I’m at the Toyota dealership, giving our car a routine checkup before taking it to its annual inspection, making sure it won’t pollute the spring-fresh New Jersey air. The dealership works hard to make the wait as comfortable as possible, and I appreciate it. There’s free donuts in the morning, free popcorn in the afternoon. Three televisions air three different programs: CNN, daytime talk show, and Spongebob Squarepants for the kids. The chairs are comfy, and more than adequate for the number of people in here. And you can play video games for free. One machine is hooked up to a modern (though not quite the latest model) console game system, but my attention is on the other: a stand-up booth from the video arcades of the ‘80s.
It’s undergone some modifications. The games of that era were embarrassingly primitive by today’s standards. The memory demands are slightly larger than those of a digital watch. You could fit dozens, probably hundreds, of them onto a single CD, so the machine is designed to play several dozen games from several companies: Space Invaders, Defender, Joust, Robotron, 1942, Qix, and some titles you’ve forgotten ever existed.
And my very favorite is the cheapest-looking one of all: Red Baron. I don’t know whether it really is less sophisticated than some of those classics, or that it requires less processing power, but to the casual eye it sure looks like it. A close relative of Battle Zone, it employs those same bright-line vector graphics left over from Asteroids and, before that, Space War. Mountain ranges are two-dimensional zig-zags rising in front of the horizon like angry M’s—good luck estimating whether you’ve passed one or whether a sharp wingover will result in a crash. The only sounds are an understated siren to let you know an enemy is on the screen and beeps to count out your score: low tone for 100 points, high tone for 10 points. Shoot a gun emplacement (250 points), and you’re rewarded with a congratulatory “boop boop beepbeepbeepbeepbeep.” There’s no sound effect for blowing up enemies apart from score, nor for firing your guns. Or gun, more precisely—Red Baron places you in a pure fighter, not a fighter-bomber, thus overlooking a chance literally to add another dimension to the game, and your gun is never upgraded.
But guess what. It’s still fun, after twenty-five or thirty years. Not so fun that I’d shell out money for it, but fun nevertheless—more fun than some of the more recent offerings on the machine, like Bust-a-Move. I enjoyed Red Baron a lot at my local arcade where, rather than the stand-up booth, it was packaged in an enclosed space with a seat and a joystick with the fire button built into it (rather than placed separately on a dashboard), meant to simulate roughly the tactile experience of sitting in a cockpit. The arrangement helped block a little of the noise from the other games in the arcade, and, once I’d worked out a weaving infinity-symbol pattern to avoid enemy fire while keeping my guns more-or-less in line, Red Baron was my favorite for about a year, when they replaced it with some other game. I can understand why: Red Baron wasn’t very popular, and it took up the space of two or three upright booths. Still, its passing was mourned by at least one pimply teen, who only once experienced the thrill of being confronted with a wave of five biplanes at once, and bringing them all down.
