It was all there, almost. The flimsy jangle of the tokens in my jean pocket, money already spent before a single game was played; a lady demanding her money back because the pinball never spit out when it got sucked up into a trap at the top of the machine; two kids tugging on their parent’s shirt for just a few more games. It was almost the same, and it was glorious.
All photos at Quazar’s Arcade, Victoria, B.C., on Polaroid 600 (July 2022)
When I boarded the ferry at the docks in Seattle for the trip to Victoria, I hadn’t planned on spending an afternoon under the main thoroughfare. My guess was that I would just walk around and enjoy it not being 100 degrees, like back home in Mississippi. The phone said the lows would be in the 50s—in July!—and the highs wouldn’t hit 70. This seemed like reason enough to go, and anything else would be a bonus.
I saw the sign for Quazar’s Arcade while walking down Government Street, just past the Inner Harbour. It wasn’t open yet, but the website promised dozens of games—some I loved, like Rampage and Dig Dug, and some I’d never heard of, like something called Bubbles. I strolled around and made photos and had some vegetarian ramen, then made my way back and headed down the stairs into the dark.
Although I hadn’t been in Canada long, I already had a pocket full of dollar and two-dollar coins. I sunk them into the token machine and filled up a cup and started wandering the aisles of games.
There is such a joy in that, a curiosity, to wonder what to play and what might be worth remembering and what might actually be fun. These are not all the same things. While I remembered liking the cartoony graphics of Dig Dug as a kid, now I found a giddy challenge in the snap timing required to juggle the inflation of enemies attacking from different sides—a technique I saw some big kid do probably four decades ago at a Showbiz Pizza or Diamond Jim’s.
The glaring and sometimes incredible designs coating the cabinets were as fascinating to me now as they were then, perhaps more. Every game had its own color scheme, characters, and logo, like an album cover. Some were phenomenal—like Centipede’s screaming metal creature, which could’ve been on a record by Judas Priest, or the square-jawed Conan knockoff adorning Rygar. And it seemed like all the games had their own intensity, tried to pull you into their orbit. If you weren’t lured in by what the cabinet promised, you would never play the game.
So the designers made stories. Pac-Man didn’t just have some generic ghosts chasing it, the ghosts had names—Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde. Q*Bert hopped to flip the colors of the pyramid while evading Coily, Sam, Slick, Ugg, and Wrong Way. Slick looked like Sam but in Wayfarers. There was just such a wonderful care and vitality to it all.
It was only this morning, in writing to you, that I realized what was missing.
There was no danger to it. I wasn’t pressed for time by someone picking us up at the mall, wasn’t scared because of a denim-clad teenager snarling at me because I knocked off his timing during a fifty-cent leap in Dragon’s Lair. I wasn’t scared I would run out of money — I once blew a whole trip’s allowance at an arcade in Gatlinburg on the first day, which left me in a sour panic.
And the lurid cacophony of the arcade was absent; there weren’t dozens of machines bleeping and booping and playing theme songs and GAME OVER dum-de-dums simultaneously, but instead a synthwave soundtrack booming over the whole place, with the machines turned down low. Plus Quazar’s was brand-new clean, which was nice and even welcome, but wasn’t like how it was.
There was also distance. I was once obsessed with Spy Hunter—the incredible decision to have the controller mimic the button-studded yoke of a fighter jet instead of a steering wheel, the pure Thunderball of it all. But I also sunk quarter after quarter into that thing decades ago and never really got the hang of it, if you even can get the hang of it, and was happy just to admire it this go round. Same with Paperboy. I stuck to Tetris and Dig Dug, both of which I could play for a while, and found an affinity for Rygar, figuring out it was because its two-button jump/shoot combo tapped my Nintendo abilities, not my arcade ones.
Perhaps it wasn’t the same. But for an hour or two, last week a basement in Canada gave me some of the same thrills as a mall in Alabama did, forty years ago. And that, my friends, is worth a lot more than a quarter.
“Obscurity Knocks” is this week’s installment of GORJUS, a newsletter devoted to art and life in the South on instant film. If you like it, consider sending it to a pal. Just like anything, some weeks are better than others. I’m @gorjusjxn on Instagram, and you can see more Polaroids at McCartyPolaroids.