The Surreal Nostalgia Of Arcade Longplays

​I was born in a weird time for video games. By the time I was eight, and had developed the motor skills and cognitive capacity to comprehend and play games, it was 1996.

That year titles like "Metal Slug," "Die Hard Arcade," and "Time Crisis" hit arcades across the US. Just two years earlier, "Super Street Fighter II Turbo"¹ would practically launch the competitive fighting game scene.

The mid-'90s might have been a time of of Clinton-era optimism and the last big arcade boom, but I had no idea. I was still in elementary school. I remember in the fourth grade we held a vote if Bill Clinton should be removed from office. I don't remember how I voted. Again, I was eight years old. But I do remember going to the arcade.

My memories of the arcade are few, blurry and intense. The suburban Connecticut town I grew up in had one, Scooter's, just a few miles from home. It had everything an eight-year-old could ever want. Bright neon lights. A ticket-redemption counter overflowing with big stuffed animals, RC cars and plastic jewelry — the treasures of elementary school. Pizza. Hot Dogs. French Fries. Soda. An honest-to-heck indoor mini-golf course that was, for whatever reason, Old West themed. And, of course, dozens of arcade games arranged into tight rows across a colorful linoleum floor. You walk in, and "Daytona USA" was right there screaming in your face. There was even a freaking laser-tag arena upstairs.

To an eight-year-old, it felt like you could spend the rest of your life in Scooter's and not possibly experience everything.

Of course, I could never just go and hang out at Scooter's. Once again: I was eight years old. There had to be a birthday party. Adult supervision required. Also there was that whole Tipper Gore thing with violent video games.² I'm sure that did not help.

Anyway, what's important here is that what I do remember is there being seemingly endless rows of video games that I was not very good at and did not have nearly enough money to play. In the handful of times I went to Scooter's, I just hopped on the cool plastic "Super Hang-On" bike, wasted three dollars in quarters in about 20 minutes, and then spent the rest of my afternoon making motorbike sounds with my mouth on the cool plastic bike, while watching the older kids call each other "buttmunch" on the "Super Turbo" cabinet next door. My strongest, and fondest memories of the arcade amount to, more or less, "I can't wait to grow up and play all these big kid video games."

Of course, by the time I was old enough to afford to and play the big kid video games, the arcade — the romanticized one from the '80s, not the Dave & Busters one — began its death spiral.

On October 1, 1997, just four days before my 9th birthday, Scooter's was bought by the Bristol Route 6 Association for $925,000. Eight months later, during which the building was gutted and arcade games sold, the association leased it out to Staples. And so in the summer of 1998, Scooter's was now Staples. By the time I was old enough to go there alone, it was to shop for school supplies.³ Where the mini-golf course once stood were now pallets of flat-packed office furniture. The rows of arcade games replaced by aisles of pens and three-ringed notebooks. The snack bar was now the print center.⁴ Go figure. 

Apparently, back in the day instead of waiting in line to play an arcade game you would just put your quarter down on the machine and say "I got next." I learned that one decades later because I was too young and scared to go near the popular arcade games the big kids were hanging out at to actually have figured this out first-hand. I stuck to the margins of Scooter's, playing the older games no one was really lining up to play — "Super Hang-On," "Bust-A-Move" and this space-themed shoot 'em up with a insane arcade cabinet that would roll and yaw with your movements that has been lodged into my brain for decades, and that I could not, for the love of God and Googling, remember the dang name of it. To me, it was only known as "that one shmup with the wild-ass cabinet."

But at the time, I didn't really mourn the loss of Scooter's because in 1996 I got a Nintendo 64 for my birthday, and I just ended up playing a lot of video games on that instead.⁵ I guess a lot of other people felt that way because the arcades didn't stick around.

You big kids, who are probably in your 40s now, are rolling your eyes, but I think this pretty much sums up how I feel about arcade video games: A cool scene I wish I could have participated in but died out before I could, and thanks to the internet I can learn everything there is to know about hanging out in arcades but never will put it into practice because I'm 30 now and the arcades are mostly dead.⁶  

This is to say that a thing I do a lot when I'm stressed out is watch people play arcade games on YouTube for stretches of 15 minutes or more. Once again, I'm not alone here, because this genre of YouTube video has a name: the arcade longplay.⁷ For example, here is a longplay of Sega's "Super Hang-On":

What's it like to watch someone play a video game of your childhood better than you could possibly imagine in 1080p at 60 frames per second? It's absolutely enthralling. It's the past, but perfected. It's better than you remember because it's not you playing and it's not being played on a big fuzzy CRT screen in a big loud arcade that's desperately trying to suck quarters from you. It is the idealized childhood no one could ever possibly have. That's the most intoxicating nostalgia; when the past is better than you remember because it's been up-rezed and played by an infallible machine with infinite money.

Granted, if you were born a few years earlier than me, or a few years later, arcade longplays are probably just one of millions of YouTube videos of people playing video games. But being born at a weird time for video games, they provide a crystal-clear view of memories that have become fuzzy and fragmented over time.

Back in 1996, I played "that one shmup with the wild-ass cabinet" at Scooter's, but I don't remember playing "that one shmup with the wild-ass cabinet" at Scooter's in 1996. For decades this game was an opaque image in my brain that would not go away, and yet would not resolve itself no matter how hard I tried to dig. Its name, how it looked, even how it played were just gone from my memory.

Searching online for variations on "shmup with crazy cabinet" would yield nothing. Meticulously pouring through lists of names of every arcade game released between 1980 and 1998 would spark nothing. All I could remember was the cabinet and the emotion of feeling absolute sensory overload for the first time.

Eventually, I just resigned myself to the belief that there was never really "that one shmup with the wild-ass cabinet" — that my brain was piecing together broken memories and creating a game that never existed.

A few months ago, I started watching arcade longplays. And then I found it.

It turns out "Galaxy Force II" is a real video game that was released in 1988 and I sat down in it, fed it two tokens and played in 1996. There is exactly one known working wild-ass arcade cabinet that spins and yaws. Finally seeing footage of it — after hours of fruitless searching, years of believing I was fooling myself‚ was the closest I've ever felt to something physically clicking in my mind. It was like someone literally blew the dust off of my brain.

And this has now happened dozens of times. Watching arcade longplays has been a deeply surreal experience — unearthing games you forgot you even played, or fleshing out the half-memories of the ones you did — but also an affirming one. Your childhood memories are real, and things are just as incredible and amazing as you remember them. At least on YouTube.

It's hard to believe that the internet hasn't killed nostalgia. You would think that ability to pull up just about any piece of culture from the past century or so would simultaneously sate and destroy the idealized memories of the past we all hold so dear. But the past, at least in terms of arcade games, is exactly as I remembered it.