You can’t teach it to the younger generations without giving them a hands-on experience. Going out of your house to a mega arcade, as was immensely popular in the 1980s, is far better than planting yourself indoors day-to-night with nonstop video game action. I know depending on your age, I’ve preached the gospel or committed heresy.

Sure, the graphics for video games today are 100 times better than the analog days of Atari, Midway, Namco, Stern and even the infancy years of Nintendo. One-ups to you, Gen Tech. The cinematic Red Dead Redemption II, Dying Light or any of the countless Call of Duty games annihilate Missile Command, Centipede and Galaga in game play and design. All the Mario games to evolve from Donkey Kong and the days of Nintendo Game Boy are marvels of the modern age, in particular those wacky fun, psychedelic Mario Cart games. A cool addiction.

Photo from the public domain

Not a lick of it, however, gives me the same giddy geekery of smashing the crap out of buildings as either a monster-sized wolf, gorilla or lizard in Rampage from the old days. The only video game in known existence to have given me the same therapeutic purging of a rough day being Simpsons Road Rage from the PS2 days, which is where video games for me stopped. A Friday night with some Chinese and SRR before a late-night horror movie or two could unwind the ruts as good as a Dethklok album later in life for me. Some friendly, thumb-spraining tag team duke outs on Tekken 2 were also gnarly, for that matter.

My kid, who was once very good at sports, and loved to hike with me, soon made video games his obsession as teenagers find their own path giving them verve. We’ve since been submitted to PS4, Xbox One and now PS5 in succession, and while TJ may have worked a stint for GameStop in another life and cheers on the boyo on when there’s energy to do so, I’ve lost most of my passion for video games. Call it overstimulation, a whiff of sour grapes, a bit of old fogeyism and hangover from so much cannonade and bloodthirsty desensitization. I say it inside my head over and over, other than the Lego video games (especially Marvel, DC and Star Wars) this shit just ain’t fun anymore.

To think Mortal Kombat was considered gruesome nearly 31 years ago. Child’s play compared to the spine-tearing, sinew-ripping, disemboweling bucket of gore it is today. 17-year-old Ray would’ve been champing at the bit like my kid is for tomorrow, the release of the newest MK mayhem, Mortal Kombat I. Yeah, video games are following the trend of comic books by constantly rebooting back to number one. Vonnegut was a fragging genius with his eternal shrug off phrase, “So it goes.” A lot more fun shaking one of the early day Mortal Kombat machines against a friend at elbow’s reach inside an eye-popping arcade than anonymously online where your opponent might be hacking your credentials to the digital bark, “FINISH HIM!”

So enough of the whining from yours truly about today’s video games. Before I come off like a crotchety old coot, I like the teenagers as much as the adults in Cobra Kai, and I impressed the young shampoo girl over the weekend while getting a haircut by mentioning the YouTuber Markiplier as we both talked about looking forward to the new Five Nights at Freddy’s movie coming out. My kid shoved both down my throat to the point of surrender and neither are a bad thing, I confess. Like today’s rap and hip hop; I cringe at most of it, but really dig Childish Gambino, Metro Boomin, Coi Leray, Shiloh Dynasty and 80purppp. I make a point to find what’s good as the times change instead of staying stuck in my happy place decade. Evolve or evaporate, as TJ loves to say.

But I digress. For all our mutual, sometimes awkwardly failed attempts to meet halfway at the generation gap as a family, my kiddo does have a firm appreciation for the history of video games. He loves my rattling about the day I was given an Atari 2600 for my 12th birthday and how old Atari units used to fry picture tubes of floor model televisions. All to the chagrin of parents from my generation, shelling out to replace Atari zapped color t.v.s, us teens banished with our joysticks and Atari paddles to an old black and white television inside our bedrooms. Necessity versus outright punishment.

Atari and later Intellevision and Colecovision gaming systems relegated to black and white may have sucked, but it kept a pervading familial peace when you had the need to blip, bleep, bloop and digitally Tarzan yell along to those early Activision classics, Pitfall, River Raid, Enduro and Seaquest. Black and white was and still is stellar for classic horror and noir movies, but I think of this whenever I see my kid freak out playing games and whacking his controllers in frustration. Try it and black and white, brah.

You’d never survive the experience, kid, though you got a snowy screen simulation of it at Timeline Arcade, this past weekend didn’t you, dude? After all these trips there, it finally sunk in with you. All things being relative, you do have it nicer and easier. My family’s house didn’t look like the retro assemblage of plywood walls and gaudy floral print sofas Timeline Arcade recreates like museum pieces (cough cough, ouch), but I knew many who did.

