Matt OsbornLast week, my son had a birthday. He is the typical modern-day 11-year-old. He is constantly on the computer playing Minecraft or Roblox (Fortnite has apparently fallen out of favor). He’s got a cell phone that’s filled with games.
Over the years, our house has acquired practically every console imaginable. He plays the latest Madden, NBA 2K, and WWE games on the Xbox One and the PS4, and even plays NCAA Football 14 on the PS3.
But it wasn’t until his 11th birthday that he played his first game of pinball.
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I was born in the late 70’s, so all my main childhood years were slap in the mid-to-late ’80s. The Stranger Things kids — that’s the wheelhouse. And, like many my age, that show is my childhood on screen. Star Wars toys, shopping malls, food courts, and, most definitely, the arcade.
My town had two shopping malls, which meant two arcades. One was called the Barrel of Fun. And yes, you walked through a barrel to go in.
Aladdin’s Castle was the other. I had a birthday party there one year. I went to probably a hundred others. It looked something like this.
Pac-Man. The superior Ms. Pac-Man. Galaga. Punch-Out. Defender. Dragon’s Lair. Rampage. Double Dragon. Those three steering wheels on Super Offroad. In the later years, Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter. Skee ball. And all the pinball games — Star Wars, Star Trek, Funhouse, and the almighty Pin-Bot.
The pinging and beeping. The sound of tokens hitting the metal plate of the change machine after it ate your dollar. A roll of quarters might as well have been a brick of gold. It was heaven for a 10-year-old.
But it wouldn’t last. By then, Nintendo had hit the streets. Mario, Double Dragon, and the rest were all at your house now. And Punch-Out now had Mike Tyson! I specifically remember being in Barrel of Fun as I tried to convince my parents to buy me the new Wrestlemania game for the original Nintendo. I’d have to give up a ton of allowance, which meant the arcade fund would be gone. It didn’t matter.
That was 1989. The arcade wasn’t dead yet, but the end had already begun. Soon enough, Aladdin’s Castle and the Barrel of Fun (which tried in vain to hang on as something called the Cyberstation) would be gone.
Strangely, video games led the way to modern living. They were sending kids home decades before things like Amazon, the internet, and Netflix would send their parents home too. The arcades died first. The shopping malls are next. The one housing Aladdin’s Castle closed nearly ten years go. The one that had the Barrel of Fun is just barely hanging on.
But, as with everything, the old becomes new again, and the nostalgia for the old arcade has returned, due no doubt to Stranger Things and other ’80s centered media. Walmart is even selling smaller-sized arcade replicas of all kinds of classic games. Ours has a Pac-Man on display. We always stop for one round each.
And though no longer in a mall, the arcade still lives, usually attached to a restaurant, amusement park, go-kart track, or putt-putt course. Most of the games now are ticket-based, and, strangely, many are just larger versions of games from your cell phone. Think Fruit Ninja or Candy Crush on a huge flatscreen — it’s a bit bizarre. But if you look hard enough, you can usually find an old Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga machine and maybe even a pinball machine or two. Just be ready to pay four quarters a game.
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Which brings us to last week. It was a school night, so we had a quiet little birthday dinner at a local restaurant. And then we found ourselves at one of the beachside go-kart tracks. The track was closed for the season, and there was hardly a soul there. But the arcade was open. And the boy played pinball for the first time.
Duck Newton
