The Jakes
BEEP BEEP BOOPIN’ IN THE BASEMENT
What five arcade cabinets would you own in your own personal gameroom?
My neighborhood never really had a dedicated arcade. One time a local entrepreneur rehabbed an old grocery store and brought in pool tables and a few cabinets but the kids in my neighorhood were hard people so when the fights started, granding opening, grand closing. Occasionally local corner stores and pizza parlors would shove a console into a corner; I distinctly remember the spot across from my elementary school having Mortal Kombat and NARC (now THAT’S a wild game) but local parents lost their shit so they removed them. Arcades would pop up at Towson mall but my dad wasn’t dropping me off there regularly, nor did I really have the gumption or money to become an joystick hero.
For me, occasional visits to Chuck E Cheese and summer vacations to Ocean City were my key arcade times. I’d save my quarters or take birthday money and dump it into these infernal machines but I never loved them though they way people did, and still do. I’m a narrative guy, and my problem was I wanted to watch the game more than I wanted to find 100 acorns or blow up a car in 30 seconds or any of the other ridiculous, repetitive tasks you have to perform to get to the next plot point. Plus they cost a ton in little kid dollars. You needed rich parents or Pinball Wizard acumen to finish these games.
But hey, apparently you can buy arcade cabinets for less than $1000 now. If I were a rich man, here are the five arcade games I’d buy to flesh out my game room and chokehold my nostalgia.
5. Pop Poker
Pop Poker doesn’t quite fit my introduction but screw it I loved this game, which makes sense since this played like a child’s gateway drug that led to an eventual addiction to those “entertainment only” poker machines found in every bar and liquor store in Baltimore. The premise was simple: The DEAL button sent five blue rubber balls bouncing around an analog board containing 25 card combinations, all royal suits (10, J, Q, K, A) plus a set of jokers. Your hand would be the combo where the balls settled, but you could then repop up to four of the balls to try for a better hand. Pairs would get you a few prize tickets, full house more tickets, three of a kind more, etc. up to a massive ticket payout for the All Aces Royal Flush. I fed countless quarters into this stupid game at the Ocean City arcades, all to win a Bart Simpson pencil-eraser set or plush Spuds MacKenzie. I wasn’t a smart kid.
Acceptable Variant: In lieu of a Pop Poker machine I’d settle for one of those Las Vegas Bubble Craps set ups I spent too much time on my last time out. Like I said, a gateway drug.
4. Cruis’n USA
This was the racing game for the guy who didn’t care about reality. Give me a ridiculous electronic sports car with double pedal pump nitro boosters and a few cows on the side of a country road to plow through and I’m a happy man, especially when I can go head-to-head against my bros. Again, the price point on this sucker was at least $1 a game, so I definitely wasn’t going to find out how the Cruis’n saga ended by actually winning the game.
Acceptable Variant: There was a motorcycle game at Chuck E Cheese that I assume is this guy but all I remember was there was a chick in a bikini waving the green go flag at the start of the race and that was the hottest thing in the world in 1992. Also, I have a soft spot for the original Atari Pole Position.
3. X-Men: Four Player Arcade Game
Four-player cabinets are the best. If you had a bankroll you and your gang could dominate one of these for hours playing the X-Men Gold team against a wave of Sentinels. Of course it also sucked when you were the lone dude playing Cyclops and sucking while the crack three-member rogue squadron on the other side of the board gave you death stares after your umpteeth fuckup. This was also another victim of the price gouge, starting at $1 a game and I believe anywhere from 25 cents to a $1 to continue after Magneto killed you with a steel beam to the head.
Acceptable Variants: I just assume the Simpsons and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Four Player Arcade Games were made by the same company and used the same OS. All three were indistinguishable from each other.
2. Mad Dog McCree
THIS fucker. Mad Dog McCree used live-action laserdisc video technology to create a Westworld where you had to prove you were the fastest gun in the West. That is of course if you’re stupid laser gun was actually calibrated correctly. Nothing was more infuriating than when you were firing directly on target only to see the light laser bouncing off the nearby air hockey table. Innovative at the time, the cost (this was the first game in Ocean City that cost $1 a play) and creative limitations of live action video games killed this concept before it could ever really find a footing in either cabinet or console form.
Acceptable Variants: There was a Mad Dog sequel, a straight high noon draw version, a version with space pirates (the fu?) and I think a Miami Vice/police one that would play GREAT now. They all sucked.
- Operation Wolf
Look at this thing. The art work, the “controls.” None more ’80s. Riding a popular wave of Vietnam retrospective “we’ll win the war by winning the post-war” propaganda movies like Rambo: First Blood II and Braddock: Missing In Action III, Operation Wolf brought the fight to save POW/MIAs to your local arcade and with guns ablazing. What better way to prepare children for a future in the military industrial complex then by putting a life-sized replica Uzi into their hands and letting them blast away indescriminately at foreign enemies? Obviously Operation Wolf was hugely popular and pioneered a wave of first-person rail arcade shooters while also inspiring cornerstone console games like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom.
Acceptable Variant: Arguably Terminator 2: The Arcade Game perfected what Operation Wolf pioneered, but since you’re blasting sentient robots and not real human avatars it loses a bit of the macabre that makes Wolf so special. The oddest member of this genre has to be Revolution X, a three-man rail shooter where you help Aerosmith fight the Deep State by shooting explosive CDs at New World Order stormtroopers. Totally unrealistic.