Nostalgia part one: baseball cards and arcade games
by Matt Worley

I was still buying baseball card packs at the amazing price of four for a dollar, but the lure to spend money on something else was always lurking. For about three years, though, everything went into baseball cards. It was like banking for us kids, I guess. My younger brother and I found twenty dollars on the street on our way home from school: that's a lot of baseball cards. And then something changed. Maybe it was the move from a city where there was a Major League Baseball team to one where the most exciting sport was high school football. And maybe it was the sudden change (any change to kids is sudden) of price from four packs for a dollar to three or even only two for the same four quarters. Suddenly baseball cards didn't mean as much.

Around those years of baseball cards was the fleeting thought of video games. There weren't a lot of video games back then, and most (compared to today's) were pretty lame. We knew they were lame back then, but there seemed to be a world outside of the game itself-and that was the exciting part. At one of the grocery stores I would frequent to soothe my baseball card fix, there was one of these early video games. I want to say it was called Galaxie 500, except I think that's the name of a band and just sounds right in my head's mishmash of memories. The object was to go through these tunnels (or swirls of stars) without crashing into the sides or getting hit by any of the things coming at your ship. You got blasters on all four sides of your ship (they all shot at the same time), but for some reason, it was still a hard game. This was always an object my eyes wandered to after purchasing baseball cards. Something compelled me to push my remaining change into the machine.

I never got good at that game. I probably played the thing about ten times in my whole life. A few years later some friends and I became friends with one of the guys who ran the arcade at our neighborhood mall. He was in high school (we were in junior high), but he liked us anyway. Every once in a while we got to play games for free after the arcade closed down as long as we took out the trash and helped him clean up a bit. For maybe fifteen minutes of work we got an hour or two of free gaming time. I had no idea what I was actually doing to my habit of feeding quarters to arcade games when I began playing the games for free. I thought it was the greatest thing in the world. And then we started beating the games.

One of the strange things about adolecent past times are the legends that surround them in kids minds. The constant legend about video games was that if you beat them, you would be rewarded somehow. Quarters would fall out like a slot machine, or a naked lady would covort on the screen for your pleasure, or the meaning of life would somehow be revealed. Of course, none of these things happened. When you win, there is a quick congratulatory message followed by a long list of credits to the guys who made the machine. And then the game starts over. At the first level. My friends and I defeated about three different games before I realized I didn't care about video games anymore. Instead of actually helping my life in some way, the machine only took about two hours of my time away. And the experience was hardly worth remembering.

When I first began writing this column, I wanted to make the point that video games make kids de-value life. Not from any kind of gratuitous violence angle or anything like that, but because you get so many chances to be alive in video games, dying is not a big thing. But really, that's just psychobabble crap. The real point is that you shouldn't want to actually win. The thrill is to keep playing, keep trying to kill the evil slimy monster, keep pushing in your own quarters, because when you get it for free and win the game, you realize the whole exercise has no point. Finding out your life is worthless is much less fun than battling the Snark-Tooth-Power-Grunions who have endless supplies of granola and automatic laser guns.

Matt Worley is currently working on the new Up With People! production for the next Superbowl. The powers-that-be are trying to make him change the ending where Michael Jackson's future child feeds Kool-Aid to all the cast members, and they die horrible deaths.

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