My top five 1980s arcade games

I spent quite a bit of time (and money) in arcades in the early and mid-80s. The games were so much better than the systems we had available on our TVs at home that it was worth dropping a few bucks in quarters for an hour or two of fun.

For me and my friends, the primary destinations were Galaxy Gardens (the nearest game room), Up to Par (the biggest game room), and Fun and Games ($3 all-you-can play Tuesday nights!)

I don't have any photos from the time, but I distinctly recall wearing a series of very 80s painter's caps on these arcade excursions. Often I would decorate these caps with small metallic pins of my favorite musical acts of the time...most notably Men at Work, the Police and Duran Duran.

I did not, for the record, wear any neon, though.

As I've mentioned here before, video games kind of passed me by once the 90s rolled around, but I still have very fond memories of the golden era of arcade gaming.

Here, then, is one man's (and only one man's) ranking of the five best games from that period. Many of my fellow Gen Xers will be outraged to find Pac-Man/Ms. Pac-Man, Defender, Dig Dug, Centipede, Missile Command, Berserk, Joust and a host of others left off my list. Those were all worthy choices, they just didn't make my personal top five.

(5) Vanguard

This is a dark horse entry, to the point that many won't even be familiar with it. I was a frequent player for a few reasons, including the variety of settings through which you could fly your ship, the fact you had four directional fire buttons, and maybe most importantly, the very cool, Flash Gordon-inspired music that would play when you passed through one of the glowing energy fields. I pumped a lot of tokens/quarters into this one. (Speaking of great 80s video game music, while I never liked the game itself, you can't beat the driving distorted guitar riff of Reactor, which you could hear cutting through the arcade noise no matter how crowded it was.)

(4) Gorf

Gorf was among the first games to incorporate voice synthesis. It would semi-mock you with cries of "My Gorfian robots are unbeatable" and "Prepare yourself for annihilation!" Like Vanguard, I liked the variety in this one, even though it kind of ripped off Space Invaders and Galaxian. If you could get through the five different challenges, you would rise in rank from Space Cadet to Space Captain. If you could survive five full cycles of missions, you would reach the ultimate rank of Space Avenger. You could also get yourself more ships if you were willing to spend TWO quarters instead of one. This was a big investment but often worth it.

(3) Donkey Kong

I have grown to love the original Donkey Kong more in the 2000s than I ever did in the 80s. I play it on my laptop thanks to the amazing MAME emulator, and I've gotten to the point that a game isn't successful if I don't make it past the first "pie" board, as pictured here. (I call them "pies," but I think they were supposed to be tubs of cement or something similar. Mario was, after all, a career tradesman.) I love the barrels and rivets levels, and the pies are great, but I can do without the frustrating elevators. All in all, though, a very fun experience every time you press that one-player start button.

(2) Galaga

Lots of people loved (and continue to love) Galaga. It took the concepts of Galaxian and Space Invaders to another level of enjoyment, rather than just recreating them à la Gorf. The wrinkle whereby you could allow your fighter to be captured and then earn it back to be a double-firing, dual-ship juggernaut at the bottom of the screen was genius. And as valuable as they are to the environment, I never minded wasting hundreds of those darn bees every game. They deserved it. We have a replica cocktail arcade game in our basement that includes the original Galaga, and I play it often.

(1) Track and Field

My early-80s gaming friends could have told you even before they clicked on this post that Track and Field would be #1 on my list (and it isn't even close). If you were around back then, you will remember this as the game in which players had to repeatedly hit two buttons quickly to propel their little track athlete through the 100-meter dash, long jump, javelin, hurdles, hammer throw and high jump. The faster you alternated button hits, the better you did. Which led some to cheat through the use of combs or pencils held in such a way as to create a faster cadence of button mashing. I always played it straight, though, and I was pretty good at it, which is probably a big reason why I liked the game so much. Depending on the whim of the arcade owner, this game could be set to end after the high jump no matter how well you did, or it could simply start over through the cycle of events, though with tougher qualifying times and distances. Either way, this is one I wish I also had in my basement. But I just checked on eBay, and these machines are going for anywhere between $1,800 and $4,000. I didn't love it that much.

The cocktail table arcade game in the living room

My wife, a gift-giver extraordinaire, bought me this for Christmas. It is an authentic, cocktail table-style arcade game unit that includes several versions of Pac-Man along with my second-favorite video game of all time (Galaga), as well as Galaxian and both versions of Dig Dug.

It has been a hit in our house from the moment it was unveiled Christmas morning.

Actually, I should clarify that it has been a hit mostly with me, Terry, and Melanie's boyfriend Jason. We're the ones who play it the most.

It should also be clarified that, while it's technically "mine," Terry logs the most time on it. She has always been very good at Dig Dug. Over the last couple of months, she has progressed to expert level.

I enjoy it not only because it's so much fun, but also because it takes me back to the years when I was a regular visitor to our local game rooms...say roughly 1981 through 1984.

