Random Encounters: Neon and Noise - Part 1

Atari, Arcades and the NES

The Sound and the Light

The memory hits me like a wave of painful nostalgia. I’m standing at an arcade cabinet with a crowd of adults around me. I was seven years old and I was getting farther in this game than most of the adults around me could get. I could hear them talking about me as I flew through the trenches of the Death Star and blew away vector-based TIE fighters.

“This kid is nuts.”
“How is he even doing this? I doubt he even knows what he’s really doing.”
“He’s been playing this a long time. I can’t believe he’s got this far.”
“Now he’s in the zone with this game.”

The seven-year-old kid, totally focused on blowing away neon-colored enemies and avoiding spiky balls of pain.

This was my stomping grounds. This was my hangout. This was the place that felt like home, even to a seven-year-old boy in an arcade of the early 80s. I spent many quarters and a lot of time there.

I can still feel the rumble of the machines and the AC kicking on during the summer. The gloominess of the darkness intercut with the neon lights and CRT glow of the screens. Even during the day it was dark in the arcade, because there were no windows outside the doors leading in from the big mall entrance. But I came here as much as I could because this was the place I loved to be. It had an energy that is hard to describe to people who have never really been in an arcade of that time. The neon, the noise, the feeling of just being there is not something that’s ever been replicated since. It’s of its era. It’s something that will not return.

Before the Nintendo dropped in 1987, this is how I preferred to play games. Even after the NES came to my room, I compared the games to what the arcade versions were like. In the case of many of the arcade conversions, they were better, gameplay-wise, than their home counterparts. But that wasn’t the case with the 2600 games of that era.

Home Consoles Were Never Quite Enough

I had an Atari 2600. Or I should say my brother had a 2600. It didn’t go in his room, like my NES did in later years, but stayed in the living room as a family machine. I do think I played it more than he did, but who knows. The 2600 tended to be played as a family, with my brother and me playing whatever game was in, and my mom and her friends in the background, watching and chatting.

These memories hit me when I picked up and started playing an Atari collection recently. The games just didn’t feel like I thought they should. My nostalgia for these games is piercing and mixed with loss, but I didn’t look at them as “games.” I had to stop and figure out why.

Unlike the later consoles, like the NES and the SNES, the Atari 2600 was played as a family. There were times I played it alone, but generally when I played it, my brother and my mom were there with friends and family in tow. This generation of consoles, at least for me, tended to be played together with other people. We would either take turns on the various games while the adults sat in the back watching us and chatting. They would sometimes take turns at the games themselves, but more often than not they’d watch my brother and me play. The Atari 2600 was a familial system, not something I played by myself or with one or two other kids.

Then Things Changed

By the time the Nintendo came out, my mom wasn’t really into video games anymore, and I was banished to my room with my NES and a series of garage-sale televisions. I didn’t think about it at the time, but the social aspect of gameplay had totally left. So when I picked up these games now, that aspect was gone. And the nostalgia I feel for them isn’t for the games themselves, but for the longing and loss of family.

On the other hand, when I was in the arcade, I was playing the machine by myself and on my own. Outside a few specific instances where a crowd gathered behind me to watch—like when I was playing the Star Wars arcade game above—it was mostly just myself or one or two other people.

I look back now and the games I want to play aren’t the ones that I played with my family at home, but the ones I played in the arcade. I think part of that is because I don’t have that specific family anymore to play with, and like it or not, it brings back a memory of a time I can never have again. With arcade games, at least, I can relive this just a little bit.

Next Week: Neon and Noise Part 2. In which I go into more of my early gaming memories.