Street Fighter 2 in the suburbs
So, I’m on Google image search. And I’m trying to find a photo of an arcade cabinet sitting outside a 90s style takeaway / pizzeria / fish n chip shop, whatever.
And there’s nothing. Zero. Less than Zero.
Which is weird. Because I know this was definitely a thing. I experienced it firsthand. But it seems to have been collectively wiped from history.
I can still remember the very first time I played Street Fighter 2. I was maybe 12 years old and on holidays when I came across the machine outside a beachfront takeaway. I had seen Street Fighter 2 in local arcades before, but there were always lines of kids waiting to have a go. Here, finally, I could try it myself. So I chose Ryu, steeled myself, and instantly had my ass handed to me by Dhalism.
30 something years later, I can still remember all this like it was yesterday. And if I’m up that way on holidays and happen to drive past I still half-expect to see the machine there. For me, Street Fighter 2: The World Warrior occupies a physical place in time and space.
I don’t think that exists anymore.
These days, we play games at home, on the couch. Or maybe at a desk in the home office. Or in bed before we go to sleep. Point being, gaming these days is very much confined to the home. A single location. I don’t associate games with physical spaces anymore, because it all blurs into a single, homogeneous background.
And I can’t help but feel some kind of way about that.
Plenty has been written about the death of arcades. But that was only one part of the equation. To grow up in the 90s was to have random arcade cabinets scattered across the suburban landscape.
There was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cabinet at my local video store. The old arcade cabinet outside the fish n chip shop on the way home from school. The Neo GEO MVS with four-different games where we’d congregate after ditching school early.
Looking back, these arcade cabinets added a physical aspect to the gaming experience that we’ve lost. A communal shared space that you simply don’t get from sitting on your couch or desk.
Lately, there’s been a bunch of media articles about ‘the third space’. It’s a term first coined by Ray Oldenburg in 1989, and it means somewhere between home and work that can help foster community.
“A familiar public spot where you regularly connect with others known and unknown, over a shared interest or activity,” is how one site I’m too embarrassed to name describes it, and that works for me.
For a generation of kids growing up in the 90s that’s what these battered old arcade cabinets in strip malls provided. They were urban totems that drew us together. Signposts that only we could really see and understand.
Sure, it’s easier than ever to take your phone out and communicate with the world, but that physical sense of place is missing. Which is a shame. And our lives and suburbs are poorer for having lost it.
I can’t be the only one that feels that way. But if several hours of fruitless online searching is any indication, it’s something that’s faded from our collective memory. So let’s pour one out for that busted arcade cabinet outside your local takeaway and the urban cartography they helped to map.
