Stuff You Should Know - Arcades: Nostalgia Abounds

Episode Date: March 16, 2023

Chuck and Josh were around during the Golden Age of the arcade. And look how they turned out! Join them on a trip down memory lane. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Yep. So go to linktree.sysklive for tickets, and for you oldsters like us, that's L-I-N-K-T-R dot ee slash s-y-s-k live. We'll see you guys in May. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here somewhere running around like a chicken worth their head cut off, like headless Mike, and that makes this stuff you should know.

Mike J. Headless Chicken? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. You're immediately reminded me of the McNoggin. What? I mentioned that way back then. Just look up McNoggin. Is it fried chicken heads?

It's a fried chicken head that slipped into some fried chicken at a restaurant. Oh. Have you ever eaten an H&F, Holman and Finch? Yeah, yeah. I've had that burger at Pond City Market where we used to have our studios. Oh, if you go to the flagship restaurant, fried chicken heads are on the menu. Oh, really? Yes.

And when you eat one, you're like, I've gone too far. This dinner has turned into a blood orgy, basically. I have never, I'm sending you the McNoggin right now, just because that's the kind of stuff we're doing now. That's how loose this has gotten. Here, I'll do a typing sound effect. All right, feast your eyes on the McNoggin, and let's talk about arcades, eh? Yes, let's.

I'm really excited about this one, Charles. Because both of us were kind of, we hit two different sweet spots with this, right? I mean, you were in the golden era, and I was in the silver era, am I correct? Yeah. I mean, you were kind of, you probably went to the golden era at times, right? I was forbidden from going to arcades as a youngster, yeah, my mom was like, that's a drug den. Right.

Which is funny, because I went to a lot of arcades, and I know I was a naive little Baptist boy, but actually, what am I saying, there was probably drugs all over the place. Yeah, you're like, why are you acting so goofy, Todd? Geez, get it together. But we're talking about mainly the golden age of arcades, and what else does it dovetail with, you said? Well, I was part of the silver age, is that what you mean? Oh, okay.

I thought that was one additional thing you were going to say. No, I don't think so. Okay. Well, this dovetails nicely, I think, with our episode on Nintendo, obviously. Totally. And in fact, we've had this, Dave Roos helped us out with this one. Dave Roos, co-creator of the hit podcast Biblical Time Machine. But he wrote this a while ago, but I've been sort of sitting on it until the Nintendo

stank were off. And did we do one on Atari or not, or just the ET game? You did one with Strickland, I think, on Atari. No, I definitely did a two-parter on tech stuff, but... We did not. We did the ET game, though, right? Yes. Yes, we did that one.

Yeah, we've talked about the video game crash of 1983, like, multiple times. And we did pinball. We did do pinball, and that actually kind of factors in remotely. We won't go into it much, but pinball kind of prefigured the video game arcade in a lot of different ways. Not the least that it had an unsavory reputation among parents, and kids love to go play there. But after pinball kind of stopped being as much of a thing, there was a little bit of a drought until we pick up in, I think, say the 70s, the early 70s, late 60s, with a young

man and electrical engineer from University of Utah named Nolan Bushnell. Nolan Bushnell figures into this story as much as you can figure into the birth of the arcade because he was a nerd. He was in all the best ways. He was an EE major at Utah, like you said. And when you are a nerd in university in the late 1960s, early 70s, you're going to start playing very rudimentary computer games and think they are awesome. And that very first game that he played was one from 62 developed at MIT called Space War.

Exclamation point. Yeah, with a big, fat exclamation. Yeah, and it spread very quickly among nerds in college all over the country. It was a big deal. But you say that Nolan Bushnell was like an important figure. You can actually kind of make an argument that this may have never happened had it not been for him because as he kind of recounts later, well, listen, there was no one in the same position that he was in, probably in the world, because he had an electrical engineering

degree and he played games on computers. So he knew about video games. Like I should say video game because there was basically just one at the time. And then he also, and during summers then shortly after he graduated college, he was the games director for an amusement park outside of Salt Lake City called Lagoon. And there's seriously probably no one else on the planet that had that experience with computer games and also with arcade games like pinball or ski ball was one who could have kind of synergized them the way that Nolan Bushnell did to create Atari.

That's my take. Do you have a thing against Nolan Bushnell? No, but I tell you what, is Nolan Bushnell still around? I don't know, my friend. He loves you if he is. I will say that. Why? Because you're saying he's the only one that could have done it in the world and that it

wouldn't have happened without him. He's like, he's saying the Josh Clark praises right now. Well Nolan Bushnell, if you're out there, I think that demands that you get in touch and thank me. Yeah, send some of that arcade money, Josh's way. But you are right in that he had an economic understanding that proved to be pretty key as in he knew what it cost to build a game in a game cabinet. He knew how much they had to make to make that money back and turn a profit.

So just sort of knowing the economics of how this stuff worked and like you said, also being into the games was a key reason this all happened. So he saw a real opportunity to do something big and he's alive by the way. Okay, cool. Well then yes, please do get in touch Nolan Bushnell. He recruited a guy named Ted Dabney who together they went on to found a tarry with another guy named Al Alcorn, Alan Alcorn. And the three of them created a rip off of space war called computer space in 1971.

And a lot of people say like it wasn't a good game, it was too hard because the whole point of creating a game they found out after this first attempt is to make it just hard enough to keep people interested but easy enough that you can play it while half drunk. Yeah, like easy to play hard to master. Yeah, because these coin operated games, their first targets were bars. So computer space, it's very frequently said it's a commercial failure, but Nolan Bushnell, my new friend, he points out that we sold enough of these units that we were able to go on and found a tarry.

