waited until he was done. If you didn’t, you could lose your quarter or get thumped but usually you just got ignored and your quarter would sit there until you finally grabbed it back. If you were unfortunate enough to be waiting while two ‘Big Kid’ buddies were on, you were usually better off just coming back later.
For those who weren’t into arcade games (IE girls, with freakishly few exceptions) it is hard to describe what it was like to stand in front of an arcade machine with joystick in hand and buttons at the finger. It was every arcade kids hope that the next game would be the one that put them into “The Zone”. Most games were fairly predictable and it was expected that each game you would get a little better as you learned the patterns of the enemies. Every once in a while, you could get into a state where distractions didn’t matter, every move was perfect and you felt slightly detached from the game, almost as if each enemy move was pre-determined and you were the only one in the know. This was “The Zone” and it was a blessed state. “The Zone” could strike at anytime. Even in mid-conversation with all manner of distractions, “The Zone” would take you for a ride and dump you off much further in the game than you had ever been. If there was anything better than being in “The Zone”, it was being in “The Zone” with a crowd of kids around you checking out your “radical skills”, completely oblivious to the fact that you were just “fluking out”.
Every arcade had its masters who would strut around the arcades like knights in a village of serfs. These were the guys whose names became neighborhood legends and whose feats had awe inspiring labels like ‘kill screened Pac-Man’, ‘glitched Galaga’ or ‘looped Kong’. Guildford’s master was Calvin. Cal was a spindly tall black kid with an always messy afro and dirty jean jacket who smelled like a walking ashtray, but he was amazing. There wasn’t an arcade machine in any arcade or corner store around Guildford that Cal hadn’t mastered. Watching Cal was truly an invitation to witness greatness. From the moment he inserted his quarter you could see ‘The Zone’ taking Cal away. To an outsider, Cal’s movements probably seemed spastic. To someone in the know, it was a complicated dance of war that was always perfectly in sync with the game. Cal was so good he would win most games on one man. The rare times where he was on his 2nd or 3rd man were usually due to trying out some complicated move that would eventually lead to an even faster win or more points next game.
I remember Cal trying to tell me about the nuances of Pac Man during one of his marathon mastery sessions of the game.
“You just need to follow the pattern and you can get pretty far in the game,” he said. “But when you get to level 256 you can’t go any further.”
He told me this casually, as if getting to level 256 was somehow achievable for me or other mere mortals. An achievement for me was just getting past level 6.
In the pre-teens there were exactly two sources of income, collecting pop cans and Mom. Collecting pop cans was great in theory, but once removed from my goldmine route of North Surrey, the collections were a lot leaner. Sure, there were the neighbors that would give you some empties but you couldn’t use that as a daily source of revenue. You could find the odd cans on the side of the road but dumpsters were no longer something to be seen diving in. Most of the time, you were lucky to scrounge together two or three games worth of pop cans. Mom on the other hand, represented the possibility of four or eight games. Still, this wasn’t going to get me ‘Excalibur’. What I needed was a way to make my own money.
In 1982 here in Vancouver, BC there were three major provincial newspapers, “The Province”, “The Vancouver Sun” and “The Columbian”.
One day I saw a kid named Eric playing Donkey Kong at Macs with a seemingly endless supply of quarters in his pockets.
“How did you get all those quarters?” I asked.
“I got a paper route,” he said, “I make about a hundred dollars a month”.
My jaw dropped. “One-Hundred dollars?”
I don’t remember what he said next. I only remember being solely devoted to the task of getting a paper route of my own. One-hundred dollars was grown up money and I was pretty sure you could buy anything you wanted with it. In those days, commercial paper routes were still given to kids as a form of employment (some would argue slave labour) before they were legally entitled to work. Nowadays, it’s primarily adults delivering the big commercial newspapers in their cars but back in the 80s the big papers were delivered by kids pulling paper carts or in a paper bag slung around the shoulder.
