Pac-Man Fever

In the beginning, there was Space Invaders. I don't know for sure if Space Invaders was the first arcade video game I ever played but I can't remember playing any other game before it so for the purposes of this blog post, it was the first. Maybe it was at a pizza parlor or a bowling alley (duckpin bowling, of course) or in the back of a drug store. Somehow, somewhere I started playing video games by dropping 25 cents at a time into Space Invaders machines.

I was lousy at it. I never could get used to using buttons to control the direction of my ship. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get beyond those buttons. But because there was pretty much no other video game worth playing, I continued to play Space Invaders whenever I had a spare quarter or two. Until something better came along.

Then in either 1980 or 1981, my parents took me and my sister on a trip to Orlando. We hit the Magic Kingdom, Kennedy Space Center and some more off the beaten track attractions like Gatorland Zoo. But one of the big highlights for me on that trip was the arcade at our hotel. I'm not talking one machine here, I mean a whole room full of video games and pinball machines. And in the midst of all those wonderful lights and sounds stood a single Pac-Man machine. My world would never be the same again. Sure I played more than just Pac-Man on that trip, but that was the game that hooked me.

Super Potato: El Dorado or mirage?

Pac-Man was the first video game that I loved. It was simple enough to do relatively well at but difficult enough that if you really got on a roll and cleared six or seven screens you felt euphoric (this was before I learned the game had patterns that could be deciphered and beaten relatively easily) and probably got to enter your initials on the machine when you got a new high score. Above all it had a joystick, not buttons. In the couple of years after that Florida trip, I spent a lot of time playing video games at arcades and I always went for the games with joysticks. Pac-Man. Crazy Climber. Rally X. Donkey Kong. Frogger. Dig Dug. Ms. Pac-Man. Mario Brothers.

Little did I know at the time, but all those games I loved were products of Japan. Taito. Namco. Nichibutsu. Nintendo. Konomi. It's been a long time since I've played any of these games although I admit to sneaking a peak on ebay every so often to see if there's a Crazy Climber or Frogger machine for cheap to be had (if only I had somewhere to put one...) but I thought maybe one of the districts of Tokyo might be crazy enough for me to find one of those machines and re-live a bit of my childhood years.

If this seems like a crazy notion, it's not. While video game arcades in the United States have gone the way of Pac-Man running into Blinky, not so much in Japan. There are Sega and Taito video game arcades all over Tokyo alongside restaurants and shops and 7-11 after 7-11 after 7-11. I thought why not try to find some classic video games to scratch a 35 year old itch while I was in country.

Yes, I get that 3330 is a pathetic score at Galaga but it wasn't all my fault.

Turns out I was in luck. While there was nothing doing for me at Taito or Sega, there's a spot down a side street in Tokyo's Akihabara district called Super Potato which allegedly had what I was looking for. I had to make a stop here, albeit with low low expectations. While in my wildest fantasies I had visions of playing for a couple of hours on all the old machines I loved (and doing very well I might add), I realistically prepared myself for something much less than what I would have loved to find. 

Find Super Potato's storefront (and by the way, how great a name is Super Potato?) and you'll notice it's not at street level at all. This is a condition which in my experience is pretty unique to Japan although let's face it, I'm likely lacking in experience worldwide here. You can't just look at whatever bar or restaurant or store is at street level; there are likely to be five or six more businesses up above the sidewalk. And sure enough, two levels above ground level, there's a sign for Super Potato, with (enticingly enough) Pac-Man himself chasing Blinky and Inky.

Find the front door by walking down a very very beige corridor and taking the twisty windy narrow staircase at the back to the third floor where you'll find the beginning of your Super Potato experience. Third and fourth floors are a video game store so let's skip those after a quick posed picture with the giant Mario statue on three and head right to floor five, which is advertised as the "Retro Game Center." This is what I came 6,500 plus miles to find. The anticipation is palpable at this point.

I am glad my expectations were set suitably low but I did find a small pot of gold. No Pac-Man, no Crazy Climber, no Frogger but there were some games I used to play: a single Galaga machine, one Super Mario Brothers machine and one Donkey Kong machine. Good enough. Let's get to it.

I am no longer very good at video games. My 13 or 14 year old self would not be very proud. I'm embarrassed to say that I could not make it beyond the first level of Donkey Kong or Galaga, although I did manage to get to level 2 in Super Mario Brothers (that Nintendo I picked up after college and played for what might have amounted to months of solid play in Cooperstown helped a lot there I'm sure).

I have some good reasons for my lack of performance and I swear they are not excuses. First, I was never very good at Galaga although I certainly spent my fair share of time beyond the first level. Secondly, the two lives that you start with (rather than the customary three; who starts a video game with two lives??) and the fact that I only played once really killed me. And Donkey Kong was just a case of a malfunctioning joystick which I swear cost me at least one life per game (I gave up after four tries).

30 minutes, four games of Donkey Kong, one game of Super Mario Brothers and one game of Galaga. In the old days I would have played for about two hours with that sort of selection and it would have cost me $1.50 rather than the 600 yen I spent in Tokyo (that's about $5.50; yes, it was about a buck a game). Times have changed and I'm really OK with that big picture. I'm also OK with my time at Super Potato. It wasn't very successful and I for sure hoped for more but it was fun just the same. I'm going to continue to check out the old machines on ebay every now and then.

Another Game Over. It's the joystick, I swear.