So they actually did sell some, it went okay, but again, it was supposedly way too hard and they took that as a lesson learned and they moved on the next year to create Pong. Yeah, they said, all right, you want easy? Let me introduce you to Pong. And I know I mentioned this on the Strickland's episode, but I had the, and I think you were kind of the same in your family, sort of middle class folks who a lot of times got the knockoff versions of whatever, whether it was the not quite Izod shirt or the not quite Mongoose bike.

The nights of the round table knockoff polo shirts. Yeah. I had the not quite Pong, which it was, I believe the Sears and Roebuck version of Pong. It always is. Yeah. I don't know what it was called, but it was essentially the same thing, which is Ping Pong or Table Tennis. It was called Gnop.

Was it really the Sears version? No, that's Pong backwards. Oh, I got you. Boy, I was slowing the uptake on that one. It's okay. There's somebody out there left. Yeah, but Pong was based on a 1958 video game, Tennis for Two. Did you see video of that game?

Of Tennis for Two? Yeah. Yeah. It's played on a radar oscillator. Yeah. Like the same kind of like round fish eye screen that you use for like to detect missiles in 1950. That's how the game is played, but it's actually pretty sophisticated if you watch it.

Yeah. There was another game that was on a round screen. Was it the, was it computer space? Did you see that one? I didn't actually. Was that a square screen? I don't know. Anyway, something in my memory bank tells me there was another one on a round screen

because they just, you know, that's what graphic screens were like in the 60s. They were radar screens. Yeah, but I mean, this thing was like, it's almost like they broke into like a DoD missile silo and hooked up their controllers and we're playing Tennis for Two on it. That's what it looks like in this video. Yeah. And, you know, while we're singing Bushnell's praises for creating Atari and launching the arcade, basically the modern arcade, he also was one of the founders of Charles

Entertainment Cheese, better known as Chuck E. Cheese, which is still around. Yeah. Have you ever seen, I'm sure we've talked about it before, but have you seen the Rock-a-Fire explosion documentary? The what? The, so Chuck E. Cheese has his band, like they have like the live animatronic band at their Chuck E. Cheese locations. Showbiz Pizza had their own called Rock-a-Fire Explosion.

Oh, okay. I think a gorilla was like the lead singer and it's very cute. Same thing. Animatronics, they sang some songs and stuff like that. And they made a documentary about people whose passion in life is finding and rescuing and restoring old Rock-a-Fire Explosion setups. Oh, wow. It's one of those like really great like social interest documentaries that like just kind

of fly under the radar, but it's like, this is one of the best documentaries I've ever seen in my life. It's just great. Oh, I got to check that out. Please do check it out. Rock-a-Fire Explosion, I think is mid aughts, maybe 2007 or 2008. I love anything where someone takes old stuff and restores it for, even if it's just for display or whatever.

Okay. Well, then I have something else to tell you. I was saving this for the end, but I happened, I don't even know how I happened upon this. There's a website called Aussie Arcade and it's almost like a news server, a listserv or something like that, but I found a post called Atari Star Wars Cockpit Restoration. So you remember the Atari Star Wars game? Uh-huh. Do you remember the sit down version?

Yeah. Okay. So a guy in Australia got his hands on one of these that's seen better days and he spent nine months restoring it. And I don't mean the outside. I mean the wiring. He resoldered the wires. He electroplated the metal parts again.

It's one of the most amazing things I've ever seen in my life and he chronicled it exhaustively. So if you want to spend an hour just being impressed, go look for Atari Star Wars Cockpit Restoration by Womble. Womble's the guy who did it on Aussie Arcade and you'll just be wowed. All right. I know what I'm doing for the rest of the day now at least. You'll like it Chuck, I promise. And it's not a video.

It's just photos and like explanations and stuff. Okay. All right. So back to Alan Alcorn and Pong. Pong was a huge hit. They put the very first one in a bar in Sunnyvale, California called Andy Caps which is kind of fun. One little historical footnote and a couple and this is like the movie version.

Two weeks later they called and said, Hey, this thing's not working anymore. And they go over and they was like, here's your problem. And they opened the coin catcher and like a million dollars spills out. But that's how the story goes. It was basically so popular. It was jammed with quarters and they sold 8,000 Pong cabinets in the face of knockoffs because it took a year to get the patent for Pong. So there were knockoffs being sold and they still ended up selling 35,000 total Pong cabinets.

They sold 8,000 just the first year and that was with six people building them. Like they had six employees. That's in a Pong cabinet in a bar in today's dollars could bring in close to a hundred grand in quarters. Wow. Every single year, if you had one of those in your bar, I think they were saying it was bringing close to in today's dollars about $270 and of course that's if it's played every day.

Of course you can be closed on Christmas. Yeah. Oh, you did the math. Is that where you got it? I did the math. Wow. But I sort of round it up. Still.

I'll bet Andy Caps was open Christmas. But it was also a good place to meet somebody if you were interested in them because it was a good way to have a conversation. You played side by side. It was a social lubricant because you were drinking at a fern bar, a Harvey Wallbanger playing Pong and you know, meeting some ladies. Down at the Regal Beagle. Exactly.

So, this was 1973, yeah, 1973. So Atari went from not existing to coming out with its first game in 1971 to having a smash hit in actually creating stand up coin operated arcade video games as an industry from nothing to in 1973 to 1974, selling out to Warner Brothers or Warner Communications for 28 million, which is almost 150 million today in sorry, in six years. That's crazy. Yeah. I mean, that's definitely worth singing the praises.

Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, Dave argues that the golden age was 78 to 82. I would argue it trickled into 83 and people were still going into arcades in 84 and 85. But I think he's probably pretty close because 83 as we'll see later is if you look at data is when gross profits, you know, really kind of didn't bottom out, but we're a lot less than during those previous four years. Yeah.

I think it was like 84, maybe especially 84, but probably in the 85, it was like a dead man walking. You didn't know it. Yeah. But, but yeah, people were still, I mean, those, those video arcades that started to spring up like mushrooms all across the country. I think in 1982, there were 13,000 arcades in the U.S. And let's just get the straight five, six years before there were probably zero and

all of a sudden there were 13,000 arcades. There were tons of companies that were getting into creating and designing and building these standup cabinets that were sent to all of these 13,000 arcades in the United States. And it was just the thing. It was the biggest thing around at the time. Yeah. I mean, I can off the top of my head, I can think of four arcades that were within 12 minutes, a 12 minute drive from my house in suburban Atlanta.

I see. I, the only one I could come up with was the one at Southwick Mall in Toledo that I wasn't allowed to go to. It was called Red Barons. And I don't even remember what it looked like inside. I saw pictures of the old sign. I was like, yeah, that's it. I just remember it being dark and I think I may have gone in there once as a slightly

older kid after I was allowed to do whatever I want, like age 12. Yeah. And it was kind of like this neat place that I wasn't allowed to go to before, but it kind of missed. You know what I mean? Yeah. You know, if I wish one thing for you, it would be that is that you were just a little bit older.

Yeah. And then you could take those years off because I don't want you to be my age. Okay. I want you to be my age in the 80s. That would be really neat. I wonder when we'll start doing that. We'll start playing with age and experience like that. I have an idea.

I want to tell you this. I think this is so cool. All right. There's no way I can possibly do this, so I'll just share it with the universe and maybe somebody can do it. Okay. And so we've got like AI that's starting to get pretty smart all of a sudden. And if you listen to the end of the world with Josh Clark, that may not be a good thing.

Just saying. But the AI that's starting to be deployed is getting smarter and smarter and more and more human-like and more and more capable. And one thing I thought would be really cool is if the AI that's out there today could study the different stats and footage of every NBA player that ever existed. And then eventually you can say, I want the 88 Lakers to play the 2015 Heat. And the AI would play a simulated game that would play out probably exactly like it would have played out in real life if you could actually do that.

I mean, they do those simulated games now for like the big game, and stuff like- For Super Bowl? Yeah. I thought we weren't allowed to say that. Who cares? Is Super Bowl police going to come get us? Yeah, they play those computer sims. But I don't know if it's as robust as you're probably thinking.

And I don't know if they have done like matching up classic teams, because that would be pretty fun. It would be. Especially in the NBA, that's a big argument of like, you know, which era was best or whatever. So anyway, the arcades, I had four that I can think of off the dome that were within a 15 minute drive. Kids in the 80s were feral, basically. If you're a younger person and you watch Stranger Things and you think like, was it really like

that? Yes, it was really like that. It was so sweet. You would come home. My mom was at home, but I would basically come home and immediately leave again most times and not come back until after dark. Latchkey kids would come home to an empty house and then go somewhere else or have friends over or go straight to a friend's house.

And we just didn't have oversight. Somehow, you know, most of us did okay, at least me and my friends did. Like there were no, I'm sure there were plenty of tragedies, but not in my room. We all did fine. Yeah. I mean, yes, there would be a tragedy once in a while that would make Nashors and scare everybody. But it was so few and far between at the time.

Yeah. So I just wanted to get into with Dave, he kept saying like quarters, quarters, quarters. In the early days of arcades, at least at the ones I went to, there were not quarters. There were tokens. Oh yeah. Yeah. And you, they had deals going like a game didn't cost a quarter, a game cost, depending on the deal that day, if you went on like a Tuesday, you would get like 20 tokens for

a dollar or something like that. Like they would have like double token day. And a game was never a quarter. So you could play and play and play forever for five bucks because games ran on tokens that were not the value of a quarter. And then eventually, of course, quarters or maybe in some places they already used them. But then the quarter became like a 50 cent game was like, whoa, are you kidding me? And now when you go to like a Dave and Buster's, you get a, you pay $50 for some card.

And you didn't even know how much you're paying per game unless you read the fine print. You just buzz your card. It's, you know, it's over, it's several dollars probably. Yeah, for sure. I'm sure probably five bucks a game maybe in some cases. For the big, big ones, but it's different. I mean, I went to Dave and Buster's recently with Ruby and it's not a ton of just regular old arcade games, big things and cranes grabbing stuff, toys and interactive stuff.

It's fine. It's fun. Yeah. It's just not a video arcade. The late seventies and early eighties was a very specific space. Yes. It was dark. There was very few people over the age of 18 or 19 in there.

It was just, it was a kid's place and like you said, kids were feral at the time and you could, your parents didn't know where you were. So you could spend as much time as you wanted or as much money as you had at the arcade or out in the woods or doing whatever. And so because that this was like a new thing, like kids were I think allowed to like kind of roam free in the mid seventies for sure and definitely before that too, but they didn't have this place to go to. Maybe a pinball arcade was there or something like that, but nothing like this.

And the difference between a pinball machine and a 1979 standup video arcade machine is just mind boggling. Yeah. If you're playing this thing in 1979 and your only exposure previously was to things like pinball machines. Yeah. Um, should we take a break? Yeah.

All right. We'll take our first break and we'll be right back. There's so much news happening around the world that we're somehow supposed to stay on top of. That's why we launched the big take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and I heart radio that turns down the volume of it to give you some space to think. I'm Wes Kosova.

