Life in the arcades: ‘They gathered round this Roger Federer of alien annihilation’

Mads Hedegaard’s incoming Cannon Arm and the Arcade Quest conjures up memories of a lost idyll. The documentary concerns one Danish man’s brave efforts to play an obscure 1980s video game for 100 consecutive hours. It is a celebration of eccentricity and of tunnel-vision determination. It also pays passing tribute to the golden age of the video game arcade. Kim “Cannon Arm”, now a mullet-haired grandfather, fights dehydration as he hammers the buttons. Supporters gather over his shoulder. Could someone please get Van Halen’s Jump playing on the (video) jukebox?

I am taken back to late mornings — what other people called “afternoons” — in the mid-1980s. Clog-brained and headachy after the previous night’s festivities, I would begin the day with a stroll round Dublin’s arcades. We never knew them by names. There was the “hall of mirrors”. There was the “basement on the quays”. At least one is still open for slightly different kinds of business. The game of choice was Konami’s Hyper Olympic. Rapid button-pressing was required to ensure that a little boxy man would excel at the 100 metres, the long jump, the javelin throw and — my speciality — the 110-metre hurdles. The trick was to raise the finger as little as possible. The correct motion was more of a faint, but furious, vibration than a pronounced tap. If successful your avatar would raise his hands to applause that contemporary ears might mistake for tinny static.

At this stage, high scores only stayed on the machine until it was plugged out for the night. So, there was every chance that you might enjoy an hour or two’s glory if you got to the Hyper Olympic machine first. Imagine my frustration when, at the crack of dawn (around 2.30pm), I would see, already topping the scores, the three letters used by a friend who would later go on to become a garlanded linguist at a prestigious European university. Below him was the mark of a man who is now a pillar of the Irish legal establishment. It was as if they had got up before dawn to mark their territory across the city’s arcades.

The digital arenas had their own conventions and aesthetic habits. Small, metal ashtrays were often bolted on to collect a minuscule portion of the tobacco burnt daily around Defender or Galaxian or OutRun. In a hangover from pool-table etiquette, you placed a coin on the dashboard to indicate you were next in the queue for the machine. You were expected to stay back from the player, but, if a rarely achieved level was attained, a supportive hubbub could gather round this Roger Federer of alien annihilation. Few incidents are so intensely burnt into my brain as the moment one of the future ornaments to the nation mentioned above reached the last level of definitive block-breaking game Arkanoid. What’s this? A giant head descends and threatens fatal bombardment. The gathering crowd had never seen the game completed and were unaware the head even existed. It was as if they were watching from behind as Howard Carter prised open Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922.

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That world has largely gone. The story goes that arcade culture sprang up with Space Invaders in the late 1970s and faded close to extinction with the rise of high-quality home consoles a decade and a half later. This is a simplification. The true high era lasted until 1985 when, heralding eventual retreat to the bedroom, the Nintendo Entertainment System was launched in the US. But there were further oscillations before the glory days closed. In some senses, the arcade business has gone through a cycle and ended up back where it started out.

Coin-operated games had been around decades before the arrival of Space Invaders. Pinball was a phenomenon in the US during the 1950s, cementing its place in the culture by triggering one of the many moral panics that have threatened to send middle America into mass apoplexy. Meanwhile, the “amusement arcade” became a staple of British and Irish holidays by the sea. Penny falls still exist. So do those cranes that fail to grab what nobody then called plush toys. By the end of the 1960s, there was already a school of diversion that looked very like a video game. You inserted a coin to play. You viewed virtual realities through a screen. You pressed buttons and an illuminated score appeared at the bottom of the frame. The most memorable of these “electro-mechanical” games was a Japanese innovation called Periscope. The game cabinet did indeed offer an impression of the observation device from a second World War submarine. No squillion-bit console could ever replicate the thrill felt when the player peered in and saw ships foolishly idling past their boat’s crosshairs. In truth, the facile gameplay could be mastered within minutes, but the sense of being absorbed in the action took longer to dissipate.

There were thus already spaces waiting when the first proper video games emerged in the 1970s. Atari launched the legendarily basic Pong, in which a square ball was batted backwards and forwards across a black screen, in 1972 and, by 1974, the company had shifted more than 4,000 units. To the average punter, the graphics on Space Invaders did not look significantly more advanced than what had come before, but the game had a playability that broke new ground. Different strategies emerged. You could pick the invaders off by row or by rank. You could zip back behind a protective silo between each shot. You could risk prolonged exposure at one end of the screen. Space Invaders became the defining “shoot ‘em up” game — a genre that survives in madly altered form — and launched an alteration in recreational habits.

The amusement arcades became video game arcades. Owners preferred the new devices to pinball machines as they were more reliable and easier to repair. The fantastically tricky Defender, a “side-scrolling” shooter, first infuriated players in 1981. In the same year, Donkey Kong, featuring a soon-to-be-famous Italian plumber, popularised the platform game and introduced the West to a school of Japanese absurdist comedy that became increasingly influential in succeeding decades. Asteroids made a virtue of its skeletal, aesthetically clean vector display. As in the silent era of filmmaking, most of the important formal innovations were worked through while the medium was still finding its feet.

There were inevitably scare stories about drug dealers and vice rings hanging around the arcades. Video games (like horror comics before and video nasties in the near future) were supposed to turn kids into brain-chewing maniacs, but the young gamers grew up to be no more deranged than their parents before them. The arcade business weathered a tulip-fever financial crash in 1983 to endure gentle decline before reviving in the early 1990s when fighting titles such as Mortal Kombat and Tekken offered new temptations. There were hits in the subsequent years. The craze for dancing games gave the industry a fillip. But it fast became clear that the home consoles — now allowing instant connections with strangers throughout the planet — could do almost everything the arcade games could do.

Almost everything. For a few short years a scruffy culture built itself around the dark, smoke-filled rooms where enthusiasts exchanged tips on how to avoid asteroids, destroy aliens and take corners at 180 miles per hour. Only a few knew the grim truth about the underrated arcade version of Choplifter. There came a point when, if things had gone badly in a particular way, the best plan was to ruthlessly machine gun your own hostages to death. There were no Reddit boards to tell you that. You worked it out yourself or the younger version of Cannon Arm passed it on.

No more, no more. Amusement arcades have returned to penny falls, air hockey and pool tables. It must have felt the same when Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and the rest of the Lost Generation left Paris. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. To have once seen the giant head in Arkanoid was very heaven.

Cannon Arm and the Arcade Quest is released on June 24th