While my back was turned, my 14-year-old son, Mark, sank 60,000 tons of shipping. This was after he had shot up a saloon and ogled a couple of scantily clad harem girls. Kids today, honest to God.
Blame the best game room in the world, Bingo Jack’s Penny Arcade in Manitou Springs.
Why is it the best? Because people of any age can wander in and relive their misspent youth – and not spend any more money than we did when we were originally misspending. The shooting gallery game is still 25 shots for a dime, the Pac-Man still 25 cents, the nickelodeon still a nickel. The Skee-Ball gives you nine wooden balls for a quarter.
Housed in seven stucco storefronts, the arcade spills out onto the sidewalks. Some of the machines are museum pieces from as early as 1900. Most of them work most of the time, although the older ones can be temperamental. A cadre of red-shirted teenagers roams the floor to troubleshoot and dispense refunds.
We veered off U.S. 24 on the way home from somewhere else. In a few hours, we sampled the basic charms of Manitou Springs. We tasted all the mineral water fountains, each named after an Indian tribe, and decided we liked Cheyenne Springs the best. We had soft ice cream at Patsy’s Original Since 1903 candy store and walked up to Soda Springs Park, where a line of storefronts is cantilevered over the creek.
Above us, the lights of the Pikes Peak Cog Railway formed a backward question mark on the mountainside.
On the way back, we let Mark play Marvel vs. Capcom Clash of the Super Heroes, a game he claims he’s been searching for “for years and years.” Then he wanted to show me how Dance Dance Revolution works. The next thing you know, we were back in the arcade, knocking over scary-looking clowns with an air cannon.
“You may say to yourself, ‘There are arcades so much closer,”‘ my husband, Doug, said. “But you would not understand.”
Modern-day video arcades assault the senses, with flashing lights and booming explosions that rattle your fillings even when the games aren’t in play. The really sophisticated ones are set up like gambling casinos, with low lighting and bar service, selling sodas to kids during the day and beers to young adults at night. Their games don’t take “real money,” just tokens, or “credits” on plastic cards that you front load. Some games cost a buck or more a play. A kid can run through $20 of “credits” in 15 minutes, earning tokens they cash in for 25-cent Chinese plastic toys. It feels very exploitative.
At home, many parents fight a losing battle to peel our children off their computer games, console games and hand-helds. They have the addictive power of crack cocaine. I should know: I had to take the puzzle game Snood off my computer, and I’ve been known to stay up until I finally win a hand of Windows Solitaire. Photos exist of me in labor with Mark, playing Tetris on an Outbound laptop, speaking of rare machines.
I swore in those naive days that there would be no video games. Nor would my children have anything to do with licensed characters or rigid gender stereotyping. This notion disappeared when Mark turned 2 and became obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine. Three years later, when our daughter Sara was 2, I gave her the same trains, and she wrapped them in blankets and put them to bed. In parenting, you discover very quickly that you don’t know jack.
So I picked my battles. Moreover, who wants to be a hypocrite? I hate to think how many quarters I sank into Asteroids, Ms. Pac-Man and Centipede. We were transfixed, back in the 1980s, by games that must seem primitive to kids who play much more sophisticated stuff on the inch-square displays on their phones. And we grew up just fine.
Bingo Jack’s, by contrast, feels like your favorite cousin’s rumpus room.
“That’s a fun game,” Mark said as he passed the Galaxian console of my youth. But the 1941 United Sky Pilots, in which you shoot down planes while distracted by alluring space babes, and 1970 Sea Raider, where 25 cents gets you a periscope and 10 torpedoes, interested him more.
Meanwhile, Sara was checking out the really old machines: love testers, fortune tellers and the Happy Feet Vitalizer, which “relieves tired aching feet” (honest, it does) for a dime. A penny gives you one ball in the English Football game, billed on the case as “thrilling – exciting.” We also played Chicago Coin’s Pro Hockey, a two-person game circa 1961, its linoleum playing surface tilted in such a way that the right-hand player always loses. It was still fun.
Sara peeked into “In the Sultan’s Harem” and reported, “He’s having a martini.” Much more offensive to her was the Monkey Organ, banging cymbals and staring. “That’s just evil,” she said.
For us old folks, there was Bally’s Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, featuring a young Elton John in platform boots and enormous specs, the pinball wizard with such a supple wrist. “It’s rather more fantastic than I remember,” said Doug.
Our collective favorite, however, was the Drivemobile Drive Yourself Road Test. Bingo Jack’s has two of these 1954 games, in which you steer past obstacles in a roadway on a rotating barrel. At the end, it assesses your skill. I scored only fair, way worse than Sara, and will never hear the end of it.
The kids played the 1954 version and a new video driving game and pronounced the 50-year-old game more fun. Then they were off for more Skee-Ball.
Lisa Everitt is a freelance writer who lives in Arvada. Contact her at lisa@well.com.
The details
Bingo Jack’s Penny Arcade is at 930 Manitou Ave., Manitou Springs. It’s open 10 a.m. to midnight from May to Labor Day and 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on “nice weekends” in the off season. Call Arcade Amusements first: 719-685- 9815.
Information about various games came from marvin3m.com/arcade, written by Marvin Yagoda, collector of vintage mechanical and electromechanical arcade games and owner of Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum in Farmington Hills, Mich.
