Those Were the Days is a new weekly article in which Gamervision employees share video game-related memories. If you’ve got a story of your own to share, please do so! We love hearing from the community.

_________________________________________________________

The news this week has got me nervous. I don't mean the wars, nor do I refer to the fact that we may elect the runner-up in a beauty contest to the second most important job in the world. No, this week's anxiety source can be traced to a 17-mile wide ring deep below the surface of Switzerland; the CERN project. Sure, maybe they'll recreate the Big Bang and discover the nature of matter and blah, blah, blah. But there's also a chance they'll destroy the whole of existence. And I, personally, find that prospect more than a little scary. But I imagine that there are less far-fetched, but still rather frightening scenarios that could play out. Doomsday is a concept that has been imagined by others, and even turned to celluloid. And that got me thinking of the summer of 1991...

Growing up in a house with six other brothers and sisters meant two things. One: there wasn't a lot of spare money to go around, so it was a long time before we got a gaming console other than our Atari computer with the cassette tape hard drive. Two: I was working at a very young age. When I was eight, I started selling the Sunday paper on the steps of our local church, so I always had a little bit of coin in my pocket. And since our game system wasn't exactly state-of-the-art, I spent more than a fair amount of time at Supercade, the arcade in our local mall. And in the summer of 1991, most of my time at Supercade was spent playing the hit game of that year: Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

Once upon a time, before anyone knew they were supposed to care about the Titanic, James Cameron was known as the director of some of the most bad-assed movies of all time. Aliens, the first Terminator, and The Abyss showed that he had a knack for writing compelling stories, but also had the ability to incorporate state-of-the-art visual effects to aid his stories along. And the early buzz over the theatrical release of T2 was that, visually, it was unlike anything anyone had ever seen. The shot of Robert Patrick as the evil T-1000 emerging from the fire of an burning semi is one of the most iconic of 90's cinema. By today's standards, the effects in Cameron's early works seem passé, but at the time, they were the height of "wow". All my friends that summer would brag to me about how many times they had seen T2, or how awesome it was.

Sadly I had not seen it. See, part of the whole "selling papers on church steps" thing meant parents who were very involved in what media I could and could not see. And T2 was an R-rated movie. There was no way in hell I would be seeing that one in the theater, at least not without a good fake ID and three-foot lifts in my shoes.

Thankfully there was Supercade. For those of you who don't know the game; Terminator 2 was a one or two-player on-rails shooter, and the controller was an Uzi (a button by the muzzle launched grenades). The cabinet was designed so that if you were playing, all other sounds in the arcade were essentially blocked out (no easy task in the cacophony that was an early 90s arcade...). After the introductory level where you fought in the future against terminator endo-skeletons, you would play through the plot of T2 as the Schwarzenegger T-800 with the sole mission of keeping John Connor alive. What made T2 so revolutionary was the incorporation of digitized elements which were shot during the making of the film specifically to be used in the game. Robert Patrick, Edward Furlong, Linda Hamilton and even the Governor of California recorded dialogue specifically for the game, which added to a fully immersive gameplay experience. 

I had played the game a lot that summer, but I would always give up in frustration. There was one level in particular- with a hunter-killer attacking a pick-up truck- that I would always get hung up on. And in the beginning of that summer, T2 was fifty cents per play! But around mid-August, the owner of the arcade had a change of heart, and made the game fifty cents to start, but only a quarter for each continue. So one Sunday in mid-August, after shutting down the paper stand and counting out my money, I rode my Huffy to Supercade on a mission: I would beat T2.

I plugged three fives into the change machine, grabbed my weight-equivalent in quarters, and headed to the cabinet. There it was. No one was on it, I had it all to myself. I popped in my first two quarters, Arnold's basso profundo told me it was, "Excellent", and I was on my way. Half an hour and $2.50 later, as that bastard Hunter-Killer (HK) turned into a pile of ash, I knew I was on my way. I fought one enemy after another. I shot off pieces of the T-1000, I fragged the shit out of everything on the screen. As the game progressed, the sagging in my pockets lessened and lessened, while the bin in the machine got more and more clogged with my hard earned dough.

And then I got to the armored car level. If you've seen the movie, you'll remember that the T-1000 steals a helicopter and chases our heroes who have commandeered a SWAT team armored van. In the game, you have to shoot down the helicopter before it either kills John Connor, or crashes into the back of the van, killing you all. This level of the game made the battle with the HK seem like a tutorial. For an hour and fifteen minutes I played that level, over and over again; three, four, five dollars were plunked into the machine. And then, finally, by sheer act of will, I had done it! I moved on.

Needless to say, in the course of the next hour, I finished the entire game. It cost me 3 hours and $14.75 (that's 1991 dollars!), but I had done it. I saved the world. I can remember being so incredibly excited, but when I looked around for someone to share my joy with, there was no one around. It diminished the victory somewhat, but it still tasted sweet to me. Maybe I hadn't seen the movie, but I had lived the story nonetheless.

So today, as we all wait for the world to end (or not, depending on your level of paranoia), I think back to the summer of 1991. To a day when a 15 year-old, pimply-faced loner needed nothing more than a pocketful of quarters to save mankind.

Related Articles:

Those Were the Days: A Street Fighter Virgin's Victory

 

Those Were the Days: A Diablo Obsession Remembered

Those Were the Days: A Halo Obsession Remembered