Growing up, I spent many a weekend in the Family Fun Zone, a local arcade known for its apparently custom-built massive Ghostbusters game and convenient proximity to Shakey’s. Most of my fondest memories involve the familiar cadence of tokens vanishing into loud, imposing arcade cabinets and hasty trips to the aforementioned eatery to beg Dad for more fiat. I still get that fluttery feeling of potential when I trade paper for coin to pry repast from a mechanical vendor. Those percussive plinks – one, two, three, four – may well have been my primary mathematical educator. What value has a five-dollar bill beyond its facility to conversion to twenty tokens? I haven’t a clue.
There were many familiar haunts in those days: Golden Axe was a favorite, as were the fast classics. Pac-Man. Dig-Dug. Donkey Kong. Centipede. Being the youngest person in the pinball aisle seemed a badge of honor. It was an homage to the true progenitors of the medium. I’m going to go play the pinball games, I’d think. Why? Out of reverence.
Every trip concluded with at least a few rounds of air hockey. Dad almost always won, but over time, my brother became the true master of compressed air and plastic pucks. The sound of the puck entering the goal slot is as satisfying a sensory memory as the plinking of tokens in the change machines, those dutiful money-changers of the realm of the arcade, converting your hard-earned greenbacks into worthless metal slugs. One-way foreign exchange. No cash value. But as long as Arcadia stood, those embossed metal rounds were good as gold.
One game above all others captured me deeply, though – deeper even than the Western-themed side-scrolling shooter in the Shakey’s that formed a sort of cathartic ritual after the post-gaming Bunch of Lunch – and that game was Puzzle Bobble, a.k.a. Bust-a-Move.
Bust-a-Move is one of those rare games that is so perfectly designed that it can truly stand as a monolith of the industry. It’s trivial to learn, exciting and addictive, and the potential for racking up truly monstrous scores (the theoretical maximum being somewhere around thirty million) affords near-infinite replay value. Whoever AAA is, one would think, their 16,000,000 cannot stand forever! This game continues to be one of my favorite games of all time. The music’s familiarity is right up there with Tetris and Mario Bros.
Fast-forward to modern times, and the arcade has gone the way of deinonychus. That once-powerful fraternity of flashing, blaring audiovisual gods has been deftly deposed by the gaming console trinity, and the somewhat shamanic realm of the personal computer. The plaza-mall which once held, in addition to a fabulous snow cone shop and a Crown Books, that doomed Shakey’s and the Family Fun Zone is now all but vacant. Only the Edwards 10 remains, under new management as a three-dollar theater clinging to life on razor-thin margins, if life it can be called.
Taito’s legendary bubble busting puzzle game is now the property of Square Enix, by whatever sorcery has led to this being the case, and it is a good case for it to be. As it has been in countless other fashions, Bust-a-Move has now been remade on the Android platform, and I could not be happier. Sure, the graphics are a little different, the music doesn’t speed up as the ceiling falls, and the fact that it’s on a mobile phone instead of a massive cabinet, while convenient, is also somewhat disingenuous to the original experience, but for $4.99, and at this level of polish, I am utterly thrilled. I feel as though I’ve been given the opportunity to enjoy a lifetime of Bust-a-Move for a mere score of tokens, which once I would have squandered in a single Sunday session. Besides, nostalgia is a bargain at any price.
Speaking of which, I wonder where I put that Family Fun Zone token. I located one – who knows how it escaped that vortex – but seem to have misplaced it. A damn shame, too. That token is, to me, like a Japanese occupation peso. Coin of a realm that no longer is, it has no worth, and yet for me, a former citizen of that land, it holds fast to emotional – I’d go so far as to say cultural – significance. It is the currency of my homeland, whose national sport might well be Skee-Ball, and for me, at least, is as priceless as it is worthless.
In close, and, if I may myself so indulge, in verse, let me an anthem propose:
Rest Ye Well, Arcadia
Rest ye well, Arcadia,
Though thy temples fold,
Thy gods dismissed, thy roads untread,
Thy halls vacant and cold,
Rest ye well, Arcadia,
Thy people prosper yet,
And ne’er will they thy memory
Nor thy fair games forget.
Rest ye well, Arcadia,
Thy purpose doth endure.
Although thy sovereignty is past,
Thy legacy is sure.
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