I think that it must have been some sort of trick of genetics that
made my dad and several of his brothers constitutionally unable to
resist the overwhelming lure of coin-op games. I think only one was
able to resist having one in his possession and that was probably his
wife’s doing anyway. My uncle Barkley had a Donkey-Kong Jr. and a
Pack Man game at least. My uncle wade had a game where you picked up
actual physical toy cars with a claw and put them in a hopper to be
recycled, exactly like a job you may get if you were to drop out and
use to many drugs. My uncle Bill had at least two dozen pin-ball and
novelty games he kept in his house and in the shed. It was something
they needed to have like other men would regard food and shelter. The
addiction has largely passed but at one time my dad had a inoperable
French foreign legion game that used a full-sized toy rife to shoot
at stereotypical Arabs. So we would just pretend to play that one. He
also had a Pirate themed pin ball machine that awarded the most
points for flipping the flippers. Not a hard strategy to master as my
little sister discovered when she beat us all. Finally, we had a coin
op full sized air-hockey table without paddles. We only played these
games when someone came over and wanted to go up in the front house
and give them a shot. We would have to improvise paddles with the air
hockey so we usually used an over turned cup which being poorly
suited for the task usually broke fairly early on in the game and
would have to be replaced. My mom was naturally thrilled at our
breaking all the cups so we were banned from the practice and
eventually we lost interest in trying to play with other makeshift
alternatives and the game was used to store parts on top of and
underneath and then eventually given a quite burial at the landfill.
