Spare quarters were rare as hen’s teeth for us. In winter months, my mother’s metal crochet hooks clacked constantly in the evenings as she produced a steady stream of homemade blankets, which she sold in town for extra money. The song’s message was simple: Insert 25 cents into the nearest Pac-Man machine and bliss was imminent. That year, Pac-Man Fever – a wretched piece of music that I unquestionably loved – was perpetually on the radio. On the front of the banana-yellow box, just below the TV, was an apparatus called a “joystick.”
PAC MAN ATARI 2600 COMMERCIAL TV
It was as tall as an adult, with a TV embedded inside, arranged at an irresistible 45-degree angle. Arcade machines were still oddities, then. The summer of 1981, a Pac-Man machine had arrived in the back corner of our local gas station. My three absurdist obsessions were magic, space travel and Pac-Man. I grew up in upstate New York in the 1980s, about three hours away from the Canadian border.
Listen: "I'm really cookin' now, eating everything in sight / All my money's gone, so I'll be back tomorow night," proclaims the 1981 hit novelty song Pac-Man Fever by Buckner & Garcia. It pains me because video games saved my life. I know video games will probably never stop being maligned, chased into metaphorical old windmills by metaphorical villagers bearing metaphorical torches. Parents now rail against Fortnite, just as earlier generations railed against Mortal Kombat, Duke Nukem and Doom. Regardless, my heart has an allegiance to them all. Some are more graphically violent than others. I know that video games exist in many different permutations. For a seven-year-old, a video game can function as a necessary escape hatch, a lesson in the strategy of survival. Humans have a knack for making their inventions serve them in whatever way suits them best. I have heard the detractors, the “experts” who point a disparaging finger at games, blaming them for violence, calling them “murder simulators.” Would that it were so easy to isolate the cause of acts of crime and cruelty. Games have fed me, clothed me and put a roof over my head. I’ve written for magazines, newspapers and websites about games and technology. Now, decades later, I have a career that is centred on video games. In fact, over the years, it only seemed truer and more important. Continued abuse of our services will cause your IP address to be blocked indefinitely.This realization never left me. Please fill out the CAPTCHA below and then click the button to indicate that you agree to these terms. If you wish to be unblocked, you must agree that you will take immediate steps to rectify this issue. If you do not understand what is causing this behavior, please contact us here. If you promise to stop (by clicking the Agree button below), we'll unblock your connection for now, but we will immediately re-block it if we detect additional bad behavior.
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