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All right, so we've established that the peak of parents not caring about their children was in the 80s, the early 1980s, arcades came along to squeeze dollars out of us. And they started getting better games, you know, the games at first, you know, I started looking at these and we're going to talk about some of the iconic games. And what I realized is the iconic games of the era, almost all still hold up today. Maybe not with the graphics, it may be a little rudimentary. But most of these iconic games are still the gameplay is still challenging. And that's why I think it holds up the ones that aren't that don't hold up as far as

gameplay goes or games like Pole Position, which was the first 3D car racing game where you were sort of positioned right behind the car. And Pole Position was a huge game in 1982 that really brought on driving games. But Pole Position doesn't hold up because the gameplay is not that great. In addition to not looking great. But if you go play Miss Pac-Man or Space Invaders or Centipede or Gallagher, yeah, or Gallagher or Asteroids, these games are still challenging and fun to play. Yeah.

And Gallagher, I will put money that it still looks good to just about anybody. Yes, it is bitmapped because it's a bit, it's like eight or sixteen or whatever bit graphics, but it still looks good and it moves well and it's just a cool looking game. It is. 1981, shout out to Shigira Yokoyama for designing Gallagher on the heels of Galaxian, their previous game, which was not as good Gallagher. And both were inspired, of course, by Space Invaders, which was the next biggest game after Pong to come along in 1978.

Yeah, so Pong just put video games on the map. And then the next step was Japan, who said, oh yeah, hold our sake. And they came up with Space Invaders in 1978 and it became such an overnight success in Japan that people rented empty commercial spaces and just put Space Invaders in there and created like these kind of pop up arcades that were open 24 hours a day and had a line out the door at all times. Yeah. Apparently the legend goes that there was a nationwide shortage of 100 yen coins because

these storefronts with the Space Invaders machines were sucking them up. Crazy. Pretty cool. I will say that Dave and Buster's had a, like a probably, probably 10 foot tall Space Invaders that you can play, which is kind of cool. 10 feet. What's the point of it being 10 feet tall? Is the screen like that big?

Yeah, that's how big the screen is. Oh, okay. I got you. Well, it's pretty neat. Does it look good though? Yeah, it looks awesome. So Space Invaders is the reason we have all those space fighting or space shooter themed games that are so clustered in like the early 80s, late 70s.

That was the one. But the next game that came out that really kind of shook that up, that was the trend forever. There was one I saw, Chuck, called Starfire from 1979. I don't remember that one. It was by, I can't remember who it was, but it was this company, this games company that just kept pushing the envelope. But anyway, Starfire, if you watch the gameplay, it has the same exact font as Star Wars.

Uh-huh. That's interesting. They were unambiguously shooting tie fighters, but it was in no way shape or form licensed from Star Wars. It was just that big of a rip-off. They ripped it off. So that was like the big trend was Space Fighters until Pac-Man came along in 1980 and said, boom.

Yeah, Pac-Man was the first, it was a Namco game, a Japanese gaming company. And it was the first game to have a mascot, like a little character. Next to this, you had your little shooter ship with Space Invaders and your little triangular spaceship with asteroids and not even a ship with the games like Missile Command, but which actually that may have been after Pac-Man, I'm not sure. But Pac-Man was the first mascot. It was designed explicitly to not be violent. It was designed explicitly to appeal to young girls because they were trying to make more

money and it was sort of a boys thing at the time, they were like, we need to get girls in here and Pac-Man comes along and they were into it. The boys were into it and it became a worldwide sensation. It was. I had a Pac-Man lunchbox and matching thermos that I was like one of my prized possessions. The Pac-Man cartoon, this is about when I came in. Pac-Man cartoon was, I think it's probably still good. There's a song, Pac-Man Fever.

Here's an article we really need to shout out on The Verge by Laura June from back in 2013 and she points out in this article that Pac-Man Fever sold a million records in 1982 and Survivor's Eye of the Tiger, which was the number one hit of 1982, only sold a million more. That's how big Pac-Man Fever was. Yeah, Buckner and Garcia, the singers of Pac-Man Fever, terrible song. Was it like in the tune of Cat Scratch Fever? No.

Okay, well that was just the Simpsons that screwed me up then. No, no, no, go listen to Pac-Man Fever. It's awful. But you know, those guys, hats off to them, they made it, sold a million records. Sure. I've never done that. Yeah. I never sold one record, although we may soon.

Oh yeah, man, that's a cool foreshadowing. It was another watershed game in 1980. It was the first game co-designed by a woman named Donna Bailey. She was the only woman working at Atari, at least the only designer, and she picked out that trackball and Centipede, again, gameplay holds up, still very, very hard game to play. Yeah, I was watching gameplay on YouTube of Centipede and I was getting anxious just on like the second level. Yeah, these games are fun and hard.

I don't think we mentioned that Asteroid, I think, was the first game to untether the ship, like Space Invaders and Galaga, all those games, you can move left and right at the bottom. Yeah, but you're shooting upward toward the top of the screen. Yeah, what made Asteroids really, really hard was once you were brave enough to hit that throttle button and start flying around a little bit, like it's a very tough game. And then I think, was it Defender? Yeah, Defender is a really cool one that still holds up too.

You could shoot left or right. And so it was a scrolling game, whereas with some of the other ones, they were like, yes, whereas some of the other ones, they were just, or all the other ones, they were just a new level, which basically was like, oh, these shapes are now in a different location and they're purple rather than green. Yeah, over where they scrolled vertically, but this is definitely the first horizontal scroll. Yes, and it was cool.