Getting on with it, I posit there’s a lot more pleasure to be had entering a vast, glowing emporium of machinery thrusting ambient digital animation in your face. Games you control with a stick and one to three firing and maneuvering buttons. You’re engaged far more against a machine forced into a standing position for most vintage arcade games, even those you sit in and subjected to senses assaulting gameplay. Heck, man, Pole Position back in the day put you into a seated position and while primitive today, it was one of the first video games simulating an actual car race you had to qualify for before you could continue on. All the quarters lost on that game alone, total Bummersville…

Retro arcades are popping up around the world as my generation gets older, a testament to our youth, where video games were as much as a social outlet as a place to test your might at a quarter a pop and let your worries free for as long as your skill level allowed. Kids went to arcades as much to shoot the breeze, date or summon the stones outside of school to ask for a date. I think of all the french fry and pizza grease we left on those joysticks for the next kid to groan at. Not so appealing in the post-COVID days, but hilarious in retrospect.

My son is so immersed in gamer culture he demands our audience more than a teenager should and he has for years. Yet, he knows the key to our investment of time watching him nefariously plow through zombies, drug runners, cowboys and enemy forces with maximum carnage is to suggest a run to Timeline Arcade in York, Pennsylvania now and then. As he did this past weekend. A smart lad, that one.

Both TJ and I are still masters at Galaga and I still clear seven or eight zones on Ms. Pac Man and I can still whip the crap out of insects with digital “arrows” on Centipede. Rampage, I still get the top score most times, though I was laughably pathetic hitting the transport button on the original Asteroids to repeated self-destructive folly. I took a picture of my hyperspace topflight “one of the top ten best” score of 40 for nyuks sake. Also laughing to myself had it been 1981, I would’ve been the same pissed-off rager my son is getting blasted by “camper” shooters in Call of Duty, Fortnite well before that.

That was when a pocketful of quarters was an Eighties’ kid’s treasure, his manna. Nothing stunk worse than nagging the piss out our parents for a ride to the local arcade (the totally rad, intergalactic fantastic Space Port being our idea of heaven) and blowing through our money in nanoseconds. If you couldn’t find friends to b.s. with, the wait for parent pickup could be interminable, especially in silent envy of those video game heroes of yesteryear hogging a machine on a single play. Bittersweet to think of today.

What’s great about Timeline other than recreating all that neon piping in certain spots is planting those old classics you loved, Frogger, Tapper, Tron, Karate Champ, Dig Dug, Dragon’s Lair, like sentries alongside a bunch of throwback video games you never knew existed then. Even those ’90s goodies, multi-player smash-up games featuring X-Men, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Simpsons. There are rows of pinball machines, hoop shooting games you can actually sink on repeat, Skee-Ball, a pool table, air hockey, even a station for the youngbloods with hand shaped chairs for them to lounge on. Those being plugged to Xbox and PS5. It’s the ultimate hangout, no matter your age.

Photo from the public domain

You pay $10.00 an hour for unlimited games, but Timeline offers a better deal at $25.00 for a day’s worth of play, and they have more than enough to keep you occupied until you tire out like my kid did after three hours of non-stop playing. Funny how he can go hours in a loafing bed-bound position. For all the griping I did earlier in this post, this was my thirteenth visit to Timeline (inclusive of their closed sister location in Hanover, PA), and I was nowhere near ready to quit.

I played like a madman, even with the opportunity to take a food break and come back later. I shot pool and played Star Wars games of the past, including the one from the Eighties where you blow up the Death Star over and over (still taking stupid pride in it) before sinking into the contemporary and supremely badass Star Wars Battle Pod. Talk about topflight, whew. You are there in that sucker.

I’m not gonna lie. Timeline Arcade hypes me every time we go. I may have lost my taste for newer games within a home environment, but I took TJ here on our second date and she whupped by butt at Time Crisis II and held her own on Rampage. We both giggled like idiots playing Space Invaders while reminiscing when we’d first done so in our youth. She loved it so much she insisted we take my son a week later. It was a fun and natural way to break a new woman into his life and we won’t ever forget that precious bonding moment. The photo set from that day is a bigger treasure than a pocketful of quarters.

NERDCORE!!!!

–All other photos by Ray Van Horn, Jr.