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Editor’s note: Here’s the second chapter of Lee’s A Youth Well Wasted. In this installment, we learn about the awesome secret behind his friend’s supernatural ability when it came to video games. -Jason
I spent my youth, from when I was 9 to around my 13th birthday, in arcades. These noisy, bleeping, blaring rooms, with their cigarette stench and grotesque carpets, were the scene of many a friendship. But one lives strongest in my memory.
Damian was utterly different than the rest of us; he had an awkwardness and poshness that set him apart. He was an outsider, and I liked him all the more for it.
Despite his real-world clumsiness, Damian possessed Herculean gaming skills. In an age when videogames were principally designed to eat massive amounts of quarters, Damian could conquer Out Run on a single credit and reach levels in other games that other arcade denizens had never seen before.
While I had taken Damian’s skills as natural talent, the truth was far more intriguing. But it wasn’t until I accepted an invite to his house that I learned exactly what his secret was.
I’d never seen anything like it. You had to drive down a long, rhododendron-lined driveway to reach the house. From where I sat in the back of my dad’s car, it looked more like a road. It twisted and turned forever, eventually opening into a large courtyard in front of what I can only describe now as a mansion. But to my 10 year-old mind, Damian lived in a castle.
Stepping inside revealed Damian’s reality to be a little less glamorous than I expected. The entrance — high ceilings and larger than my entire house — was dark and cold, its floor scattered with a hodgepodge of dog-eared carpet tiles.
Damian’s real dad separated from his mum years back, and though they lived comfortably, the huge, cavernous house was now mostly shut down. To heat, light, and carpet it was either too expensive or too wasteful for Damian’s mum to consider. Instead, rooms and entire floors fell into dusty disregard.
But one spot in particular was far from neglected. Dark and damp like much of the rest of the building, it came to life at the flick of a switch, exploding with light and noise.
Damian had his own arcade.
In one corner stood Shinobi, in another Afterburner, and along the back wall were Space Harrier, Altered Beast, and Out Run. Each machine had two wires poking out where the coin slot should’ve been. All you had to do was flick them over each other to get a credit.
I must’ve stood there silent and gawping for a full minute. It was heaven. If angels had descended to play a heavenly fanfare, I wouldn’t have been surprised. This was the reason that Damian was so good at all those games — he had his very own arcade.
From that moment on it was impossible to drag me away from the room. Plenty of my weekends have slipped since by thanks to videogames, but for those two days, I was glued to those cabinets. We both were.
Despite that they were Damian’s machines — and he had obviously played them to death — he shared my enthusiasm. The few hours we spent powering our way through Altered Beast were the most fun that I’d ever had. We shouted, insulted, and jostled each other all the way to the end. If it wasn’t for the unlimited credits, we would’ve spent the equivalent of a month’s pocket money just on that final Rhino boss. It was glorious.
At the time I was unquestioning, credulous even. But now I realize that Damian didn’t get to share his arcade with friends often, perhaps ever.
Beyond that, why did Damian have an arcade. I had, of course, put it down to the fact that he lived in a castle and was obviously fantastically rich. This was partly true, but there was another reason.
His dad was the vice president of Sega Europe.
This was an important period for Sega. Just before the release of the Mega Drive/Genesis, and with a string of their very best titles and a certain blue hedgehog on the horizon, the late 1980s and early 1990s saw Sega at the very top of their game.
This was the dawn of a golden age. And my friend’s dad was at the center of it all.
Damian never announced this to anyone at the arcade, nor did he confide in me about his dad before that day. For somebody so unpopular among my group of friends, it could’ve been his ticket to stardom. But he obviously wasn’t interested in that.
It could’ve been that Damian didn’t want to be used for his arcade or his games, that he didn’t want a kind of false Richie Rich popularity, but I don’t believe he was that reflective about the situation. He merely acted as if everyone’s dad was vice president of Sega Europe. It was one of the things I liked about him — he was utterly without ego.
I met his father not long after that first visit. I can’t really remember what he looked like, other than a vague impression of height, but I do remember that he bought a large carrier bag with him. Inside, much to the delight of his son — and to the almost apoplectic joy of his son’s friend — were a pile of Master System cartridges. Judging by Damian’s collection, this wasn’t a rare occurrence.
No doubt there was a little divorcee’s guilt that went along with these present-laden visits, and I’m sure that Damian would’ve swapped them all (well, some of them) for the permanent presence of his father, but none of that occurred to me at the time. To me Damian was the luckiest boy in the world.
Often, the cartridges in those bags were just boards, the naked innards of games fresh from Japan, unmarked and bursting with unknown worlds and adventures. Alien Syndrome, California Games, Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts, and the mind-blowing Phantasy Star (with a battery inside, so you could save!). We devoured every last one.
But the perks didn’t end there. Damian had a Mega Drive weeks before its European release. When I first saw it, it took a similar form to those boards. Shorn of its plastic case, it was an impossibly cool vision of the future, a miniature city of transistors, switches and capacitors. A beautiful machine capable of sights and sounds that I had only dreamed of, it even said “Sayyy-Gaaaa” in that sing-songy voice when you turned it on. I was so jealous.
Immediately upon returning home, I took a screwdriver to my now hopelessly outdated Master System. When my parents walked into my room to see me gleefully playing Alex Kidd on a stripped console, surrounded by screws and twisted plastic, they went nuts. Master Systems weren’t cheap. I was grounded for a week.
Rushing back to school to report the news bought problems, too. Nobody believed that my friend, a boy they had never met, had such a cool dad. Why would they? The previous week I had told them that my father was a Royal Air Force fighter pilot. My credibility was shot.
But the last laugh was mine. The next summer presented an opportunity to provide irrefutable evidence of my tenuous link to such awesomeness. It would also bring the coolest perk Damian’s dad’s job ever gave us — and the very best day of my very short life.
(This post, and everything that I write, also appears at my blog, Collect.)