Just (Zap!) Like Old Times

By Richard Zoglin

$ They are, in their own way, as much a part of TV history as Lucy, Uncle Miltie and the Great One. Their names were Pinky, Blinky, Inky and Clyde, but most people knew them simply as the squat, ghostlike monsters who scurried around a maze trying to gobble you up in the most popular video game of all time, Pac-Man. Remember the tinkly computer tune that signaled the start of each game? The "power pellets" that changed the monsters' color to blue and turned the chasers into the chased? The animated "half-time show" that appeared after two mazes were completed (and the even better one -- "They Meet" -- in the sprightly sequel game, Ms. Pac-Man)?

Hold on to your joysticks, everyone. Video-game nostalgia has arrived. Never mind that the genre is less than two decades old. The first coin- operated video game -- a rather drab, black-and-white job called Computer Space -- was introduced in 1971, to a notably tepid reception. Since then, arcades have seen a parade of breakthrough hits, technological advances, a boom period and then a falloff in popularity. Enough has happened, in short, for the American Museum of the Moving Image to assemble a collection of nearly 50 classic video games and call it historical scholarship. The exhibit, Hot Circuits: A Video Arcade, complete with earnest musings on the sociology of it all, can be seen through Nov. 26 on a newly opened floor of the museum in Queens, N.Y.

Putting together the retrospective was no easy task. Video games go in and out of fashion quickly, and many of the older models, it turned out, were close to extinction. The exhibit's organizers spent months canvassing dealers and manufacturers in an effort to locate surviving machines. "To the people we were dealing with, 1982 was ancient history," says Rochelle Slovin, the museum's director. "So many games were difficult to find. Many just got thrown out or were repainted."

One of the toughest finds was an original Pong machine, introduced by Atari in 1972 and considered the first successful video game. The search at one point led to a dealer in New York City reputed to have 21 games in his basement; unfortunately, the building had been torn down three months earlier, and all the games were buried under the rubble. The museum finally found a Pong machine in an arcade operator's collection in Great Neck, N.Y., a week and a half before the exhibit was to open. The museum also unearthed one of the last surviving copies of Death Race, the 1976 game that stirred a storm of * protests when parents noticed its grisly object: to drive a car over as many pedestrians as possible, replacing them with tombstones.

Except for a couple of the oldest machines, all the games in the show can be played by visitors (the $5 admission charge -- $2.50 for kids -- gets you a packet of five tokens). Most of the greats and near greats are here: Space Invaders, the 1978 hit that popularized the genre's single most enduring theme, warfare in space; Donkey Kong, whose endearingly quirky scenario had a little man racing up a skyscraper to rescue a girl from the clutches of a giant gorilla; and Tron, the only video game that was more popular than the movie that inspired it. Special attention is paid to technological innovations like the 3-D graphics introduced by Subroc 3-D in 1982 and the computerized voice in Berzerk, which lured passersby when the game was idle by calling out, "Coin detected in pocket!"

The show's accompanying text is a fount of video-game lore. Space Invaders was the only game to spawn a physical malady recognized by the New England Journal of Medicine: Space Invaders' wrist. A programming bug in Defender, one of the most complex of the space-battle games, made play virtually endless once the score reached 900,000 (its makers thought no one would ever beat 60,000). The origin of the odd name Donkey Kong is still unclear. Some say Donkey came from a Japanese word for stupid; others claim that the game was intended to be called Monkey Kong, but its Japanese manufacturers misspelled it.

Video arcades were once viewed by parents as the worst havens for truancy and other youthful mischief since the pool halls that caused such trouble in River City. Today they look like important precursors of the computer revolution: Would PCs have been so quickly accepted if consumers hadn't first got their computer feet wet with video games? Artistically, too, the machines often present dazzling displays of computerized graphics and animation.

Both the graphics and the games have steadily grown more sophisticated. In 720 degrees, players ride a skateboard at breakneck speed through mazelike city streets. In NARC, the newest game on display, a gun-wielding cop mows down a horde of onrushing drug dealers in various seedy locales, from slum street to subway platform. Stunning, loony stuff. But what NARC lacks is the imaginative abstractions of the older, less realistic games: the swirling, swooping attack forces in the space game Galaga (maybe the best machine omitted by the exhibit) or the kaleidoscope of insect-like creatures in the still mesmerizing Centipede. Ah, those were the days.

With reporting by William Tynan/Queens