Slate's Bizbox
culturebox: Arts, entertainment, and more.

Remembrance of Things BlastDo you Ms. Pac-Man?

By John Sellers
Posted Tuesday, March 27, 2001, at 9:00 PM ET

A few years ago, a tech-savvy friend told me to come over anytime I had the urge to play a mean game of Tron. I arrived at his door minutes later, expecting him to lead me to the beautiful upright cabinet that housed the 1982 Bally/Midway classic arcade game, spun off from the cheesily delicious Disney movie starring Jeff Bridges. Instead, he led me to his computer. On the screen was an exact replica of my blue friend Tron waiting to do battle with grid bugs, light cycles, and the dreaded MCP Cone. "What gives?" I asked, mesmerized and disappointed in equal amounts. "That," said my friend, "is MAME."

MAME is geekspeak for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, which is clearly geekspeak too. For people who prefer English, MAME is a clever application that, in effect, acts as the working guts of an actual classic arcade video game, except that it's capable of playing almost any old-school title you can think of. The programs for games such as Tron, Kangaroo, Defender, and BurgerTime are small by today's standards, so reproducing them exactly as you remember them is hilariously simple. The entire program of Asteroids, which dazzled quite a few pimply teens when it arrived in arcades in 1979, took up a mere 9 KB of ROM. My Mr. Coffee machine uses more memory than that.

The benefits of retrogaming are easy to see. Anyone in the world can go to Web sites that offer MAME (like this one for PCs, or this one for Macintoshes) and the game ROMs (check here), download the stuff, and play Pac-Man or Missile Command within minutes. Kids born after the Reagan era have a chance to laugh at how primitive Mario looked in Donkey Kong, and those of us longing to hear, say, the funky buggy music of Moon Patrol can do so anytime we like. MAME keeps these classic games in the video-game vernacular, and that's definitely an admirable thing. And sometimes you just gotta play Tron.

But something gets lost in the translation from arcade to the PC. Sure, many of the games certainly look and sound the same, and MAME's authenticity even extends to the cool feature that makes you insert a virtual coin to begin play. But once that novelty wears off, anyone who spent any real time in an arcade will understand my biggest problem with MAME, which is that all the nuances that made these games so special are necessarily filtered out. Gone are the cool yoke controller and stunning color vector graphics of Atari's 1983 game Star Wars, the signature red joystick of Pac-Man, the excellent side panel and marquee artwork of Tempest, the light-saber-esque barrrrong! of a Qix machine, and countless other characteristics that gave each of these video games charm and cult status. Not to mention the fact that certain games—like Star Wars, Crazy Climber, and, yes, Tron—are quite impossible to play on MAME due to the complexity of their controls. So MAME gives you the games but not the nuances. I'd say the nuances are more important.

Why should we bother to ensure the survival of the Galaxian species when it's been reincarnated on MAME? That's like trying to explain why the home-video version of Rear Window doesn't hold a candle to the original theatrical cut. Besides, the clunky old game cabinets and the memories that go along with them are a crucial part of telling the story of video games. In the same way that a generation of goggle-eyed kids got the directing bug from seeing a Hitchcock film in the theater while chewing on Jujyfruits, the entire arcade experience—not just the onscreen action but also stuff like the strict social strata of the arcade, which stated that the person whose initials graced the top score on a particular game was god, and that if you didn't put a token up, you had no playing power—influenced a sizable chunk of the game designers and programmers working in the business today. The budding popularity of MAME and other applications like it makes preservation of this arcade vibe all the more difficult.

I know that it's the rare fan who will drive out of the way to go to that bar whose only selling point is its sit-down Ms. Pac-Man machine or who will bid $700 for a Tron machine on eBay when these games are perfectly free to download online. And I'll admit to being a purist. But if I win the auction, I may even let my MAME-lovin' friend come over and play the real deal. But only if he brings the quarters.

