Arcade game enthusiasts introduce the 1980s to a new generation

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/JOHN SYKES JR. - A time-lapse zoom in Sherwood's Z82 Retrocade game arcade.  020714
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/JOHN SYKES JR. - A time-lapse zoom in Sherwood's Z82 Retrocade game arcade. 020714

Push start.

Pac-Man, 33, Donkey Kong, 32, and dozens more old-time video games set a trendy retro mood for the latest rediscovery, the 1980s.

Bright prints are back. Knit hats are back. And no revival of the decade would be complete without its ding-dangest contribution to pop culture, the video arcade.

Some people step back in history, but games players hop and run back 30 years, to where the action is: at Z82 Retrocade in Sherwood north of Little Rock, and Arkadia Retrocade in Fayetteville.

Players buy admission as if to a museum, and the games are free. Tournaments, birthday parties and other special events add bonus points. Otherwise, the experience is like when John Travolta had greased hair, and going to the arcade was a night’s entertainment.

“It seemed we actually could pull this off and even make a modest living,” Arcadia Retrocade owner Shea Mathis, 38, says, “and sure enough.” Friends and family helped him get started about a year and a half ago.

Partners Daniel Solis, 43, and Terry South, 50, opened Z82 Retrocade in June after years of fixing other people’s machines. They founded the Classic Gaming Association, whose members meet at the arcade.

“We’re both veterans of the arcade industry,” Solis says. “We both know how these games should play, how they should sound, how they should look.”

The name Z82 comes from Z80, a microprocessor, and year 1982, Solis explains. Arcade machines gathered more quarters than all the slot machines in Las Vegas that big year, he says.

Soon after, the arcade games business took a wrong turn, just like Pac-Man. Wah-wah-wahhh! Arcades went the way of Culture Club and the Reagan administration. People stayed home with their game consoles.

Some of the old games endure in places where people have time to kill, in coin-operated laundries and movie theater lobbies.

Bars and fun centers have games along with other attractions. But old-time arcades have been gone so long, a person might need a bonk on the head to remember what the idea was.

ARCADE (n.): An emporium of coin-operated games and amusements. The earliest were called penny arcades for machines that operated on a one-cent coin.

Yesterday’s video arcade was the place to find the most and the newest games crammed side-by-side: Tail Gunner, Astro Fighter, Moon Shuttle, Tetris, Centipede, Dragon’s Lair.

Not since Dirk the Daring of Dragon’s Lair came back to rescue Princess Daphne has there been such a return.

PLAYER ONE. GET READY.

Rob Maerz keeps watch on the comeback of classic arcade games as the owner of Retrocade Magazine, based in Pennsylvania.

“There are those that grew up with these games that either never lost interest or are now rediscovering these games from their childhood,” Maerz says.

Games alone won’t draw the crowd they did before, he says, but games plus something extra have a new chance.

“‘Barcade’ is the newly coined word for bars combined with arcades, mostly in bigger cities, such as The Max Retropub in neighboring Tulsa.

“This works because the kids of the ’80s are now in their 30s, 40s and 50s,” Maerz says.

The something else is a Kong-size number of games at Pinballz in Austin, Texas, which claims 200. The American Classic Arcade Museum at Funspot in Weirs Beach, N.H., scores more than 300.

The classics still offer “a challenging game play that kids of all ages can enjoy,” Maerz says. And arcades of all kinds revive a lost part of what the old games were all about.

“We’ve lost the social aspect of gaming,” Maerz says. Snazzy as they may be, home consoles are no way to meet new friends, watch the best players, learn how to beat the machine.

“I actually feel sorry for kids today that most likely will never experience the social atmosphere that the arcade had to offer in the early 1980s,” he says.

PLAYER TWO. GET READY.

Yesterday’s dim arcades weren’t always the classiest hangouts. Along with the tweeping and clatter of the games, was the crunch of potato chips underfoot. And who ever sanitized the crusty buttons? (Solis cleans constantly, and worries about dust in the pinball machines.)

But here was a place, Mathis remembers, where a boy’s mom might turn him astoundingly loose in the shopping mall. He not only remembered, he clung to the once-impossible dream of owning an arcade game.

Out of work and thinking of what to try next, Mathis says he remembered his three childhood dreams that never happened: to have a comic book store, a video store, or to open a games arcade. Scoping out his chances like a tank gunner in a game of Battle Zone, he blasted the first two schemes.

“There’s no money in comic books,” Mathis says, “and we all know what happened to video stores.”

Mathis names Tron his favorite of more than 100 games on the floor. Tron is based on the 1982 Disney movie in which Jeff Bridges wound up inside a computer. The movie flopped, but the game is a work of art in gaming circles.

“Tron is one of the best, most beautifully designed,” Mathis says. “My big brother drove all the way to St. Louis one night to surprise me with this Tron machine.”

“This Gorf right here,” South says, pointing to the treasure among his and Solis’ close to 60 games at Z82 Retrocade, “is my favorite game from when I was a teenager. It was at the corner grocery store.”

Gorf (Galactic Orbiting Robot Force) is the one where the laser-blasting player works his way up from Space Cadet to Space Avenger. South doesn’t mean the game in general, though: He means this exact game, the result of a Gorf-like rescue mission to find it.

He assembled the cabinet and electronics from parts of two or three hard-sought Gorf games, one being the game he played at a grocery store in Mountain Home.

INSERT COIN TO CONTINUE

The level-one challenge to having a retro arcade is how to collect a roomful of these old machines.

The owners cite eBay and Craigslist online, game collectors’ auctions, word-that-gets-around, junked-up garages and back shops, and a willingness to go where the games are - to play Night Driver for real.

EBay, for example, lists a Ms. Pac-Man for $560, a Galaga for $699, an Asteroids for $899. But level two is how to make the old games work like new, and level three is to keep them working.

At Z82, South and Solis based their partnership on a background of coin-operated machine repair.

“He [South] is a true, real technician,” Solis says, “and there are very few left. My big contribution is restoration.”

Inside the game cabinet is a spaghetti mass of wires and circuit boards. Outside - colors and decals that have to be exactly right to have the real thing. One perfect red is what makes their red-cabinet Donkey Kong more of a rarity than a blue-cabinet Donkey Kong.

Level four is to explain why anybody would go back to the blocky-looking graphics and children’s-book-simple objectives that were all the old games could manage. Why not stay home and play much more narrative and realistic-looking games on home video, and now smartphone applications?

“These [old] games were designed to kill you quickly,” Solis says. “They challenge you on a level that games now just don’t. They’re simple to learn, but very difficult strategically. They gave you just enough satisfaction to put another quarter in, or because you were mad that you got killed so fast.”

Solis demonstrates the game of Donkey Kong by running through the first three levels, never once bonked by one of the barrels that the big ape keeps rolling down the ramp.

The game’s supposed object is to rescue Pauline, the damsel in the gorilla’s clutches. To more accomplished gamers - “electronic athletes” Solis calls them - the object is a “kill screen.” Keep playing long enough, the game ends for lack of memory. The machine has nothing left. The player’s name goes on the arcade’s board of winners and legends.

But there’s always another game - even for the games business.

The reason almost nobody ever manages to kill the screen, Solis says, “is these games weren’t supposed to end.”

Z82 Retrocade is at 4051 E. Kiehl Ave. in Sherwood, phone (501) 864-7457.

Arkadia Retrocade is at 1478 N. College Ave. in Fayetteville, phone (479) 445-7844.

Retrocade Magazine is at retrocademagazine.com.

Style, Pages 23 on 02/18/2014

Upcoming Events