29. Ms. Pac Man

Ms. Pac Man
Atari 2600
1982



For a while, shortly after high school, I’d spend most of my evenings with my best friend, Zac, at Peg’s Corner, our local greasy spoon. We would eat our fried food and drink our coffee and bullshit for hours, night after night. Film, politics, comic books, dipshit philosophy. Zac and I could entertain ourselves talking about nothing and everything indefinitely. 

Peg’s was a glorious hole in the wall,   where you’d see the same skuzzy, disreputable folks on a nightly basis. Most of those folks showed up after the bars closed, because Peg’s was open 24 hours, except for a few hours on Sundays, a detail we never failed to forget.  It was the sort of place where the waitresses wouldn’t even have to take your order, because your order never changed. (The "A Club" for Zac, the “Old Standby” for me.) There was a familial atmosphere to Peg’s.  It was perfectly fine for Elbow, the toothless guy who didn’t come back from Vietnam quite right, and a permanent Peg's fixture, to join your table, uninvited, to talk to about the value of talking cars. It was that sort of place.

Peg’s also had a Ms. Pac Man machine in the back. It was a “cocktail cabinet” which basically meant it was a table with a video game inside it. It had the dip switches set so that Ms. Pac Man moved as fast as possible, while the ghost moved as slowly, making the game much easier.  You could get a lot of mileage out of a single quarter on that machine.

Our sit-down, easy-mode Ms. Pac Man machine was the best arcade machine ever, and we played the hell out of it. Zac was only just slightly better than me, but consistently so. .It felt like OUR machine.  We had the high scores,  and we knew its quirks.  We knew which side had a better joystick, and how to compensate for the crappy one. 

Ms. Pac Man is the video game dearest to my heart because to me will it will always symbolize late-night coffee and teenage bullshit sessions.  A few years later, Peg’s is gone,  I no longer see Zac nearly as often as I should, and I have no idea what happened to that Ms. Pac Man machine. I miss the hell out of all three. 



Oh, the Atari port is pretty serviceable.