That's another one that really holds up to Defender. Yeah, Miss Pac-Man, the far superior of Pac-Man in 1982 was, I mean, I feel like it was just as popular probably as Pac-Man. It may, as far as like play goes, I would guess it's Eclipse Pac-Man, but as far as like pop culture goes, Pac-Man might have Miss Pac-Man beat. I think they were kind of hand in hand appropriately, you know? Yeah, you're right. I want to shout out a few more games just quickly that I feel like were sort of game

changers, the Game Tron, which came just on the heels of the Movie Tron. It was great because it had four different sub-games within the game, and that Light Cycle game was like one of the coolest things you'd ever played when you played it. So hard to, at least for like a six or seven-year-old, it was very cool. Well, and as it progressed, those first levels are kind of easy and they just get harder and harder. And then for me personally, the Game Tempest, the Game Joust, and the Game Battle Zone were all three like big, big games for me.

I always loved Cuber. Anywhere there was a Cuber, I would play that. Yeah. Cuber's fun, and that makes sense because you were younger and sort of skewed toward younger kids, I think. What was the one where it was like hamburger or something like that? Oh. Burger time?

Yes. Burger time. Burger time was good. I never played that. And then still to this day, I went and looked at Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr., and that was way too hard for me at the time. It's still hard. Yeah.

But it's some of the best graphics and colorful movement, and it's just such a beautiful game still to this day, and that one came out, Donkey Kong came out in 1981. Yeah, and I don't think we covered in the Nintendo episode the name Donkey Kong, did we? And because remember, somebody tried to file suit, I think RCA tried to sue them, and they were like, no, this is long gone, that ship has sailed. Oh, okay. Because for some reason, it didn't ring a bell because I'd never really stopped to

wonder why in the world was called Donkey Kong. Such a weird name, but apparently they were looking for an English word that meant stubborn like a donkey, and then just combine that with King Kong. Yep. And Mario, I don't think we talked about this. Mario was originally known as Jump Man, one word, not even hyphenated. We should mention Dragon's Lair briefly. It's a game that came out in 1983.

I don't know if you remember Dragon's Lair much. I do. Yeah, it was the first game that used, and kind of the only one that used laser disc technology to basically where you were playing a Disney cartoon. Yep. And it was from Don Bluth, an ex-Disney animator. He did an American Tail, I think. Oh, okay.

I think he was like the lead on that, maybe. I got you. But here was the deal with Dragon's Lair. It looked cool, and it looked different than anything you'd ever seen, and way better than like the 16-bit technology graphics-wise at the time. But the gameplay was terrible. You basically just push buttons at key moments to advance the story, and like you weren't really playing.

You didn't have control of the character. No, so let's say a single minute of this movie was chopped up into five different segments. Over the course of this whole minute that played out, you would move that thing like five times, and the rest of the time you were just standing there waiting. It was terrible. I never played Dragon's Lair. I suckered into it at first because it looked amazing. And then I was like, this is bad.

Yeah, it really was. Which sort of just reinforces my point about the gameplay. If it's good, it holds up. No one's playing Dragon's Lair these days. I'll bet there's somebody out there that's like Dragon's Lair for life. Yeah, maybe. I want to shout out too from my youth, my super youth. There was one called Comanche, which is like a Wild West shoot-em-up.

I never played that. I remember it. I cannot find any documentation of it anywhere online, just can't find it. But I'm glad that you verified that. I used to play that at the little putt-putt on Kataba Island by where my family used to vacation in summers. Nice. And then the other one was, it just escaped me, Chuck, because I was talking about Comanche.

Paperboy? No. I don't remember. I'll shout it out. It'll come to me later, and I'll just interrupt you with it, okay? Do you remember Battlezone, the one I mentioned? Was it the one that was like a destroyer? Now, Battlezone was the one where you put your face in what kind of, you would think

now is like a VR thing, like a submarine periscope. And you had these two levers, and you were a tank basically. And it was all like, I don't know the technical name, but when it's just like the green lines and like a grid layout, like those were the graphics. But it was kind of had like a 3D effect and was really pretty rad. Oh, I'll bet it knocked your socks off back then. Yeah, it did. I thought of the other one and another one.

Okay. The one I was thinking of was Empire City. I think it's Empire City, 1942 or something. You're like a gangster. Don't remember that. You're just shooting other gangsters. Okay. It's pretty cool.

And then the other one was Spy Hunter. Remember Spy Hunter? Yeah, that was a pretty good driving game at the time. That was a great one. It was like that oil slick and people would spin out who were chasing you. It was just very neat. I knew this episode was going to go like this. Yeah, we just took fistfuls of member berries before we did this one.

Kill screens we should talk about because there was a technological limitation to these arcade games that were based on 8-bit processors, the hardware was. And an 8-bit processor can only store 256 total values. So if you got good enough at some of these games, you could get up to screen 255 and when you hit screen 256, the game would sort of skits out on you and stop. And that was called a kill screen. Yeah. The game was trying to reset to zero, but there wasn't a level zero.

So the game would just do some weird stuff. But what's interesting is, does that mean then for like Pac-Man in particular is very famous to have that 256 value curse and you can only get to 255. But if they just had named level one, level zero, I wonder if the game would just start over again and you could just play it in an infinite loop. I don't know. Donkey Kong had one too. They had the same problem with the 256 value curse.

At level 22, you should have 260 seconds to complete the level. But because the 8-bit processors, I don't know what 260 is, so let's just call it four. You have four seconds to complete. So in theory, it goes beyond level 22, but in reality, in practicality, it stops there because no one can beat that screen in four seconds. Not even Billy Mitchell. I'll bet an AI in the future, Kim. All right, so I say we talk about a few of these little tidbits and then we'll take a

break and then talk about what killed the arcade. Sure. Good? Yeah. These are kind of fun because if you were a kid at that age, or heck, I still enjoy entering my initials. A-S-S. When I get a high score, I knew one of us was going to say that.

