How I Spent My Summer Vacation

There was MasterCam training, surfing, visiting family, NYC, a cruise to Bermuda, and lots of gardening.  But in between it all my sister took my son and I to one of the coolest places I've ever been:

Pa may not look like much, as a matter of fact it looks like a run down house with aluminum siding sitting on the edge of a shopping plaza in downtown Portland, Maine.  That's because it is.  But the proverbial look can be deceiving and though the quality of the physical structure doesn't change as you enter and walk up the worn carpeting on the stairs, what's waiting for you inside has to be experienced to be believed.  Visiting the Portland arcade was one of the most awesome times I've had, ever.

As you walk up the stairs and reach the second floor you come to a desk/counter manned by an older gentleman who was probably a teenager in the 70's at the birth of the video game - but still has a sparkle in his eye and a feeling of pride as newcomers start to look around.  He explains that for $5 you get too choose a soda, a bag of chips and a record to play.  Yes, a record.  In a set of bookcases on the wall was a collection of a few hundred vinyl albums, mainly classic rock but with a good bit of punk, disco, new-wave and others thrown in.  I chose the Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack and as he placed it on the turntable I entered the arcade.

I'm 43, which means I was 10 when the above date occurred.  Pong pre-dated me but otherwise I grew up with video games.  Saw them get fancier, switch from massive machines to  home consoles to PCs back to consoles; I witnessed them go from tapes to cartridges to CDs to online purchases; I was there when you were able to play with people not in the same room and then not in the same country; I saw controllers go from (pornographically named) joysticks to paddles to containing more buttons than you could shake a stick at, first with short wires then long wires then no wires; and I watched games migrate to tablets and phones and everything in between.  As I walked from room to room and sat in the many comfy chairs, I was transported back, waaaaay back.

The original Play Station

Can you identify the controller my son is using?

Yes, Bally had a home console.

And of course the original Nintendo controller.

The Commodore 64, need I say more?

Pong on a 13" black and white television.

Can you imagine purchasing a console you could play only one game on?

Nintendo Entertainment System

And my favorite.  In 5th grade, everyone had one of these.  My dad was a computer programmer so we had an Atari 800, one of their early PCs.  We had a few games played on a cassette tape (seriously) but I longed for my friends' houses and the hundreds of games....

I'm not sure if they had every game ever made for the 2600, but this pic is about half of what they had.

They even had ET, which was actually as bad as everyone had said it was.  This game was so bad that thousands of copies were buried and recently dug up.

Click here to read the whole story.

I spent hours moving from couch to couch, playing games, journeying back to a more funner time in my life and introducing my kids (7 and 4) to games that weren't on a phone.  I can't think of a better way to spend $5.  But there was more, much more....

Got my name up there!

So I really wanted to end this post with an embedded playlist of videos from the visit to Portland Arcade, but blogger is not playing nice with my youtube channel, so here's the link if you want to see the intensity of my son playing Mario Kart, a classic Pong battle, my younger son totally baffled by what he's seeing, and several videos of my getting very intense with Space Invaders.