Print This ArticlePRINTDiscuss this in The FrayDISCUSSEmail to a FriendE-MAIL
Share on FacebookPost to MySpace!Share with MixxDigg ThisShare with RedditShare with del.icio.usShare with FurlShare with Ma.gnolia.comShare with SphereShare with Stumble Upon
John Sellers, whose high score at Donkey Kong is 266,400, will publish his second book, Arcade Fever, in July.
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?
POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES

Reader Comments From The Fray:


[Notes from the Fray Editor: Some important questions arose:
1) Is MAME the Napster of gaming (and if so, why is Slate promoting it)? See what The Shriv says here.
2) Is MAME the Slate of the future? A worrying suggestion from Quanimal, below. The Fray Editor, who reads Slate at work all the time, is stunned to find that everyone else does too.
3) Was Clint Mers out of step with this Fray? Possibly, but his ideas for new games were very funny, and his whole post is recommended.
4) Did Jeff spell the name of his game wrong, below? Almost certainly, but we're not going to put it right because when Brandon Thornburg offered the correction, Jeff said "Here comes Web Policeman Thornburg, absorbing laser fire and bouncing through the walls", so we're not going to mess with him, he might call us Evil Otto too.
5) Was that Proust reference bathos or what? Absolutely not: the stony Fray heart, totally immune as it is to computer games of all kinds, was melted by the many many posters who said they loved the article just because it reminded them of their young days in the arcades, and proceeded to reminisce. As Matt put it (and Marcel could have said it in French but not better) "Those were the days. In some ways growing up really sucks."]


When I'm out there playing on the machines, it's different from playing it from your computer. Don't you miss the feeling of using your last quarter hoping we would progress even further in the game than the last time we've played? God... it is that feeling... that fear of losing is what kept us motivated to play it over and over. Emulators in general can never create an experience like that. I'm not against emulation, hell I'm a fan myself but it will never--can never--generate the atmosphere of the real thing.

--Sokrin Hou

(To reply, click here.)


Bezerk was the first game I became a "professional" at--the term meaning ridiculously good. Ah, the good old days of arcades, before it was banks of racing and motorcycle and jetski games. And, of course, the days before the Playstation, which, paradoxically, I think is bad for kids (although I spent plenty of time in the arcade myself). But that was the thing: when the games are in the arcade, it's a once a week thing, whereas today's kids spend all day in front of a screen, blowing things up in preparation for the next Columbine.

Here's another thing about yesterday's video games that make them superior to today's. If you were really good (and a lot of ten year olds were), one quarter bought you forty-five minutes of entertainment. Today's games are more like movies; you play the ten minutes, and then, after you beat the big boss at the end, you see the credits. Boring. I'm babbling. I'm just happy to find someone else who was as heavily entrenched in the video game culture when they were a kid as I was.

--Jeff the Bezerk Master

(To reply, click here.)


Great article. Somebody out there is going to buy up all the old arcade games and open a game room. When you go in all you will see is old people (over 30) having a blast! I too miss the controls, I've tried playing the free games but they are not the same. Bring back the old games and I bet kids would love it. Ahhhh old times.

--Eric

(To reply, click here.)


MAME renders Slate obsolete. Come on, one of the biggest reasons any of us ever reads Slate is to kill time at work. Thanks to John Sellars, I now have access to an even better time killer than Slate. Slightly more challenging than Freecell or Minesweeper, slightly less challenging than reading Slate. The irony....

--Quanimal

(To reply, click here.)


 [Ideas for more machine emulations:]
RENTAL CAR RADIO: Find the one non-country station in town while finding your way out of the airport. Bonus points awarded for each classical and jazz station located. Controls consist of 31 small knobs, buttons, and switches with pictographic indications of their function designed in an eastern bloc country. Extra life awarded if you end the level by returning the car with all the presets set to "young country" and Christian rock stations!

--Clint Mers

(To reply, click here.)

 (3/29)

Washington Post
The Washington Post
OPINIONS
Topic A: Obama's Speech
| Pundits and diplomats respond.
Robinson: Sunshine in BerlinToles: The World ?'s ObamaTelnaes: Meanwhile, McCain