Gameland: A Great Arcade

The need to get away from it all has been around for a long time. The patricians of Ancient Rome would often sneak away to their famous spas for a little R and R and in more recent times, even Kafka went to the baths at Baden Baden. However, if you lived in Chicago your weekend getaways might have been spent in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

Lake Geneva was always a great place to go “to forget about life for awhile.” You could eat at some pretty good restaurants, shop in the quaint down town stores, hang-out at the Abbey Resort, and take a boat ride on the lake. However, the best part about going to Lake Geneva was the great arcade in town! The great arcade in town! I know this must sound laughable to many a reader and rightly so. It reminds me of an amusing personal anecdote:

In the early nineties, two of my best friends and I decided to take a weekend vacation to Lake Geneva. Pete and I had made several excursions there before, but Andy had never visited the little village on the lake and was a bit skeptical regarding the trip. Lake Geneva was, after all, a small town in Wisconsin. How fun could it possibly be? After we had loaded up on snacks for the road at Pete’s store and embarked upon our destination, Andy asked with some incredulity: “What is there to do in Lake Geneva?” We responded: “Well they have cool stores, good restaurants, and there’s this great arcade!” With that the most wry look appeared on Andy’s face and he chided us for being so lame as to suggest that a video arcade could somehow justify a trip to small town Wisconsin. We were especially vulnerable because our voices even inflected a high pitched, excited tone when we uttered the words “great arcade.”

Well the inevitable sequence of events followed: listening to The Jam in the car (the trip from the South Side of Chicago to Lake Geneva is exactly the same duration of the Snap! cassette), passing the sign that read Scarborough Fair and obligatorily singing the Simon and Garfunkel song of the same name, checking into the hotel, and of course the trip to Gameland. When the three of us walked into the arcade it was something to behold. It was a blast from the video past, more specifically the Golden Age of arcade games. (This was an era that began in 1978 with Space Invaders and ended sometime around 1987 when two dimensional images gave way to newfangled 3-D.*)

There they were in all their glory, all the classics of yesteryear: Space Invaders, Defender, Asteroids, Donkey Kong (Sr. and Jr.), Galaxian, Joust, Robotron, Gorf, and that great game where the foot soldier you commanded was able to jump in and out of a mini-tank while battling an opposing army.

Descending upon the brown change machine that distributed tokens we went our separate ways, each of us on a personal quest to defeat those classic games one last time. After catching falling astronauts in Defender and destroying asteroids by the dozens, I remember finding, much to my delight, the original Star Wars game --the one that allowed you to race your X-Wing Fighter down the trench of the Death Star searching for your own moment of glory as the voice of Obi Wan Kenobi resonated through the speakers: “Use the force Luke. Let go!” Just as I was moving from the Space Age theme of those games to one decidedly more Medieval, I converged with my two friends on the way to the game called Joust. At this point, a great moment occurred. Andy looked at both of us and was unable to contain the enthusiasm in his voice when he exclaimed: “This is a great arcade!” The two of us never felt so vindicated in our lives.

The End of an Era

We will never forget that vacation to Lake Geneva. Everything about it was great: Singing the Simon and Garfunkel song, shopping the shops, slurping the French Onion Soup that was served in a crock the size of your head, and sailing the seas (well, ok, I mean lake). But the highlight of that trip was “the great arcade.” In the early nineties, Gameland was a veritable city on a hill for the three of us --the last of the great, 20 something, underachievers who ten years earlier modeled our lives on the Matthew Broderick character in the movie War Games (oh, I forgot to mention they had Missile Command too).

This September, I am sad to say, Gameland closed its doors for good. In the end, it just could not compete in a world of high tech, home game systems and personal computers. Indeed, until now, it remained one of last great hold outs of the arcade era. The last ten years have seen all but a few of the bright neon signs turned off and the larger than life game consoles covered with dust --their micro chips slowly atrophying over time. Just as MTV triumphantly declared that “Video killed the radio star,” it may be said that Nintendo, PlayStation, and Xbox wiped out the arcade revolution. Yes, I call it a revolution for I lived through it! Our cry was not as historically dramatic as “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité!” Instead, we boldly asked: “Can I have another roll of quarters please?” But it was revolutionary none-the-less, at least nostalgically in our hearts. For all of us who frequented the arcades in their Golden Age, we will forever associate it with the time of our youth when we had “hope in our hearts and wings on our heels.”


*In my estimation, the high water mark of the Golden Age of arcade video games were the years 1980-83. This is based on the quality of the games released in those years.