Video Game Memory Lane

Last year, they opened an arcade bar in Uptown called Up Down. (I think that’s pretty clever, but apparently it’s a chain, so I guess the neighborhood pun is a coincidence?) I’ve gone a few times, always solo. It’s one of the few places where I don’t feel super-self-conscious about being alone in public. (Actually, my self-consciousness about that has declined precipitously in the last few years, no doubt due to extensive, recent experience.)

The walls are covered with a collage of pop culture from the 80’s and 90’s: The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Eazy-E of N.W.A., the Ultimate Warrior (wrestler) and Suzanne Somers with the Thighmaster. It’s a delightful trip down Memory Lane for a child of the 90’s like me. The TV’s show pro wrestling and movies from the era, like Demolition Man, Ghostbusters and Independence Day.

I’ve never been very good at video games. Despite my pleas, my parents didn’t get me a video game console until I was a junior in high school. At that point, I was too old to get addicted. (The window of video game addiction is different for everyone, of course.) I just played sports games by myself, not finding anyone to play with until college, and even then it was rare. But my high school and college friends weren’t really into video games, which was just as well.

The game I’ve played the most at Up Down is probably R.B.I. Baseball. My best friend in elementary school had a Nintendo and regularly kicked my ass at that game in the late 80’s. It was hardly fair, of course, since he was a wily veteran and I was a rookie, but I still took it as a sign of my inferiority. He was happy to reinforce that notion, as were many of my peers.

It’s my own damn fault for being friends with the guy. There were nice guys I’d been friends with before him, but they weren’t cool like he was, and I needed cool friends so I wouldn’t feel so vulnerable to getting picked on. One of those nice friends had a well-to-do friend with a Nintendo and Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!

I was enthralled just watching them play. I’ve spent far more time watching other people play video games than playing them myself. This is a pastime I’ve indulged more recently on YouTube with Battlefield 1 and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I generally prefer the voyeuristic aspect of video games to the participation. That must be why I’ve stuck with my first love: television.

Part of the reason I’d rather watch than play was my fear of failure. But that has faded as I’ve matured, so I’m more interested in having the controls in my hands now. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been anyone to watch me at Up Down. I actually got my name among the high scores on Super Sprint, but I think that was due to a glitch in the game. Even though I wasn’t winning every race, it let me play for like 45 minutes on 1 quarter.

Track & Field offers a surprisingly aerobic workout. You have to hit two buttons in alternation to run in the sprint, the javelin, the long jump and the hurdles. (That’s as far as I’ve gotten.) In order to beat the computer, you have to mash those buttons with seemingly superhuman speed. The javelin and long jump also require you to time your release or jump to the last possible moment before crossing the foul line. I remember playing that back in the day. At least now I can advance in a few events, even though I felt kinda lame pounding on the buttons like a lunatic all by myself.

Another favorite of mine is 1942 or 1943: The Battle of Midway. You’re an American fighter pilot fighting the Japanese in the Pacific during World War II. It’s basically you against the entire Imperial Japanese Navy, so you’ve got some weaponry at your disposal that isn’t historically accurate or, strictly speaking, real. I read up on this video game series on Wikipedia, because that’s what I do with my free time (i.e., make the most of it). In the course of my research, I had a startling realization: The people who made these games were Japanese.

Does it seem strange to anyone else that Japanese people made games in which their own ancestors are the Bad Guys? I mean, sure, I guess they were the Bad Guys of World War II, but they must’ve been tempted to make a game in which the Japanese were the Good Guys and call it something like Kamikaze: The Divine Wind.

Hell, we’ve already got a wildly successful video game franchise based on an alternate history in which the Nazis won World War II (Wolfenstein). Why don’t the Japanese get that treatment? The Nazis have an even worse reputation than the Imperial Japanese military. They’re considered the ultimate historical example of evil in the West.

So why no alternate-history video games for the Empire of Japan? It’s not like there are no apologists for Imperial Japan. They still have shrines to people whom the Chinese consider war criminals, although that seems a predictable response to Japan’s post-war status as an American client state.

Did you know the U.S. military wrote the Japanese constitution? It’s true! How would you feel about having another country set up the structure of your government and laws? I’d be pretty pissed. Sure, they did some really bad shit, but so did we. I think it would’ve been enough just to slip in that part about renouncing war forever (and never making video games in which you’re the Good Guys in World War II) and then let them handle the rest.

While in Hawai’i for my sister’s wedding, we went through an exhibit at Pearl Harbor about the history of U.S.-Japan relations. It started with Admiral Perry showing up in Edo Bay with 4 warships in 1853, one of the signature events of America’s “gunboat diplomacy” of the 19th Century. Japan had been shut off from the world for 250 years by an isolationist regime, but Perry was able to convince them to start trading with us.

The exhibit ended with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as though it had taken us almost a century to follow through on that initial threat. Upon reaching the end of the exhibit, I thought to myself, “Am I the only one who sees the connection between those two events? Am I only the one who can connect the dots?”

At the time, I thought I was one of the few who had made that connection. But now I think the creators of the exhibit probably had that somewhere in the back of their liberal, peacenik minds. What would’ve happened if we’d just left Japan alone? Would they have become one of the Bad Guys? Are we partly responsible for the atrocities they committed in World War II?

Sorry. That was a pretty long tangent. I usually try not to get too political on this, my personal blog. (For political shit, check out my other blog, Riding the Rubicon.)

Well, in conclusion, Up Down is a pretty cool place to kill some time and, if you’re a child of the 80’s or 90’s, take a jaunt down Memory Lane… if you dare!