When my wife asked me what I wanted to do for my birthday, I replied like any soon-to-be 47-year-old would: I wanted to go to the arcade. In Charlottesville, that’s Decades Arcade, which is full of old (and some new) video games and pinball machines, some dating back to the early days of the video game era (and in the case of the pinball machines, the 1950s and 1960s). Upon arriving, I went right for what I think is one of the greatest games every put into an arcade: Star Wars, which was first released in 1983 and has you piloting Luke Skywalker’s X-Wing through three stages in order to destory the Death Star. It’s clearly blown out of the water by a billion other games that have come out since, but for my quarters, it’s the most fun you can have in an arcade.

Prior to that day a week ago, I had only played the Star Wars Arcade Game a few times in my life. I was six years old in 1983 and wouldn’t have the chance to frequent arcades until my late elementary school and junior high years, which was toward the end of that decade. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the game had become a rare find in arcades that only had so much space and because the nostalgia for old games was a couple of decades away, often jettisoned older machines for whatever was new and popular. So I spent those years playing After Burner, X-Men, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Double Dragon, and Mortal Kombat. They had 16-bit graphics (which were the best in the early Nineties) and were way cooler than an old vector graphics game, although I’m pretty sure that if you put that machine in front of any 13-year-old in 1990, they’d get sucked in, especially if they spent any time standing around the Star Wars machine watching other kids play while they waited their turn like I used to do at Sayville Bowl. Come to think of it, I spent a lot of time in arcades watching other people play games or wandering around for a good hour or two because I blew all my money on sucking at Double Dragon. To this day, I’m more familiar with the demo screens of a number of games than the games themselves.