The very first game to even display a high score at all was called Sea Wolf from 1976. Dude, do you remember that game? I do. I don't think I really played it, but I remember it. So everybody, it was a submarine game, so you just shot torpedoes at ships, but the joystick was a periscope. It's so cool looking still today. Oh, I remember that.

Yeah. And it had great graphics on the cabinet. It was just an all-around neat game. I don't know about the gameplay and the graphics in the game weren't top notch or anything, but just the periscope alone was very cool. No, I totally remember that. It just kind of came out and then came down. Right.

But that was the- Like a periscope does. Right. But that was the first one that had a high score, you said? That's the first one that just registered a high score. The first one that I believe stored the high score was Pac-Man. I thought it was Space Invaders. No, no, no.

What did I say? Pac-Man? You got Pac-Man fever. Yeah, I do. Space Invaders in 1978. Right. But you still didn't have the initials. That was Starfire in 79 that let you put your initials, and then Asteroids was the first

one that showed the top 10 or whatever. Yeah. And the problem with Space Invaders was that if you unplugged the cabinet, the high score was gone forever, which was very richly portrayed in that Seinfeld episode, The Frogger. Remember that one? Oh, that's right. George, his only legacy is he still had the high score at the pizza place that he used to hang out at in high school on The Frogger, and he tried to keep it going, and of course

it didn't work out for George. Yeah. I forgot to shout out Frogger. That's another game that's still fun and still hard. I totally forgot about it, too, and it really is. I even looked up that episode. I still didn't think that, oh, yeah, Frogger was a great game, but absolutely was. And that's actually a really good point, real quick, Chuck.

You played Frogger on like a stand-up arcade. It was exponentially better looking. It played better than what your friend was playing at his house at home on the Atari 2600, and that was another big draw that even when the controllers and the home consoles came out, there was still reason to go put your tokens in at the arcade. No, absolutely. I would argue that Frogger was one that translated pretty well to the Atari. Sure.

It just didn't look nearly as good. Yeah, they didn't look as good. But some games did not translate at all, like the infamously bad Pac-Man for Atari. It was bad. I was very, very excited to get this game. It was the biggest thing in the world, and I got it for my birthday, and it was just... It didn't sound right. It went donk, donk, donk, donk, donk, donk.

When it was eating the things, the mouth, none of it worked. It was just a bad game. That is really weird. By the way, the thing I couldn't remember about Battlezone, it's the vector graphics. Oh, yeah, which apparently I don't know a lot about it, but you can render way higher-resolution graphics with less processing power somehow. Okay, that makes sense. All right, so let's take that break, and we'll come back and talk about what killed the arcade

right after this. There's so much news happening around the world that we're somehow supposed to stay on top of. That's why we launched the Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio that turns down the volume a bit to give you some space to think. I'm Wes Kosova. Each weekday, I dig into one important story and talk about why it matters.

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This is Questlove, and, you know, at QLS, I get to hang out with my friends, Sugar Steve, Laia Fontigolo, Unpaid Bill, and we, you know, at Questlove Supreme, like the nerd out and do deep dives with musicians and actors and politicians and journalists. We give you the stories behind all your favorite artists and creatives that you have never heard. I'm talking about stories behind their life journeys and their works of art. I love QLS because of the QLS team supreme, they're like a second family to me. Your fan is deep diving into music, everything, all monacking your musical history, and learning

things about hip-hop artists and things you never thought, then you're a lot like me. But you're also a fan of Questlove Supreme. One of the things I love the most about this show is that we get to learn from the masters. I look at being on this show as my graduate program in music. Listen to Questlove Supreme on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Chuck, what killed the arcade? Ronald Reagan.

Kinda. He did not. Yeah, right. Well, a couple of things helped kill the arcade, one of which was kind of what happened with Atari in a way, in that it got so popular that people just started making terrible games to try and cash in, and that was true for the stand-up and sit-down cabinet arcade games as well. They just started making too many of them, and a lot of them weren't good, and a lot

of these arcade owners borrowed money to get the latest games in there that ended up stinking and that bit them in the rear end. Yeah, anybody, any small business entrepreneur could open an arcade because all of those manufacturers had programs where they would give you these machines on credit, and you could pay them back in quarters if you wanted to. But like you said, you couldn't tell what game was good and what game was bad because the marketing and the graphics and everything made it look so cool, no matter how bad the game was, that you would end up with a room full of duds, and all of a sudden all your

customers are gone, and you would go under, and that happened over and over and over again. So those 13,000 arcades just dripped down to very, very few by the mid-80s. Yeah, and I bet you, and this is just me speculating, but I bet you a lot of those arcade owners weren't really into the games. They were like, you know, I've got three car washes in an arcade. Well, yeah, and they also like made a pretty good sideline on selling little kids' drugs. Right. The other, and this is from that Verge article you mentioned, they list another big reason

which was that there was a cultural backlash, just, you know, that's sort of always been the story from pinball, like you mentioned, early on to, you know, Grand Theft Auto now is parents and politicians saying, hey, these games are not only robbing our children of like potential homework time or interacting with the world and with their friends or being in nature, but they're corrupting them. Yeah, right, like they're not only being corrupted like physically in the arcades by potential drug dealers and kids who want to teach them how to skip school more efficiently and that kind of stuff.

