Unlike most men my age who cling stubbornly to the trappings of adolescence, I'm not obsessed with home videogames. I gave up on the home-console systems when more than four buttons appeared on the controllers and when the games began to require more of one's waking hours than the average full-time job to master. There was certainly a time when I haunted mall arcades and pestered my parents to upgrade our Atari 2600. But these days, I don't know the difference between a PlayStation 2 and an X-Box. Not even the impressively violent and antisocial Grand Theft Auto series could entice me.Maybe my brain reached a point where it was satisfied with my hand-eye coordination. Maybe I didn't watch enough MTV growing up — we didn't have cable until I was a high-school junior — and consequently am not acclimated to contemporary game graphics, most of which stop just short of seizure-inducing. Maybe it's the fact that most of the music accompanying them is horrible.
Or maybe the weekend nights spent indulging rock-star fantasies, the college-level binge drinking and the nearly constant urge to go skateboarding already provide enough of an outlet for my inner 19-year-old.
Still, I came of age in the '80s, which means I'm developmentally predisposed to react instantly and favorably to Star Wars, Chicken McNuggets, Thriller and videogames. So occasionally, the all-consuming desire to play the stupid things arises unbidden, and it will not depart until sated. But I'm sick of all four of the games I bought at the flea market for my aging Super Nintendo. And I'm not about to drop $200 on a machine I'll need a week's worth of sick days to learn how to play; I want to have a little fun and get a little nostalgic, not memorize the sequence of buttons and joystick moves required to produce the Summoned Elemental Decapitating Magna-Laser Chop-Kick.
On the other hand, I seem to remember someone telling me that the Treasure Island Fun Center houses a goodly selection of vintage games. In all my years as a Bay area resident, I've never entered the place. Perhaps that stems from some anti-tourist/anti-listless-youth prejudices on my part, but it's more likely that I was simply scared to death by that weird commercial featuring the caroming disembodied head and badly recorded voice of flamboyant local art-scene gadfly Sterling Powell.
Oh, what the hell. They might have Donkey Kong Jr.
The Fun Center sits directly across the street from one of Treasure Island's biggest and most accessible beachside public parking lots, a few blocks south of where the Treasure Island Causeway sluices into the Gulf Boulevard strip. It looks exactly like what it probably is: a remnant of the colorful goofy-golf makeover applied to East Coast beach-burgs from Maine to Marathon during the '80s. There's already one summer-camp bus in the parking lot on this blazing early afternoon, though something about the Fun Center's plain, outdated exterior suggests a little more … character than a children's attraction should have.
On the inside, it's a different story. The aggressive lights and sounds of the games, along with the dull roar that accompanies the interaction of overstimulated kids of all ages, effortlessly overpower any seediness implied by the edifice itself. You got your Skee-Ball. You got your coin-operated mini-rides for the tots. You got your latest shooting/karate/movie-themed multi-player (and multi-coin) videogames. You even got your adjacent Subway sandwich shop with direct entry from inside the Fun Center. In the back, you've got a nice rank of pinball machines and a few pool tables, recalling older kids' hangouts of decades past. (I guess that's OK, but something about billiards in the midst of so much kiddie candy makes me think uneasily of Pinnocchio's Pleasure Island sequence.) In the center of everything, you got your ticket-redemption counter, where a young lady in too good a mood to have been on the clock for long changes my quarters for tokens.
I'm pretty sure I can find what I'm looking for by wading upstream against a torrent of half-pints in matching white T-shirts streaming away from a particular corner. And I do, sort of. It's definitely the Treasure Island Fun Center's museum wing. There's Defender. There's Donkey Kong. There's the ubiquitous nostalgia-game couple comprised of Ms. Pac-Man and Galaga — it seems like these two go everywhere together; Pac-Man's soulmate must've dumped him for a tractor-beaming space-mantis at some point.
I'd been hoping for Spy Hunter or Dig Dug or Omega Race or the aforementioned Kong sequel, but the classic tale of an Italian midget who must rescue his statuesque girlfriend from the clutches of an angry, barrel-chucking ape will certainly do. I spend a while collecting purses and parasols and inexplicably putting out fires with a large hammer. Children from 6 to 16 wander near, peruse the machines in this quadrant, and wander away quickly with vaguely nauseated expressions.
A guy with a few years on me steps up to the Asteroids machine next door, sighing heavily as he sinks a couple of tokens and starts to play. He may be a parent just killing time while his kid tries to whack the mole in hopes of earning enough tickets to buy a ring that's also a lollipop, but I don't think so. He's close to my age, another male who hit his teens around the time Aladdin's Castle arcades appeared in every mall on Earth, and I suspect he just woke up today with the need to manipulate some really shitty two-dimensional renderings.
A few more buses pull up outside, several dozen more youngsters burst into the Fun Center, and the noise gets to be too much for him. As he turns away from the machine, our eyes meet, and we share a sheepish, knowing shrug that says, I know, I know. What are you gonna do?
I know what I'm gonna do. I've still got a few tokens left.
Contact Scott Harrell at 813-739-4856, or by e-mail at scott.harrell@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Jun 24-30, 2004.