When Chris Candreva asked his new wife Valerie if he could buy Tempest, a
classic 1980 Atari arcade game, and her answer was a conditional yes, he
knew he'd married the right woman.
When Chris Candreva asked his new wife Valerie if he could buy Tempest, a
classic 1980 Atari arcade game, and her answer was a conditional yes, he
knew he'd married the right woman.
Sure, he could buy it, she said, as long as he bought her Centipede, another 1980 Atari hit.
Centipede and Tempest now sit in the basement of the couple's Mamaroneck home, along with five other arcade machines, the towering kinds that once ate up lots of space - and quarters - in pizza parlors, gaming rooms and beer joints in the early 1980s, before kids owned game-playing PCs.
"To a guy who grew up in the '80s, it's just cool to have an arcade in your basement," Chris said with a giggle that sounded like it came from a 12-year-old arcade player at Playland, not the 29-year-old owner of WestNet, an Internet service provider in Rye.
Chris and Valerie have tried playing the latest jazzed-up, eye-popping computer, video and arcade games, but to them, nothing beats the addictive simplicity of classics like Asteroids.
"Asteroids is fascinating," Chris said. "It's a black-and-white game and a bunch of rocks that you shoot at. People come and sit here and play for hours.... People don't like being beaten by a bunch of rocks."
Chris resents the term "retro," which is often used to describe early video games from the late 1970s and early '80s, because he thinks it doesn't give these classics their due.
"If you're playing Monopoly or chess, are you retro-gaming, too?" he asked.
This sort of passion among young gamers who now have real money to spend, as opposed to pockets full of quarters, has created a boom in retro games.
The Web is filled with sites where young adults are looking to buy, sell and fix old video machines. Those who don't have the space, or the funds, for the real thing are making do with PC and video versions.
Hasbro Interactive, for example, just released a collection of Atari Arcade Hits. And numerous sites offer free emulators that let people re-create the arcade experience on their PCs.
Of course, all this interest has made it harder to find and buy the real thing - which is what George Castanza did when he spotted a Frogger machine with his high score in a memorable "Seinfeld" episode.
When Chris started buying old games, he was purchasing what everyone else viewed as junk. But, he said, EBay has driven up prices a lot and now people are fixing up the old games and turning a profit.
Chris picked up his 1989 Atari Asteroids cocktail table game a couple of years ago for $75. Today, it could easily fetch $700 to $800.
"If a guy is going to have an arcade, he might was well go all the way," said Chris, who acknowledged that making room for his arcade collection took some effort. First the basement had to be redone, right down to putting in a stereo with an 1980s soundtrack that plays tunes such as "Do the Donkey Kong," "Pac-Man Fever" and "Ode to Centipede."
Chris then had to scout out - and often repair - the games: He paid $350 for a Centipede game that needed a new track ball, and $350 for a Tempest game that needed a month's worth of tinkering. When he finally got Tempest in working order, he went upstairs to clean up. Returning to the basement, he found his 27year-old wife playing one game after another. Valerie refused to push the two-player button and share the fun, saying it would break her concentration.
Luckily for Chris, their basement contains plenty of options. There's Adventures of Major Havoc, the hard-to-find Atari game (500 to 600 games were manufactured). Chris, embarrassed to reveal how much he paid for Havoc, did admit that when he won a HumVee in a raffle last year, he sold the vehicle and used the proceeds to put a roof on their house, buy Valerie a new car and buy the game.
Chris has also purchased the fire-and-shoot BattleZone - a game with a viewfinder for the player and side windows for friends to watch - for $400, and owns Tron, a complicated game with a black light and deep paneling that "pulls you into its universe."
The only game not in working order is Star Trek, a Sega game that has a propensity to blow up after lots of play, according to Chris. But, his electrical engineering background makes the temperamental games fun to fix, he said.
As Chris continues to show off his collection, Valerie grows impatient.
"Mind if I play?" But, before Chris can answer, she's firing away on Centipede, her personal favorite.
After she runs out of turns, Valerie cries out, "Oh, that Greg Smith is annoying!" referring to the family friend who has the machine's top score of 50,939. Her best score so far is 30,021.
Chris offers to erase the high score, but Valerie says she's deter-mined to beat Smith. Valerie, realizing how silly this conversation must sound to an onlooker, offers a slightly embarrassed smile: "OK, so I look normal on the outside."
But she's not too sheepish to give Centipede another try.
Valerie is hunched over the machine, knees bent, eyes intensely focused on the action. Her left hand frantically hits the button to fire at the bugs while her right hand rolls the track ball back and fourth as she maneuvers the shooter across the screen. "You see that look," Chris asked. "That's how you know someone's really into it. They get the look."
"Sometimes, she'll come down to the laundry room to put clothes in the dryer, and two hours later, I'm like thinking, 'Where did she go?' "
The answer, of course, is obvious.
She's down in the basement blowing up bugs.