Arcades: a blast of the past
Amid changes and decline, some game galleries retain allure
NASHUA - The floor is shaking. Booming.
Up on the green-and-pink stage at FunWorld, a 15-year-old chases exploding arrows in her black sneakers.
Left . . . left . . . right . . . forward . . . pause.
Right . . . right . . . back . . . left . . . pause.
Neon pink light occasionally blasts. Digital voices offer encouragement: "You're getting better!" "You're doing great!"
After three rounds of this game - Dance Dance Revolution, or DDR for short - Mena Lothi steps down, stretches her legs, and takes a seat.
"It constantly gets you moving," says the Lowell teen, slightly out of breath. "The beat of the music, all you gotta do is follow it."
Once, this was a place where pinballs never stopped pinging; where Pac-Man gorged and never got his fill. Today, though, arcades have become a fading symbol of Americana: Digital bad guys beckon from across empty, soda- splotched carpets; Donkey Kong stands still with his barrels; plastic rifles remain in holsters, unfired.
Yet, still, here in these noisy, neon-drenched savannahs, a small, nimble-fingered and prize-seeking breed endures.
Today's avengers and conquerors are still mostly teenagers, mostly male. Nostalgia draws the rest - moms and dads and grandparents who fondly recall the hours they spent squinting over Centipede and Frogger.
Just pad up the stairs, for instance, to the second floor of FunWorld. There, in a corner to the left, you'll find 31-year-old Anthony Kittrell blowing up dinosaurs alongside his 5-year-old son, Kayne.
"There it is - reload, reload," the Fitchburg resident exclaims from his seat in "The Lost World" booth, red gun aimed.
Parked nearby in a stroller, his other son, curly-haired, 14-month-old Isayah, fusses, pacifier bobbing.
On the screen, dinosaurs of all types blaze in garish shades of orange and red. Suddenly, a velociraptor approaches, all sharp teeth and snarl.
"Oh! It got me! Get him! Get him!" Kittrell blurts out.
A few minutes - and several felled dinosaurs - later, Dad disembarks. "It's to keep up the tradition," he says. Kayne emerges within seconds, blue gun gripped in his small hand. "Daddy, I died again," he says.
All around them in the three-story castle, consoles blap, zap, and chime in a digital symphony.
Teenagers fire at aliens and vampires; speed in sports cars; feed armloads of white tickets into voracious machines.
Rows of hyperactive screens - devoid of players - whir and beckon on endless loops in distorted Technicolor. Car motors grind. Occasional exclamations of "Charge!" come from somewhere below.
On the second floor, toward the back, Chris Chabot rockets along two-lane blacktops in the simulated racing game Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune.
Hands gripped around a half-sized wheel, he roars at 170 miles an hour in a flashy blue Nissan with an explosive 720-horsepower engine. As he drifts and knocks into walls, the bass box under his seat blares and booms.
"It can get insane," the 17-year-old says after climbing out of the driver's seat, hands jingling the tokens in his pockets. "You feel like you're really doing it."
Experiencing such fantastic unreality is the lure for many arcade rats - including Chabot's friend Michael Morash.
"There are things you can do here that you'd never do in real life," asserts the Nashua 18-year-old, thicket of light hair tamed by a baseball cap, skull keychain glaring from his back pocket. "That's the thrill of everything."
His favorite game is Gauntlet Legends, a slash-and-hack challenge in which players collect "Runestones" across four realms and seek out the underworld-skulking Skorne.
At the moment, however, he's blasting alien intruders on a giant screen.
Up above in a landscape of stars and gray spaceships, yellow and red rays dart up, down, and sideways. His legs bobbing with caffeine, Morash relentlessly squeezes the double triggers on a ray gun.
Despite such violent spectacles, arcades are overall "stress-free, which is awesome," he says as he shoots, eyes fixed on the enemy. Although he spends many hours at hometransfixed with his PlayStation 3, he finds more variety here in this whirring, colorful cacophony.
At home, "What's the thrill?"
You'll hear that philosophy voiced by those still operating in this coin-and-tokenindustry.
They'll discuss the boom time in the late 1970s and early 1980s: Back then, there were 10,000 arcades across the United States, explained Michael Rudowicz, president of the American Amusement Machine Association in Chicago.
But then, doom: In the mid-1980s,
Since then, the number of arcades across the country has plummeted to just over 3,000, said Rudowicz.
Around here, many survivors cluster near the seashore - there's Joey's Playland in Salisbury, Lucky 7 Arcade in Gloucester, and several more along the strip at Hampton Beach.
Now consider a few of the casualties: Amusement Arcades at the Burlington Mall; the Good Time Emporium in Somerville.
Still, there's a niche, and manufacturers continue to produce between two and three new games a year, which devour quarters at movie theaters and family entertainment centers. Many vintage games, meanwhile, have migrated to the homes of collectors, with an increasing number of them willing to pony up between $100 and $5,000 for their thumb-cramping favorites, including pinball machines.
But ultimately, home games can never fully replace the old boxy favorites, asserted reigning pinball champion Bowen Kerins. While Grand Theft Auto players can sit for 60 hours fueled by Red Bull, at arcades, "you get in quick and have fun fast," said the expert flipper, from Salem, Mass.
Bill Irwin is all for that simplicity.
Just peek over the 46-year-old's shoulder as he taps away at Ms. Pac-Man at Salem Willows' arcade on a recent afternoon.
The hungry yellow sphere with her red bow gobbles beads as a horde of skating ghosts give chase.
"I can't play at home with the boys anymore - there's all the buttons," the Pelham, N.H., father admitted when his quarters ran out. "This is just a joystick. You can't get any easier than that."
Then, on the opposite end of the technological spectrum, there's Bryan McCallum. The Nashua 18-year-old, lanky and dressed all in black, comes to the hyperactive castle FunWorld at least twice a week to shoot, race, dance, and box.
At home, digital also reigns: He has Xbox, Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, Nintendo 64,
For some reason, he can't explain why, he's able to pick them up quickly. "It's like a gene or something," he quips. But, he's quick to add, "I wouldn't say I'm addicted."
Morash, on the other hand, might be.
An hour or so after blasting aliens, he's hunched over Gauntlet Legends, all alone among the zigzags of rectangular consoles.
Unceasingly, frenetically, he taps at the green keys.
On the screen, green, orc-like creatures charge through a purple landscape. Fires blaze. Kicks and punches fly. A plastic cup of tokens resting on the frame vibrates with the action.
Several minutes later, he collects the cup and moves on.
The four realms, it seems, are safe.
Taryn Plumb can be reached at tarynplumb1@gmail.com.
