Rise From Your Grave: Another Visit To The American Classic Arcade Museum

So have you heard the urban legend about when Atari buried about a million copies of the E. T.: The Extra Terrestrial in a hole in the desert? The rumor is that Atari whipped out the E. T. video game in about six weeks to make the almighty Christmas dollar, and when the game turned out to be a giant, buggy, stinking pile of shit (that part’s not a rumor; I borrowed the game from a buddy back in sixth grade for a weekend, and have never been so happy that I didn’t spend my own allowance on something) that no one wanted to buy, Atari’s management sent truckloads of of the game to the middle of the desert, under cover of darkness, to drop in a dark hole to take as some kind of filthy tax write-off.

It’s an event that, while a lot of people thought it was apocryphal, is widely considered to be the beginning of the end of the original era of classic video games. Within a couple of years, the Atari 2600 and 5200 had gone down (along with ColecoVision, which was the biggest and most advanced competitor for the home video game throne until people just stopped giving a shit) and video arcades began a long, slow decline to take a place in Americana with the drive-in movie theater: an institution that once was everywhere, but that now you need to really hunt for.

And it all started with an alleged hole in the desert, dug by a company that did something that the full weight and power of the United States Government was unable to do: kill E. T.

Or at least it was an alleged hole. This weekend, a group of documentary filmmakers successfully found that hole in an Alamogordo, NM landfill and unearthed a bunch of copies of the E. T. cartridge, thereby bringing to light the end of the first golden age of video games.

And it is purely by coincidence that the bulk of the Crisis On Infinite Midlives staff made our semi-annual visit to the American Classic Arcade Museum at the Funspot Arcade in Laconia, NH, to get back a taste of the meaty days of that first golden age.

I have written before about one of our trips to Funspot, and there’s not a lot to add about this visit. Most of the old games were still there (and that seems like, literally, most of the old games. The only old games I remember playing as a kid that Funspot doesn’t have are the vector graphics The Empire Strikes Back sequel to the original Star Wars video game, the Return of The Jedi game, and Warrior – a vector graphics sword fighting game that I’ve only ever seen at the local mall arcade I frequented in junior high school.

The big differences between any given visit are which games are or are not working. This time around, Tempest was still broken, but broken in the right way – the game was playable, but it always thought that there was already a quarter in the slot, so you could play for hours for nothing. Rampage was broken, but Spy Hunter was back up and running to remind me not only was I never any good at it, but that the reason I was never any good at it was because it really is a shitty game, Peter Gunn Theme music or not.

One of the big actual additions (and I mean big) was Hercules: the world’s biggest pinball machine. And I’m talking bigger by an order of magnitude: you could bury a fat man in this fucking pinball machine. It uses a pool cue ball as a pinball, it is wide enough that I, a six-foot tall dude, found it almost awkward to play, and every time the ball fires a bumper, it shakes the floor. It really is more novelty than a good pinball machine, since the wooden ball is too big to support ramps, trapdoors or anything else that defines a modern pinball machine, and the wooden ball on a wooden deck has a slower, more predictable action than a standard steel ball, but it’s cool not only to see such a thing, but to actually play it.

But even though most of the games stay the same, it is still a hell of a cool place to go to re-experience the glory days of video gaming. Back when social gaming was when you went to the arcade with your buddies, the only massively multiplayer game was Gauntlet, and the only Ex-Box were the ones containing copies of E. T.: The Extra Terrestrial.

But don’t take my word for it: here’s a few photos I snapped of the main floor this weekend.