Highway 62

Like a ghost, however, it's not quite the real thing. There's no feel in the keyboard, like there was in the old joysticks (particularly the old 4-way sticks, back when you couldn't even move your characters diagonally and were limited to the four cardinal directions). The flicker of the CRTs isn't there, nor is the ionized smell and the click of quarters is nowhere to be heard. It used to be that you could put your muscle behind your moves and the whole cabinet would rock as you worked the zone.

Gone.

But I've got all these cool old ghosts I can summon up when the mood strikes me. Need a ten-minute diversion? Set the wayback machine to 1987 and play a level or two of BAD DUDES. Feeling oldschool? Then SPACE INVADERS is the tonic for what ails ya.

Arcades, however, are a thing of the past. Sure, there's still some left, but it ain't the same, is it? Used to be that arcades were as plentiful as, oh say, Jamba Juice franchises. There wasn't a self-respecting mall (whether enclosed or a strip-mall) that didn't have one. Of course, that was back in the days when a home computer couldn't do much more than play some kind of Pong variant. Maybe you were lucky and had an Atari (I was an Intellivision kid myself), but if you looked at the arcade version of anything as compared to the Atari version, well, there wasn't any comparison. Real gamers lived in the arcades.

Or worked in them, as I did for a summer. Never got sick of the place, either. Sadly, it wasn't about all the games I could play. I mean, I actually had to vacuum and hand out change and retrieve stuck quarters and shoo hooligans out of the place. Never ceased to amaze me, though, how many quarters I'd fish out of coin chutes in machines that were plainly marked OUT OF ORDER. I considered them tips. It's not like they were marked with the names of whoever had dropped 'em in.

But man, otherwise, that was a lousy job.

In my time as a true arcade maven, I'd been to a hundred different kinds of game joints. Everything from the three machines in the corner of the 7-11 to the kinda sad little arcades in pizza restaurants, to Starcade at Disneyworld which was awesome yet sterile and devoid of any real character, to the franchise operations run by slick operators, to the comforting neighborhood game parlor.



None of them, I repeat none of them, came close to the glory and splendor that was The Arcade Metál.

Not that it was really called that. I don't remember it being called much of anything, actually. And for the longest time, my friends and I called it the Metal Arcade, 'cause this was the late '80s and Metal was in the air. Granted, it wasn't actually Metal, more like hair farmer rock. Def Leppard (no, HYSTERIA was not a Metal album), Poison, Billy Idol, Whitesnake, Crüe. That sort of thing.

See, the Arcade Metál had a few things that really set it apart. One of them was that it had a jukebox that was cheap (3 tracks for a quarter). Yeah, a lot of it was pretty terrible, but you got lucky once in a while. It also had, the only operating example of a video jukebox I'd seen. Though those were expensive and it hardly got fired up unless the guys behind the counter were bored.

The other thing that made this place stick out was the snack bar. Maybe this was a west coast thing, but most arcades and drinks mixed like water and peanut butter. IE, they didn't. Drinks stayed out so as to keep the high-fructose and circuit board combinations to a minimum. In fact, I can't recall a decent arcade that allowed drinks anywhere near the front door. Sure, in pizza places, you had all kinds of videogame/comestible combinations and it never worked out well. Buttons stick, controls become jammed or too slippery to work. You get the picture.

Yet here was a place that treated its (primarily) adult patrons like adults and let 'em guzzle carbonated libations like they were going out of style, all within arm's reach of the array of videogames, all while taking in "Cherry Pie" for the hundred thousandth time. Okay, sure, the music could have stood for some improvement, but when your focus is narrowed down to blazing a trail past the King of Gods or mowing down purple-skinned zombies with automatic weapons, well, that just didn't matter all that much. Only when the spell was broken, when your final death had been suffered, when you were left slick and faintly shaky from concentration, only then did you realize that you always hated that goddamn song.

My housemates and I spent hours there at a time instead of doing useful things like, oh, studying or dishes or any of that boring life maintenance stuff. I mean, this was gaming. And you could only get it in one place. This was the place where you tested your brains and your reflexes, your wrists and eyes. Nothing else came close. It wasn't like you could fire up an X-Box and have something this vivid in your living room. This was the Source. Right there.

All at the Arcade Metál. Down there on the corner of MacArthur and Beach Boulevard. They're open 'til midnight and we had nothing more important to do.