But also by the games themselves, like they're being turned into zombies at best, at worst they're being taught to enjoy things like violence, which is starting to become more of a thing. Yeah. They are, who knows what hidden messages, somehow Black Sabbath worked into some video game. Right. It was the same kind of moral panic that it was within the same bubble that anything

that was that parents didn't fully understand that kids were really into was suspect and dangerous and probably you just need to keep your kids away from it. Yeah, which is really ironic because these are the same parents who let us be feral children. Right. Right, because- And then go on their high horse about these games that we play that we really enjoyed. I think they could understand that in a lot of ways, like if you were out in the woods building a tree fort, like your parents had done that before.

They understood it. They knew what it was like. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. These arcades, they didn't have that experience. Or if they did, they remembered what they got into when they were playing pinball back in like the 40s or something like that as little kids. And they were like, oh yeah, I forgot, I learned how to skip school there.

I should probably keep my kid from doing that. And then I think also there's just like a, it's just a generational gap that inevitably develops. Like I kind of understand where the parents were coming from at age 46 now, whereas if you had asked me 10 years ago, I would have been like, that is so lame. Parents just suck in general, you know? Yeah. I think that those, all those things put together like kind of, kind of, just beep, I think

all those things kind of came together to kill video games. Yeah. The irony of what we were just talking about too is like, you know what goes on in the woods too. That's where I learned to smoke cigarettes. Like nothing was going on and that's good in the woods. We found all kinds of things in the woods. You know what I mean?

That's, that's as far as I'm going as the cigarettes thing, as far as recollections go. But this notion that we were all just out there playing, you know, playing nature kid. So I learned a lot of things in the woods as a kid. I was playing nature kid. I was just smoking while I was doing it. Right. Man, you had this thing where I kept a bar of soap that I'd stolen from my parents'

house out at our tree fort where I would smoke cigarettes and I would, I would go out to the golf course pond that was like right adjacent to the woods and wash my hands off first and then put the soap back and then go back home as if that like got rid of the cigarette smell from me. You would have scared the hell out of me because I was not, if I would have seen a kid my age or God forbid like five or six years younger than me smoking, I would have just run in the other direction. Did I ever tell you the cigarette buying story from when I was like 12?

Was this, I know Emily got a note from her mom to buy her cigarettes and that was illegal. That's pretty awesome. It wasn't that, was it? No, this is me buying for myself and my friends. We all pooled our money together and came up with I think like $20 between us, which is like 10 packs of cigarettes at the time. I rode my bike to this convenience store, like lean the bike up against the wall and full view of the clerk and walk in and I'm like, I'd like 10 packs of cigarettes.

Let's see. It was kind of like when you're at a donut shop ordering a dozen donuts, but I was doing that with cigarettes. I'd like, I'll have those cools and those Marlboro's of a couple Winston's, how about some Virginia Slim's and the guy sold them to me, put them in a bag for me to drive or ride home on my bike more efficiently with. That is amazing. Yep.

It really was a beautiful time. It really was. So Dave posits and he's kind of writing a lot of ways is one of the death knells was in 1982 in a very sort of offhand comment from C. Everett Coop, who was a surgeon general at the time, had given a speech in Pittsburgh and this was in the Q and A afterward. There was a question about video game effects and he just sort of tossed out, yeah, you know, I think these kids are becoming addicted body and soul. And then, you know, this was the surgeon general.

This is when people knew who that person was and trusted what they said. Yeah, he was big. And that just sort of became the media narrative. The national PTA leapt on this, issued a report and I'm glad that Dave puts report in quotes because they weren't really basing it on hard data or really great studies. It was more like a lot of speculation on how bad these games were for kids. Right. And that was all you needed to hear PTA put their seal on it and parents were like, OK,

it's official between them and C. Everett Coop like this just needs to end. Also there was a part of it too. It wasn't necessarily the game consoles. The author of the Verge article, Laura June, points out that game consoles were around before the demise of the video arcade. And it really wasn't until like 1985, like we talked about in our Nintendo episode that they got even bigger. But I would say still early 80s Atari was still pretty big.

So it was around at the time. But I think parents let that live in order to let video arcades die because at the very least you could keep an eye on your kid while they were playing the games at home. Right. You know. Yeah, you could ignore them in the basement rather than ignore them out in the wild. It's much tougher to smoke cigarettes in the basement than it is in the woods. There was an early 90s Renaissance when Street Fighter II, the world warrior came out followed

by Mortal Kombat and Tekken in the early 90s. So people crept back and this was like my early college days. I remember we would go to the bowling alley in Athens to play Street Fighter and stuff and then the whenever the first I guess it was the first PlayStation maybe is when we you know started really playing heavily at home with Mortal Kombat. Yeah. With Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter. So you were into this because this is where I was at my peak as far as video arcades go.

Yeah. I was in I was more into because like I said I was in college so we would make the occasional trip to the bowling alley but it was mainly playing with my friends Clay and Jason and Brett and Bill playing at their house. I had a friend named Tony, Tony Appie actually who I went to high school with and he was like 17 at the time and managed an entire Mount Asia somehow. That's how responsible he was. Managed to what?

Mount Asia. It's like a family fun park where there's like go-karts, mini golf, huge arcade. Yeah. Golf and stuff. It was fun and Tony was 17 and managed the place and he would give us unlimited coins so we would go in and play all these games and when you have unlimited free coins like you're really willing to try out all sorts of games but we had a really good time there at Mount Asia in the early mid 90s.