It was about 2 months of waiting before I got my first real job as a paperboy for “The Columbian” newspaper. I would deliver every morning, six days a week, to a five building apartment complex. Now, method of delivery wasn’t the only difference between paper routes in the 80s and now. Collecting was another huge difference. Nowadays, paper carriers get a cheque mailed to them every month but back then paperboys had to do collecting.
Collecting involved going to each of your subscribers and asking for the money due for that month. The papers had it worked out so that the first 60 to 70 percent of your collections went to them first and the 40 to 30 percent left over was your money for services delivered. The problem was that the first 60 to 70 percent were usually the easiest to collect. They were the nice grannies or housewives who kept track of all their bills with fridge magnets or the people who appreciated seeing a young kid “earning his keep” and would even throw in a tip from time to time.
The 30 to 40 percent left over on the other hand were comprised of dead beats, drug addicts, or people who read their paper everyday but somehow weren’t ever home when it was time to collect. When they were home they would usually lie or yell or both.
I nervously approached the door and knocked four times. A middle aged man with greasy combed back hair opened the door.
“What do you want again you little ass turd?” he said.
I looked up with the most innocent look I could muster. A look usually reserved for Mom when caught red handed doing something I wasn’t supposed to. “I’m here to collect for this month.”
“I told you to come back next week when I get paid you little ---steaming pile of meadow muffin---!” he said, slamming the door and sending the strong smell of alcohol and skunk like incense into my face.
“What you told me yesterday was to come back tomorrow,” I thought.
These encounters only served to create the phenomenon among paperboys of “deficit spending”. Most of us would collect and spend along the way until our debt was paid (usually well into the next month). Of the one-hundred or so dollars you were supposed to earn you would be lucky if you ever saw half that. I would continue delivering the morning newspaper for another 5 years for “The Province” after “The Columbian” went out of business. I would also go on to develop “battle tested” methods of dealing with the deadbeats but those are tales for another day because the most important moment was that first collection.
I walked into the bank beaming with pride. My pocket was filled with an assortment of coins and one, two and five dollar bills. When it was my turn to deal with the banking lady I laid two heavily creased five dollar bills on the counter.
“I would like to get a roll of quarters please,” I said.
She looked a little puzzled as most people came in to exchange coins for bills and not the other way around.
“Laundry coins for mom?” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
The lie was much easier than getting into any detailed explanation. All I wanted was that roll in my hands and the glory that would be mine.
I walked into “Circuit Circus” that day with a noble stride. The serfs milled around the arcade with their paltry sum of quarters clutched protectively in their hands, cautiously contemplating their next game. The knights strutted around confidently with their quarters, knowing they would be in for a good long game no matter which game they picked.
I, on the other hand, was a lord. I had a mighty roll of quarters and it wouldn’t matter if I was good or bad because I had the sheer volume and weight of coins to outlast them all. I took out “Excalibur” and cracked it on the rail as effortlessly as cracking an egg and shoved the discs of silver in my pocket. Was “Excalibur” not merely iron? Could iron not be smelted and re-forged as I wished it, nay as I demanded it? I was drunk with power, perhaps I was more than a lord.
The best way to describe how I felt is to imagine an “impulse buy” and that tingling feeling in the pit of your stomach. You know you don’t need the item but damn it all, you want it! You know there will be consequences but they will have to come later because you want it now!
The endorphins coursed through my body as the bleeps and blips raced through my ears and strobes of pulsating light filled my vision. I remember being in “The Zone” on a few games and I also remember blowing through others with the hapless grace of a drunken tree frog. I also remember the sinking feeling when I plunked that last quarter into Tempest, six sweat-soaked hours later. I was then firmly back to earth and panicked after my first real bout of “deficit spending”.
It didn’t matter though because for those few hours I was a King and the arcade was my court.
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Topic: Excalibur and the Holy Grail (Read 1374 times)
