When I was a young boy, no older than five, I often spent long afternoons in my parent’s restaurant in Encino, California. My instructions were to stay out of the way and not bother the guests; a nearly impossible task for any child, let alone one as fidgety as I was. I wasn’t allowed in the smoking section–ah, the early nineties, how fondly I remember you–where most everybody sat. Naturally, I was curious; the smoking section was lively, filled with mysterious adults. Even more tempting was the machine that sat in the corner, whose electronic siren calls tortured me daily. It was the holy grail of my young life, a cocktail table arcade unit of Ms. Pac-Man, complete with rad wood paneling.Of course, my parents forbade me from playing it — to give you some context, my first Christmas present was a set of math workbooks, leading me to believe that Santa Claus was some sort of twisted sicko that fed on the anguished confusion of children who had been expecting action figures but instead received holiday homework.
I was aware of the Ms. Pac-Man cocktail arcade machine for two years, and for two years I never played it. I would sneak towards it from time to time, jiggling the joystick uselessly, hoping somehow some chump had fed the machine and left their men unplayed. It would beep at me, asking me for the unspeakable fortune of fifty cents, teasing me with images of Ms. Pac-Man chomping on dots and brightly colored fruit. It boasted its 2-player gameplay, but offered no clues on what multiplayer Ms. Pac-Man would entail; could you eat each other? was the 2nd player Mr. Pac-Man? was it competitive or cooperative? These are questions whose answers still elude me.
Apparently, no one else that frequented my parents’ restaurant was nearly as charmed with the arcade console as I was, as no one ever played it. When I was seven, my father decided it wasn’t worth the power it consumed and sold it to a collector for a few hundred bucks, and I’m not ashamed to admit I shed hot, angry tears as I watched it get carted away. I can’t imagine what reaction I would have had I known that it and other units of its ilk would go for upwards of $3000 dollars today. I would probably have had a stroke.
That was my first exposure to the world of video gaming. I would later move on to arguably more attractive objects of desire - the NES for example, who blessed me with years and years of unadulterated bliss - but whenever I think about the formative moments of my gaming history, I come back to that cocktail-table unit of Ms. Pac-Man. Though I never once experienced the joy of watching Ms. Pac-Man massacre crowds and crowds of blinking ghosts at my command, it was that dusty, rarely-used machine that turned me into a gamer.