The Spirit of the Arcade
a story about long lost arcade memories, the Spirit of Marvel, and reviving the spirit of games experienced one quarter at a time
This is a preview of exclusive stories coming to my Patreon in future months. These will be shorter, supplemental thoughts in additional to the more critical essays.
I grew up with the spirit of the arcade. The spirit, because I was born in the 90’s and by the time I turned 10 most of the arcades were on life support, if not outright dead. But I carried its spirit with me, unknowingly, and eventually I played host to it long enough that it began to inhabit me, to turn me into an arcade soul.
It began in corners of laundromats. Short sessions teased out with the rare extra quarters our mother offer my brothers and I. When we couldn’t play we’d spend our time flicking quarters on the counters, taking turns trying to knock each other’s quarters off without going down with them. It help us pass a lot of time.
But it could never compare to the promise of those attract screens.
Those screens were scenes of heaving chaos. Missiles blotting out the skies of a faux middle eastern town. The surprising viscera of the House of Dead. That mysterious scrolling shooter that to this day I struggle to remember anything about, my only memory of the sheer variety of bomb types that’d each fill the screen with a different flavor of destruction.
Then there was the Marvel Vs. series, full of the cast of heroes we’d see animated on TV, brawling in strange locales against equally strange martial artists. Battles would take to the air where they almost seemed suspended by multi-hit combos, then burst into wild super moves. I’d barely had a chance to touch those games, and in my hands those characters never seemed to be able to fight the same way, never seemed to move with a fraction of that grace. And then, it was suddenly over.
I carried the yearning for those games for years. A few times, during my brief time in California, it seemed that I could reach out and understand them. There was an arcade at the local mall, a place dedicated only to games, something unfathomable to a 10 year old. Seventeen years later and there are few memories of that place left. The complex spell of Gauntlet Dark Legacy’s role playing systems. The bewildering sight of seeing a man breath fire and stretch his limbs across the screen in Street Fighter. My confusion of what exactly a Metal Slug was.
But mostly, my memory of that place was of Marvel vs. Capcom 2. It stood proud at the entrance of the place, with a massive roster of characters, each with so many options to select that seemed to make no difference. There was Megaman, and Spider-man — favorites that became my standbys — then there were strange choices like Marrow, who used weapons made of bones protruding from her back, or Ruby Heart and Amingo, who promised powerful options with their assist types, but, like many aspects of Marvel 2, made no sense to me in play. It didn’t matter. From the day I came into contact with that machine I’d spend over a decade chasing its magic.
Patrick Miller once described Marvel as thus:
Marvel is obsession. Marvel is the highest highs and the lowest lows. Marvel is the largest predictor of unemployment, underemployment, and semi-professional poker-playing among my friends. Marvel is the battleground between the cosmic forces of Order and Chaos, and if you play Marvel, you might just learn where you stand. You don’t quit Marvel, you recover from it. The spirit of Marvel is in you.
From the day I entered that character select the spirit of Marvel possessed me. I didn’t understand it, and for years it caused me suffering as I tried to understand the yearning it created in me. I stared through shop windows at Playstation copies of Marvel vs Capcom 1, seeing Jin and Strider face off — robot fists were met with a storm of robotic cats and birds, with every frame of movement seeming like something that couldn’t possibly exist. Years after I’d feel those pangs again, as I stared at copies of Marvel 2 on the Dreamcast, that beautiful CD case promising a chance to return to the world that I had left behind at that arcade.
It was only years later, when my brothers and I discovered emulation, that I began to understand the volatile spirit fighting within me. Back then emulation seemed like a foreign ritual, requiring a bizarre set of conditions and functions to be met before it could begin. Arcade emulation proved even more obtuse — each game was a set of separate files that had to be placed in a specific location, then detected from a list of hundreds, filtered down until the program came back with a list of the games that you could attempt to play. Even then, it may ask you for another file you didn’t understand the function of, which would mean HOURS more of downloading, for something you weren’t even sure was worth it. But Marvel was worth it. Even if I couldn’t return to Marvel 2, there were other entries in the series, and for a long time they allowed me a glimpse into these alternate worlds.
Ironically it was Marvel 1 that became my home. There were the Marvel heroes I’d loved, and the unfamiliar Capcom cast that drew me in with their anime appeal. The artwork, the detail of the backgrounds, the unintelligible noise of the character’s battle cries — it was finally mine. It had been ripped from the arcade, splayed out in an unnatural widescreen, and translated through keyboard commands, but none of that seemed to dampen the magic of it. Between its systems, its secrets, and its hints at the greater Capcom universe, Marvel vs. Capcom seemed infinite.
This is where the spirit of Marvel began to mutate. Where it grew into something broader, larger and all consuming. The spirit of the arcade had fully manifested, and the world I’d called home was suddenly going to become a part of a greater universe.