I remember Tuesday nights at Food and Games (later Fun and Games) at Willo Plaza where, for a $3 cover charge, there were unlimited credits on all games in the arcade and you could play them to your heart's content for three hours, no quarters/tokens needed.

We also frequented Up to Par and the game room closest to home, Galaxy Gardens.

Whenever I wanted to go to Galaxy Gardens and lacked the funds to support my video game habit, I would simply stop at the home of one of the customers on my paper route and collect whatever money they owed. For those who received the newspaper every day, the amount was $3.10. I could last a full 90+ minutes at Galaxy Gardens with three bucks, depending on the games I played, so it worked out nicely.

That's assuming I remembered to mark the customer from whom I collected as "paid" in my records once I got home. That wasn't always the case, which led to more than a few embarrassing visits to collect from customers who had already paid me that week.

Anyway, my quest on our new machine is to get to 200,000 in Galaga. Once you get past level 20 or so in that game, it is nothing but chaos. The best gamers back in The Day could get way past that, but it's a challenging and worthy goal for my 51-year-old self.

Well, that and breaking the habit of trying to insert a token into the machine when I want to start a new game. Even 40 years later, that's a tough adjustment to make.

Don't give the controller to Daddy!

There was a time when I was pretty good at video games. This was approximately 1982 to 1984. Then I started a long, slow decline that continues to this day.

The result is that my kids make fun of my gaming skills, or lack thereof. This actually happened: Jack was playing "Super Mario Bros." on the Wii the other day, and when I asked if I could join him, he hesitated for a second and then said, "OK, but don't be sad when your guy dies."

Slightly offended, I asked what he meant. And he said, "Well, it's just that you're not very good."

Please note that I had never actually played Super Mario Bros. on the Wii before. Jack was just assuming my incompetence.

It turned out he was right, of course. Back in The Day (I find myself increasingly referring to The Day in conversation), I was pretty good at Super Mario Bros. on the old Nintendo NES system. But this new version of Super Mario Bros. is much more complex. Whenever I play, my character must look out of the screen, see that it's me controlling him, and decide it would be just as easy to commit some form of electronic suicide.

Now if we were playing the old Atari 2600, it would be a different story. I could play me some Atari 2600. Didn't matter what the game, I was probably pretty good at it. Combat? Pac-Man? Air-Sea Battle? Basketball? I was The Man at virtually every Atari cartridge.

The main reason for this was that I actually had time to play and practice. You can get good at just about anything if you have time to work at it. When I was 12 years old, I had time for everything. Teachers hadn't yet started doing that thing where they give two hours of homework to elementary school children every night, so time is the one thing we had in abundance (of course, my generation is also functionally retarded when compared with a lot of kids today, so maybe that homework thing would have been a good idea).

Do you remember that scene in the movie "Groundhog Hog" where Bill Murray is teaching Andie MacDowell to flip playing cards into a hat? He tells her, "Six months, four to five hours a day, and you'd be an expert." That's how it was with my friends and I when it came to video games.

It helped that my dad was a Gadget Guy. And by that I mean we had most of the cool new electronic gadgets of the 70s and 80s before anyone else had them. I was playing pong on my TV in 1977, thanks to the Radio Shack console Dad brought home one night. We also had the Atari 2600 long before most of the families in my neighborhood. So I was able to get pretty good at almost everything.

Then came the arcade craze. I spent a lot of paper route money pumping tokens into everything from Space Invaders and Centipede to Donkey Kong and Galaga. My friend Mel and I would ride our motocross bikes up to the game room and blow $3 to $5 (that's usually as much money as either of us had at any given time) in an hour or two. We would be wearing our 80s-style painters caps decked out with metal pins of our favorite New Wave bands like Duran Duran and Flock of Seagulls. We thought we looked cool. In reality, we must have looked like The Incredible Dork Twins.

My favorite game was one called Track & Field. You would participate in a variety of track events by repeatedly mashing a pair of buttons in rapid fashion to make your onscreen athlete run faster or jump farther. I was good at this game. Good to the point that I once played a game of Track & Field for a full hour on a single quarter.

Once I started high school in the fall of 1984, the time I had available for gaming dropped dramatically. There were sports practices, extracurriculars, actual homework assignments, etc. And the video game world quickly passed me by. I lost track of what was new and hot, and sadly the arcades started going out of business. By the mid-90s, video games cost upwards of a dollar to play and could only be found in the lobbies of movie theaters.

Now I'm reduced to the role of Inept Daddy. We'll be playing Super Mario Bros., and when I inevitably fall off a ledge or run into something I thought was friendly and die, one of the kids will give me the ultimate insult: a condescending head shake, a small laugh, and the words "Oh, Daddy." The message being: "We only let you play so we can laugh at you. You're more entertaining than the game itself."

Whatever, you little brats. Once they invent time travel and we go back to the 80s, I'm dragging all five of them to the arcade and I will school them. And I'll make them wear painters caps, too. Then my revenge will be complete.