I've got the winner

I managed to do a very quick rundown of my gaming life and somehow completely left out arcades, which is totally unfair. I left out lots of things that I hope to cover eventually, but arcades had a huge influence on me and other kids growing up in suburbia.

As a suburban kid I was a little atypical in that I was always ready to venture outside the air conditioning for some sports or adventure, but even so I wasn't too fond of actually going anywhere. Playing baseball in the street or riding to the playground a block away was enough usually to burn hours of summer. But if I had a handful of quarters or five bucks (usually thanks to grandma - birthday money is the best) I would take that bike all the way across town to Southridge Mall where there was a video arcade.

Early arcades were pinball machines with a few Pacman machines stuck in them, and later arcades were the skee-ball ticket emporiums with a couple of Soul Calibur machines stuck in the back. In the middle time period were the arcades of glory where players would compete against each other in games of skill. Occasionally someone would visit the arcade who had a tremendous amount of skill with one game, and they would 'hold court' at the machine challenging all comers. The rest of us would stack our quarters on the edge of the plexiglass covering the monitor as a way to hold our place in line to try and unseat the champion.

In retrospect the games came and went pretty fast, but at the time they were all-encompassing. Figuring out the secret levels for Defender, the best strategy for Joust or Qbert, and later, learning all the secret finishing moves for Mortal Kombat. I didn't have a console during this time so instead of the A-B-A-B-up-down-etc. Nintendo cheat codes I was learning forward-down-forward-highpunch so that when I beat someone with Sub-Zero he would tear out their spine. It was one thing to do this against the computer, but when someone you're playing against was a real jerk and they deserved special punishment, you could add insult to injury and burn them to ashes or rip out their still-beating heart after a match and rub it in. Yes, this occasionally started fights.

But all of this PvP stuff was temporary - what really ranked up there on a list of arcade achievements was holding the High Score. When a machine wasn't being played it would rotate through a few screens advertising itself, and then show the list of high scores for the game and a three-letter name that someone could enter to identify them as the person who earned that score. Everyone had an acronym at that time, and we used to identify people by these schortcuts. "Oh hey, look out - BBQ just walked in and he's headed for John Elway." My abbreviation was usually DRV, and I was sad every time the machines were reset for maintenance and my initials were erased from the leaderboard.

The arcades started to close at the end of the 80s and the ones that survived were franchised and used tokens instead of quarters. Eventually they started shedding the cost of rotating out games and switched more of their stock over to skee-ball and coin drop games that ate your tokens quickly but spat out tickets that you could exchange at the counter for cheap toys. But I didn't want toys, I could just buy them with my five dollars. I wanted adventure and glory, and my three initials at the top of the leaderboard - a piece of recognition that as a kid you couldn't get anywhere else and lasted longer than a pack of gum.

The arcades died but the kiosk games didn't. They're still around here and there, sometimes they have fake guns mounted on them as controls, or overly cartoonish graphics and loud noises to pull in the quarters from little kids. They aren't respectable enough to have their own pieces of real estate anymore and they hide out in the corners of airports, bowling alleys, and the airlock entrance ways to hotel pools. Sometimes you'll find an old game that you spent hours mastering and you can pop a few coins in and leave your DRV on the leaderboard among the dozens of identical entries left by the night janitor.