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| All of the pleasure of delivering papers for only a quarter. |
We never owned a video game console but my brother and I
really wanted a video game fix. So we would either take money we had
earned or steal quarters from my dad's change holder in his truck
console and head up to a video game arcade that was built on the back
of the laundry mat and a restaurant that could never stay in
business. Now days one can reasonably expect top-notch gaming
experience from a home video game system for not much money but back
in the day the arcade machines and the arcade versions of games were
much more technologically advanced. This was during the 8 bit gaming
days and this place was chock full of all the latest and greatest 16
bit games, Paper Boy with a real-ish bike handle with a trigger on it
for throwing papers. Actually, that is not much like a real bike
handle at all, come to think of it. Still cool, but maybe not
authentic. It had the new Mario Brothers game, a 16 bit offering
called 'super' Mario Brothers it later became one of the most common
video games on earth because it was bundled with the 16 bit Nintendos
but at the time those graphics and game-play looked pretty sweet.
They had Spy Hunter which had a futuristic airplane like yoke with
buttons for everything from loading into a moving semi-truck to oil
slicking the opponent, and it had a gear shifter fro low to high and
a gas peddle. Awesome. We would take our stolen loot of quarters and
wander around watching other people play and then deciding on the
game we wanted and either getting in line and playing or just popping
the quarter in. These games were incredibly hard and designed to give
the advantage to the quarter earner not the quarter spender. I hated
to see a quarter wasted on just dieing, lucky for me there was a
scroungy little video game prodigy who was always at the arcade willing and ready to offer his services. He was always hanging around
coaching anyone who wanted his advice or not, through the more tricky
regions of the the video game landscape. His name was Sheldon and he
knew all of the power up and extra life locations on every game, if
you needed a game guide he was there. If you had gotten really far on
Super Mario Bros. but you were on the fourth world and were, by your
own poor eye-hand coordination, in deep trouble. He would
magnanimously play through the level for you even. He would even get you tons of lives, this was
always a gamble but one worth taking with Sheldon at the controls,
trying to 'turtle tip' to get you all those lives lives. Turtle tipping was a
game exploit that would score points over and over by striking the
same enemy turtle over and over in rhythm trapping it just perfectly
to allow the player to get an extra life after the tenth hit without
touching the ground and then one additional life for each hit after
that. It was like printing your own money.Turtle Tipping! Once he got you a few
hundred or as we called it 'infinity' lives he would loosely offer to
hand back the controls. He did this verbally while he was still
standing squarely in front of the machine eyes locked on the action
and hands deftly executing moves. His offer to return the controls
was always coupled with a grave caveat that it was only going to get
harder from here on in and that if I wanted to beat the game I should
let him continue to play. I often did let him keep going just to
watch the game get beaten again. Sometimes I would take it back and
see he was absolutely right it was harder and I would die an infinity
times but that is not bad value for a purloined quarter.
