Plus, like I mentioned before, the competitive craze was focused on “space shooters” so the press spotlighted that. Although some people migrated to it quickly, the press paid it little attention until full “Pac-Mania” finally hit in the Summer of 1981, its shift from a fad to a full-blown craze delayed by a historically brutal sub-arctic winter in many parts of America which kept millions of grade school gamers out of the arcades until things warmed up. Since America was right in the middle of “the shooter craze”, when the competitive gaming scene was focused exclusively on mastering difficult multi-buttoned games, Pac-Man’s debut quite literally looked like a birthday party arriving on the front lines of World War III. Released in America in October 1980 yet arriving in arcades closer to late November, Pac-Man rolled in like a guest at the wrong address. I know a lot of game journos have written otherwise, claiming it was an over-night sensation, but they’re mistaken. The short, fat, bright yellow box with “Scrubbing Bubbles” on the side didn’t receive a lot of attention when it first appeared in neighborhood arcades dominated by tall, black intricately designed cabinets in the Fall of 1980. In The Beginning: One Big Yellow Box of Dopamine A wall of Pac-Man’s in San Francisco. Until now, I don’t believe anyone has ever written about it. And in the impressions left by that combination, particularly if you’re lucky enough to see the sides of a rare, unrestored vintage Pac-Man cabinet, lies the never before told story of how we really played the game. For every pressure, there’s an affect on mass and volume. Human beings leave physical impressions upon the things they love and use just as much as their do upon the lives of people and the planet they live upon. The author’s own 1980 Pac-Man which remains in its original state. Pac-Man, effectively without doing what has caused that wear pattern on the game. Especially since you can’t play Pac-Man, or even Ms. The fact that all vintage Pac-Man’s bear this marking from human hands yet has never been mentioned in print is proof of that. The history of classic arcades, the video craze and the affects it had on a generation have barely been examined as far as I’m concerned. By consistently quoting what has already been written and looking no further a lot has been missed. Researchers and historians who think so sadly leave an entire area of subject matter undiscovered when they choose to continue to stop looking back over the past. I must also remind you that not everything “notable” in classic gaming has been discovered yet. The wear on objects or places records patterns of movement. Now, if anyone thinks for even a second that worn-through Roman stairs, 100-year old children’s trails and worn frets on a guitar have nothing to do with the worn sides of Pac-Man arcade cabs, I must correct you. the worn frets on a favorite guitar the finger-smoothed ivory keys on an old piano the “secret path” in the forest blazed by decades of children that’s been “a secret path” to other children for over 100 years.Īnd, of course, the front left-hand sides of all unrestored and original Pac-Man arcade cabinets that no one – until now– has thought to explain. The impressions of human desire are often left upon objects of their devotion or on the paths leading to where a sense of peace or pleasure can be found i.e. It’s merely enough to know that something stimulated human desire, whether born of thirst or longing, to make me acknowledge that something important happened there, over and over again. Everything, even educated guesses on the mysterious stairs, are merely supposition.īut whatever once laid beyond those stairs, whether beloved, a necessity or a fascination – the three main things humankind gravitates towards their entire lives- isn’t important, at least to me. But no one knows for sure and most likely never will. Another theory was that the stairs led to a brothel. The owner told me that the stairway once led to a fresh water spring before Vesuvius, in 79 AD, covered the area in ash. I’d seen stairs like it before in England and had heard about the ones in Arles, France, but these were much older by at least 2000 years. I saw it in the Fall of 1998 while on vacation in Italy. There’s a ruin of what some believe to be a pagan Roman church in the garden of a private residence, in a very small town just south of Rome, whose stone stairs leading to its alleged former altar are so completely worn through in the center that they resemble what a stick of butter looks like if you held a hot spoon to its center.
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