Those Were the Days is a 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.

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I’m going to take Those Were the Days in a bit of a different direction this week. Rather than tell you about one of my more memorable boss fights or how many quarters I plunked into this or that cabinet, I want to take some time to give some love to a real game, a three-dimensional wood and plastic construction, a game called Skeeball. Depending on where and when you grew up, you may or may not be familiar with this summertime classic. If you’re anything like me, however, most good summer memories have, in some small part, Skeeball connected to them.

If you’ve never seen a Skeeball machine, first of all let me offer you my sympathies, but then let me see if I can describe it for you. Imagine a flat plank of plywood, covered in pool table felt, and put on an upwardly facing angle. At the top of the plank there is a bulls-eye arrangement of rubber cylinders marked with different score values. The bulls-eye hole is worth 50, the next hole 40, then 30, and so on all the way down to ten. (modern Skeeball machines have two 100 point holes in the top corners, but those came later). A quarter (or fifty cents, depending on the year) gets you six wooden balls which you must then attempt to toss (underhand, of course) into the cylinders to achieve the highest score. The higher your score, the more tickets the machine spits out. The more tickets you accumulate, the more prizes you can cash in for.

I was first introduced to Skeeball at a surprise birthday party held at a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant when I was in second grade. I spent a good hour attempting to earn enough tickets to trade in for a plush Muppet Babies Kermit the Frog. Bear in mind, one would probably have to spend at least $20 in quarters to earn enough tickets to trade in for what amounted to a $5 doll, but that wasn’t the point of Skeeball; the prizes were really secondary to the tickets. Sure it would be all well and good to walk away with the dual tape deck boom box, but it wasn’t nearly as cool as walking around the pizzeria with a wad of tickets that could choke a donkey. Everyone knew that the prizes were for the amateur, pros just wanted the tickets.

Over the next couple of years, I would come to discover that the true Mecca of Skeeball was to be found at the New Jersey shore, centered (at least in my tiny world) at Gillian's Wonderland Pier in Ocean City. There was a bank of dozens of Skeeball machines, complete with flashing lights, sirens, and more tickets than sand on the beach. I have memories of spending hour after hour working on my toss, to perfect that mixture of power and aim that would gain me as many 50s as possible. While I wasn’t terrible at the game, I couldn’t help but notice that there were many other players who were getting double, triple, and more the amount of tickets as in my paltry pile. I knew there was a Skeeball secret, and I was determined to crack it.

Fast-forward to seventh grade, and I’m back at Chuck E. Cheese. This time it’s my younger cousin’s birthday party, but my oldest and coolest cousin, Scott, is also there. Just as a way of background. Scott was the cousin who taught me how to blow bubbles with bubble gum, how to shoot a BB gun, and was the only older kid in my childhood who treated me as an equal. Hopefully we all have at least one of those in our past. Anyway, Scott was a Skeeball phenom. He was consistently putting up the max score (300) and actually forced the Chuck E. Cheese staff to replenish the tickets in his machine. He was just that good. Since he was the coolest cousin in the world, he could see my struggle with the game, and he also had to notice my admiration of his skills. He pulled me aside and showed me the secret to hitting 50 points every time.

You see, most Skeeball players attempt to just roll the ball straight up the middle and hope for a lucky bounce. Scott had figured out that, although this was a good strategy, it wasn’t consistent enough for perfect scoring every time. The trick, he said, was to try for a bank shot. If you look at most Skeeball machines, you’ll see that there are a series of rivets that run up the length of the bumper that separate the lanes. Scott told me that if I aimed for the second rivet on the left-hand side, that with a strong enough throw, I would hit 50s every time. I tried it, and wouldn’t you know it, it absolutely works! Now, bear in mind, I am a right-handed thrower, so all you lefties who want to try this out for yourselves may need to aim for the right-hand side.

For the entire summer between my seventh and eighth grade years, I was the man at Skeeball. No one in Wonderland could get anywhere near my pile of tickets. Sadly, though, it was to be the only year that I would be as untouchable. The very next summer, Wonderland Skeeball added the 100 point holes to their machines, and thus ended my dominance.

Since then, there have been times when I will head down the shore, or into a Dave & Busters, in the hopes of reliving some of my halcyon days as a Skeeball immortal. While I can’t say I’ve ever gotten back to the level of excitement I felt in those early days, there is nothing like sinking six straight 50s to remind a man what it felt like to be young, if only for a little while.

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