Oh well I know I mentioned what was sort of the pinnacle of my childhood life at one point was when through something as my dad being principal they had a free night at Charles Entertainment Cheese and it was I think just the educators and their kids got to go but it was just one free night at Chuck E. Cheese and everything was free. You just ordered pizza when you wanted and the first thing you did when you walk in was gave you a little cloth sack full of tokens and the idea of that being free was just mind blowing to like a 10 year old. Oh I can imagine free pizza, free games, free Coke.

Yeah. I mean you just got to play games for free all night long and I remember going home that night being tired and just dreamy in my head thinking this is the best night of my life. So things came back in the early 90s and the parents stepped up again and said no no no. Everything we were saying before in 1983 that didn't apply now really does apply like the violence is just outrageous and outlandish like in Mortal Kombat you could very memorably pull your opponent's final column out. It was fun.

I mean looking back it didn't look that great so it's kind of funny now that they're in an uproar. But if they were in an uproar over the violence from Space Invaders you can imagine what Mortal Kombat did to them so that kind of killed that comeback as well and plus also home consoles just kept getting better and better and better. Yeah and that's the story of the arcade. And you can still go now you know they're the sort of there's the Daven Busters type places which again like I said are you know they've retrofitted they have the Giant Space

Invaders they have this huge Pac-Man game where multiple people can be Pac-Man at the same time. So they've kind of like tried to bring some of these into the modern era but if you really want that throwback experience in most cities they have some kind of a barcade style thing where they have the classic games and you can get a beer or something and play. I've not been to one of them have you. I went to one at one point and then when I was living in LA there was an arcade like an old school regular arcade it wasn't some retro beer place within walking distance of

my first apartment so I would go down there and play or go to the bowling the big Lebowski lanes and some good arcade games conceptually speaking it just makes sense. Why not put like fun activities into a bar rather than just booze and you know hopefully good conversation with whoever you're with. So I totally get that seems like it would be fun if everybody like followed all the unwritten rules about playing games you know yeah I'll try it I'll take you on a barcade date someday you got anything else I got nothing else well that means everybody that arcades are done Chuck I feel like we burned through a really great live show topic here

oh that's all right yeah people don't come to our shows that have been to arcades that's true that's a good point man and since Chuck just made a good point that means it's time for a listener me I'm gonna call this hamburger steak follow up from Lori hey guys heard the discussion of the hamburger steak and thought hey that solves my problem on what to cook for supper but then Chuck said that hamburger steak was just hamburger pressed into a steak shape I had to stop and step back to make a sure I heard that correctly but try this maybe to juice up your hamburger steak I think you'll like it better mix that hamburger with about a half a pack or less of Lipton onion soup mix oh that's a that's an all

time great hack for hamburgers and turkey burgers period keep some very juicy and very flavorful mm-hmm add some breadcrumbs and even egg if you want this is meatloaf and then cook it completely remove it from the skillet place the rest of the soup mix that you didn't use and water in the skillet you cook the burger in and basically thicken that to a gravy wow you could add some flour or cornstarch to thicken it up and then add the burger back in and then this is how Lori signs her her email you can use my name comma Lori yeah that's from Lori Michael good that sounds like a good recipe to me that is a great recipe Lori thank you for that I'm going to try that post haste and it actually brings to mind

another thing I just came up Chuck since we're talking about kitchen hacks okay have you ever taken this water that you boil the spaghetti in and then add a little bit to your sauce no okay I never had before until the other night and apparently we've been doing it wrong all along you have to do that and the reason why is it actually counter intuitively thickens your sauce a little bit because of the the carbs that are still floating around in the water and just a little bit just enough and then the other thing it does is it's when you put the spaghetti drained spaghetti into your sauce which is what you're supposed to do we don't put it on top of the spaghetti you stir it around toss it it actually makes

the sauce stick to the spaghetti more and it is I can report really you should never make spaghetti any other way all right okay I'm gonna leapfrog off of that because this is along those same lines if you make homemade mashed potatoes like I do and you chop up raw potatoes and then boil that then you strain the water out save some of that water and add it back in instead of just going right to like milk or cream or whatever you want to use as your liquid put some of that starchy water back in first and I think it has a similar effect nice yeah starchy that's why I was after not carby yeah and finally just to add a correction or not a correction but a tip your butter bell you mentioned was getting

moldy we had quite a few people right in that say to you salted butter in your butter bell will not get moldy yeah I don't I I'd like to salt my own butter I don't buy a pre salted I'm not a communist yeah I'm sure that was part of it too and also I think I may have fudge slightly when I said yes I did change the water every three days I think I did from time to time but I think that probably had something to do with it but it's nice to know that wasn't the entire thing that I was using unsalted all right well if anyone's still listening now these are great yeah kitchen tips yeah for sure I think we should probably get a move on so thanks Laurie for that awesome recipe thank you for your tip thank me for

my tip as well and if you want to get in touch with us to give us a tip of any sort you can email us at stuff podcast at I heart radio dot com stuff you should know is a production of I heart radio for more podcasts my heart radio visit the I heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows there's so much news happening around the world that we're somehow supposed to stay on top of that's why we launched the big take it's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and I heart radio that turns down the volume of it to give you some space to think I'm West Kosova each weekday I dig into one important story and talk about why it matters listen

to the big take on the I heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen what would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you hey let's start a coup back in the 1930s a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism I'm Ben Boland I'm Alex French and I'm Smedley Butler join us for this sorted tale of ambition treason and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands listen to let's start a coup on the I heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows I'm Dr. Romney and I am back with season two of my podcast navigating narcissism this season we dive deeper into highlighting red flags

and spotting a narcissist before they spot you each week you'll hear stories from survivors who have navigated through toxic relationships gaslighting love bombing and their process of healing listen to navigating narcissism on the I heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.