Arcade Angel
Readers take us through the retro keyhole
People who collect videogames aren’t exactly unusual these days, this magazine very much pays testament to that. But finding people who have the space, time and dedication to collect and restore old arcade machines is a very different matter altogether. One such person is Portland native Cat Despira, who was lucky enough to be growing up when the whole scene exploded in North America.
Her memories of this time are very vivid. “I remember the electromechanical games of the early Seventies, but it was games like Boot Hill and Night Driver that got me hooked. My family also got a Pong home system for Christmas 1975 and I became enamoured with that thing so much that my parents took it away because it affected my study time! Shortly after that period, Space Invaders came and my parents, no matter how much they tried, couldn’t stop me from falling in love with that game. So, my earliest memories of videogames occurred just before the craze exploded in the USA but my best memories came right after it!”
Despite videogames being such a huge part of her early childhood and continuing right into her teens, Cat didn’t actually start collecting until 12 years ago. “Back in 2006 my guy brought home a Mortal Kombat cab that he bought off Craigslist in order to save it from being MAME’D,” she says. “The seller had painted it with black lacquer. We stripped that paint off, working until our fingertips were raw. Beneath was perfectly preserved side art. I was smitten with the idea of collecting arcade games as art pieces and it all went from there!” So does this love of collecting extend to home systems? “Absolutely!” says Cat. “Around this time I also fell in love with Playstation. I have loved it since the first model and still think that Sony giving my generation the Walkman helped shape us into the mobile generation of today. I’m also a SNES fan. After the arcade craze died the SNES became my first choice because the graphics and game styles were so good. Although I did spend a lot of time playing comp games in the Nineties, like Doom, Hexen and Quake, the SNES became a staple I felt I could always fall back on and never be disappointed by.”
Despite all of this it’s pretty safe to say that arcade games are Cat’s biggest love as she still continues her quest to save and restore cabs. “What began as a whim with one game grew over time into a very large collection of around 80 or so arcade games and pinball tables,” she says. There is still one coin-op that eludes Cat however. “It has to be Atari’s Liberator! I don’t have one. I know only person who does, and he went through a lot to get it. The side art on that game is one of the coolest sci-fi images ever rendered.”