NO COINS, PLEASE
Vintage video games are getting a makeover for the 21st century — but you’ll need a lot more than quarters
It took me 50 minutes to assemble Arcade1Up’s new Street Fighter II cabinet and start digging into my brain’s memory bank to recall how to do all of the characters’ special moves.
It took five minutes for my reputation as the Star’s resident video game expert to be left in tatters by the button mashing of our social media queen Evy Kwong, who beat me in the first match of the newsroom’s unofficial 2018
Street Fighter II tournament. Arcade1Up is made by Tastemakers, which is one of the many companies cashing in the power of nostalgia and retro-gaming. The company just launched a line of somewhat miniaturized arcade cabinets for home play of classic games such as Pac-Man, Rampage and Asteroids, which you can build at home IKEA-style. They retail for about $400. Measuring just under four feet high, I was a little
surprised by how small it was at first, but once you fire it up, the gameplay immediately takes you back, with the same joystick controls and cheesy graphics that you remember.
“Look, I’m in my 50s, I don’t want to stand all the time,” says a half-joking Scott Bachrach, CEO of Tastemakers. The company also sells a riser ($70) for those who want to stand and get even closer to the real experience. I joke that to recreate the real arcade experience, you still need a sketchy change guy in a dark and musty room, filled with cigarette smoke and kids cutting school.
“Well, it’s your house, if you want that again, that’s up to you,” Bachrach says. “We’ll start you off with the cabinet.”
Since the game has been in the office, I have seen its power. Co-workers have been drawn to it, wondering what the heck it is. It takes people back. I’ve heard “That was the game at my doughnut shop,” or, “I can’t tell you how many quarters I jammed into this game” more than a few times in the past few weeks. These new things are not the same, but they are close, and in some ways better. Like the fact you don’t need a supply of quarters to feed this beast.
Video games have never been as advanced, varied or pervasive as they are today. Gaming is the new sports. Powerful consoles like the PS4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch power the almost $100 billion world of gaming. Growing parallel to that is the consistent rise of very old games and the many new ways to play them.
Like vinyl, retro gaming is something that never really went away.
There is a reason that nerds like me still have an ancient, incredibly heavy standard definition TV and a VCR. That’s the best way for me to get my original Nintendo Entertainment System and play Duck Hunt — the classic light gun game, which won’t work on a high definition TV.
What’s different today is that it’s easier than ever to play old games, and more and more people are finding ways to power-up their gaming nostalgia with new devices. Call it new-stalgia. Every gamer has a memory of a title that is etched into their psyche: the tips from a newspaper route that were immediately spent at an arcade on that new X-Men game; the buddy who first taught you the special move in Street Fighter; or the boss fight that took every ounce of your being (and every penny of your allowance). It’s the power of those memories that this trend is really activating.
While there have long been classic-game console emulators available online, and plenty of knock-off devices, this trend got legitimized by Nintendo, when it released the NES Classic and SNES Classic micro-consoles over the past two years. This was literally nostalgia shrunken down and shrink-wrapped. With libraries featuring some of the most beloved games from those consoles, which was now notably smaller — and cuter — than the original, it also came with an HDMI cord to make it easily connect to modern TVs. The two consoles were immediately snapped up by fans and sold out, frustrating those who missed out. They have since been re-released, and where they have gone, others will follow.
On Dec. 5, Sony released the Play-Station Classic, a smaller version of the PS1, with 20 older games, including Final Fantasy VII, Ridge Racer and Twisted Metal. Atari has plans to launch the Atari VCS next year, with retro titles and more modern options like streaming. Intellivision — yes, Intellivision! — has also announced plans for the Amico, a new family friendly console, reportedly with a library of older and reimagined new games. There is a Commodore 64 Mini available as well as all sorts of other retro product and merchandise.
Want the ultimate proof of the retrogaming resurgence? Look no further than the offices of Unis Technology Canada in Markham, Ont., which has given a slick update to what is considered the world’s first-ever videogame: Pong.
If you are old enough to remember the Atari original, this is like no Pong you’ve ever seen. Forget the grainy monochrome screen and the small hand-held controllers. This is a large coffee table, with round built-in controllers that are a little smaller than an adult hand. In the gameplay area, there are three-dimensional paddles and a square dot that literally glides across the table’s fourfoot surface using magnets and servomotors. You are not looking at a digital screen, but a fully functioning mechanical version of the game.
Steven Tan, the general manager of the company, can’t wait until you get your hands on it. “I travel around the world and I see it entertaining three generations. Children as young as 6 to 8 playing the game, up to Millennials and their parents, or even grandparents who were around when it was first around,” he says. “Everyone loves Pong.”
Unis Technology specializes in building large-scale games for what the industry calls “location-based entertainment” — games for places like amusement parks, Dave and Busters or Cineplex’s Rec Room, which is where this new Pong will be playable in January. But Tan says Pong is different, a crossover product, which people are also buying for their actual rec rooms.
He thinks it can also become something like Golden Tee, which broke out and was so huge it made it all kinds of bars and restaurants.
“This is a brand that still has incredible power,” Tan says. “But it’s also better than ever. This table has five speeds. At 1, a child can play it. At 5, it is competitive level.”
Like everybody in the gaming industry, he’s interested in esports and says his version can run a 128-person tournament with big prizes. Beyond that, the table is Bluetooth-enabled so you can control it with your phone, and there are USB slots for charging cords to keep them juiced. You can stream your own music through it, use it as an alarm clock and it is waterproof so you can put your drinks on it, because it is, after all, a coffee table.
It also doesn’t come cheap. The consumer version of the table retails for $3,800, and though they have only been on the market for a few months, they are selling.
“We just started shipping between July and September, so we’re not even really six months out, but distribution has been set all over the world. We have over 20-plus distributors around the world, and all of them are now buying them by the container load,” Tan says. “We are starting to see traction of them going out into homes. In terms of sales, we are 1,500-2,000 strong right now for those. Retro is back right now, and it is not just back, a whole industry has been created around it.”
It’s an industry that wants to draw the lapsed gamer back in, like the parent who hasn’t played games in a decade. And if they bring it into their homes and introduce it to their kids, the nostalgia cycle just renews.
Another reason for the rise of these classic games might be because gaming has become so much more complicated, so as some gamers get older, they yearn for the simple fun they remember.
“People my age (in their 40s) are starting to be the people who influence culture, and are starting to be the people who have control over these kinds of decisions,” says Clay Routledge, a lifelong gamer and professor of psychology at North Dakota State University who studies the relationship between gaming and nostalgia. “It’s not a surprise to me to see people in the corporate world going, ‘Hey, this is the type of stuff that meant a lot to me growing up when I was young,’ ”
“I think your new-stalgia term is really good actually, because to me, what seems to be part of what makes a nostalgia campaign successful is to capture the elements, and a lot of times they are tactile, or just sensory — they attack our senses in meaningful ways — that reconnect us to those past memories, but to do it in a way that integrates newer features.”